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Date: 12/27/2023
HUNTINGTON — At the Dec. 13 Gateway Regional School Committee meeting, Superintendent Kristen Smidy reported that the school has entered the “dream” phase of the Barr Foundation grant process, which will involve visits to other school districts around the country to find answers to three questions the school is developing.
The private, Boston-based Barr Foundation’s grant program is highly competitive, Smidy said when Gateway received its initial grant of $100,000 over the summer. According to the Barr Foundation website, its goal in education is to “catalyze models through support for teams of educators to create a new vision for high school, plan for change, and implement new school designs.”
Smidy said Gateway staff members participated in a conference in November hosted by the Barr Foundation to review all of the input from surveys that had been sent out to students, staff members and the community at large.
“We killed it at the meeting,” Smidy told the School Committee. She said 90% of students at Gateway were interviewed, from pre-kindergarten through high school, even though the focus of the Barr grant is high school.
Smidy said she appreciated the opportunity to spend a great deal of time interpreting the data and determining what their ideal schools would look like if Gateway addresses all of the areas of growth identified through this process. Now, as they shift their thinking from the “learn” phase of the grant to the “dream” phase, they will start to imagine all of the possibilities to meet all of their students’ needs through transformative change.
“A big part of the Barr Foundation grant process is the opportunity it affords to visit other school districts throughout the country. It’s not often an educator gets to visit other schools with a critical and open mind,” Smidy said. All of the visits will be funded by the grant.
School Committee member Pegg Dragon of Huntington said she was a bit skeptical of what schools are being selected for visits by the Barr Foundation.
Smidy said the foundation is planning three of the trips, and Gateway will choose which other schools to visit. Barr is funding a trip to Arizona and California for the core team to see four innovative schools outside of the initial $100,000 grant that Gateway received.
Then Barr will lead a site visit in Colorado in which Gateway will use part of the initial grant to cover the costs as well as another grant for teacher professional development. She said in response to Dragon’s question that on this trip, foundation members selected one of the schools to visit, and the Gateway team selected four others.
“They required us to build in travel to this grant as a component of the terms, so it’s clear that the site visits are essential to them,” Smidy said.
The third major trip is to Vermont for four days, which is being paid for by a sister organization of Barr. A Maine trip will be coming out of the initial $100,000 grant, Smidy said.
“We have to conduct site visits to at least five schools for each of our questions so we get ideas that we can use to develop our own plan. Seeing one or two schools would limit our scope of creativity, and they really want us to make this our own,” she said.
Smidy said Gateway’s task is to come up with three questions to investigate on the visits to other school districts. While that process is ongoing, she said they have settled on three general areas: defining and clarifying their identity, “why is it great to be a Gateway Gator;” how can every person get what they want and need from their education at Gateway, and how do they help students build a life they’ll love.
“The process has been incredible. We started off with these really heavy questions that were full of edu-speak and now we’re working to take away the burden of the jargon and get to the meat of what we’re trying to accomplish. In other words, what are the guiding questions that everyone has a desire to seek the answer to,” Smidy said.
So far, 36 staff have signed up for the different site visits. Selected students and their parents, preferably School Committee members, will also be invited on trips. Smidy said the eight going on the California and Arizona trip include elementary, middle and high school teachers, the school librarian and administrators. Sixteen have signed up for the trip to Colorado, including elementary, middle, and high school staff, administrators and a secretary. The 12 who signed up for the Vermont trip to date include students, middle and high school staff, a counselor, administrator, and School Committee members and parents. Six have signed up for a visit to Maine include paraprofessionals, administrators, and middle and high school teachers
“All are grant-funded, which is so great,” Smidy said. “We are in the midst of planning a number of more local site visits in which we hope to bring more students, teachers, families and other stakeholders,” Smidy said.
Following the site visits, Gateway will fill out a proposal to Barr on how to achieve its goals. “If they like it, they’re going to fund it. All of us are doing this process together.”
She said the Barr Foundation wants to create a whole new world for students at Gateway, to be able to answer the questions they have formulated. “Barr is giving us the opportunity to dream big for this community,” Smidy said.