Dr. David Young | Superintendent, Abilene ISD

We are blessed to serve in a community that cares about its schools and the success of our children and grandchildren, and Abilene ISD is honored to have a community that comes together to find solutions to the challenges we face as a district. Although I could share many examples of this collaboration, I would like to celebrate a few recent examples that especially resonated with me.

Realizing a Model Instructional Lab for Elementary Education

In 2018-19, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) labeled Robert E. Lee Elementary School as an F-rated campus due to poor academic performance on the state accountability system. Then in the spring of 2020, COVID-19 and the global pandemic came into our community, and the TEA paused the accountability system for two years, which forced us to keep that rating until state testing resumed.

Further, at approximately the same time, our community engaged in a process of considering changing that campus’s name from Robert E. Lee Elementary School.

We knew we wanted to do something different at that campus and had been exploring options for approximately two years. While the attendance zone remained the same, we changed the name of the school to Stafford Elementary, and we began to reimagine the campus into a model instructional lab for our district, a teacher magnet school.

To accomplish that, we needed the right leadership and the right staff. Nearly a year and a half ago, we selected a new principal with the notion that she was “employee number one” of the new Stafford Elementary model.

To further research what Stafford might become, we took a scouting mission to the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, and after that trip, we agreed that the Ron Clark Academy was one of the neatest experiences of our professional careers and was the vision we wanted and needed.

The Ron Clark model became our goal, and our principal went about hiring staff members with the mindset of creating the same experience for our students at Stafford.

Later, we were able to take the entire professional teaching staff to the academy; the experience felt similar to a gifted and talented field trip. Hearing the conversations among our teachers while on the bus and while touring the campus was incredible! The hopes and dreams our teachers have for our students are awe inspiring.

The entire staff has fully engaged this vision, and when we opened that campus, the redesign of the instructional process completely transformed the climate and culture of Stafford Elementary.

For example, the Ron Clark Academy philosophy runs off the house system, and our teachers wanted to get to that point in year one. We have. Stafford Elementary has four houses, which allows our students to feel more connected in school.

We have ongoing professional development from the academy with the Stafford faculty this year and have put these instructional practices on display by inviting teachers from across the district and from across our region to visit and see our vision in action.

I attended the Altruismo House Christmas party last year to witness this engagement for myself. Students were constructing gingerbread houses and collaborating with each other in a contest to see whose gingerbread house had the most structural support.

On another day at Stafford, there were strings across the classroom and paper clips with fractions and decimals all around the room. The students were engaged as a human number line collaborating on how to reorder themselves based on whose fractions or decimals were larger or smaller. The students were owning their learning.

The data we are now seeing is impressive, and the growth data on our diagnostic testing is off the charts. Our official STAAR scores will be released on August 15, and if our preliminary data holds true, Stafford will show double digit gains in every test, except one.

In a year where attendance rates across the state are awful, Stafford Elementary School has the highest attendance rate in our district.

Further, pending any new military transfers, Stafford’s teacher retention rate is one of the highest in our region. The excitement I see on the faces of the students and the faces of the teachers is astounding. Our next step is to engage our community and Board to get this model environment spread throughout the remainder of Abilene ISD.

Fostering Community and Business Partnerships

When our community was planning the 2018 Bond, our vision was for all students (regardless of whether they were going to college, to the workforce or to the military) to graduate Abilene ISD with some type of certification.

The success of Holland Medical High School provided a model example for how to expand our certification offerings. Holland is on the campus of Hardin Simmons University, and our students go there for half of the day and have an opportunity to earn and gain experience in eight medical certifications. We offer programs such as certified medical assistant, registered dental assistant, phlebotomy, radiology technician and more.

Holland Medical High School is across the street from Hendricks Medical Center, and we partner with them so our students can fulfill the clinical hours they need for certification. Hendricks also provides guest lecturers and other resources to better prepare our students.

This program is so successful that Hendricks lowered their minimum hiring age for some of the positions they have open to 16 years old. They did that to accommodate our students, who because of the quality of what they were learning, were prepared for those jobs at an earlier age.

Our community supported our LIFT proposal (LIFT stands for Leadership Innovation for Future Technologies) so that we could expand our certification offerings. As soon as the bond that approved this facility passed, we created a career visioning task force by inviting every potential business and industry partner that we could think of to the table to be a part of that discussion.

We asked them what our graduates needed to be ready to enter training programs or the workforce. What skills do students need to have in both the technical aspects of their work and in the essential soft skills, such as communication and teamwork?

This committee also helped us determine what programs we should offer. What has happened in our certification programs has far exceeded the vision we initially had.

We currently offer approximately 12 certification programs there, including automotive repair, welding, construction, culinary arts, engineering, robotics and several information and technology options.

There is now an Abilene area automotive education alliance, and every auto dealer in town makes annual donations to ensure that our students have uniforms and industry standard tools and equipment. It’s common to walk into our auto shop and see the teacher, in addition to service managers from our local dealerships, meeting the students and offering instruction.

Welding is similar. We have wind turbine companies and boiler companies that need welders, and we often see their employees in our welding shop teaching our students the techniques they need to have successful welding careers.

We are striving to have every program we offer have a business and industry connection so that our kids not only get the lessons in the classroom, but they learn how to work on industry standard equipment and are prepared for those entry level jobs.

Creating a Unique Student Experience

At a recent Board meeting, a perfect example of our reimagined student experience occurred. We were in the student recognition phase of our meeting which included elementary students, Skills USA students and other CTE groups including robotics.

When it came time to recognize our robotics team, they entered the Board room by driving their robots to the front of the room. The elementary students were enthralled by those robots, and our Board asked the elementary students to come up and check them out.

Our youngest learners got to see and interact with our high school students who had the robots spinning around doing cool things. It was an awesome moment for our elementary kids to see the possibilities for what their high school experience could be.

In closing, I’ve always had the philosophy that I may think something is a good idea or a bad idea, but I’m just one person. The collective wisdom of a group of people is a better way to make decisions. We must continue to get our stakeholders involved in those conversations. I am proud that our community is used to us engaging them in the future of our schools.

Community Input . . . It’s Our SuperPower

Dr. David Young serves the Abilene ISD community as its superintendent of schools. A product of Abilene ISD and a 1990 graduate of Cooper High School, he received his Bachelor’s Degree from Texas A&M University, his Master’s Degree from Texas A&M University-Commerce and his Doctorate from Texas A&M University. He may be reached at David.Young@abileneisd.org.