(November 13, 2008) Victoriano Elementary School is the highest performing school in its district and Principal Rick Aleksak credits its success to the mantra of always reinvesting and looking for new ways to meet challenges.

Located in a residential area south of Moreno Valley, Victoriano Elementary has held the highest standardized test scores of the 13 elementary schools in the Val Verde Unified School District for the last four years, according to Aleksak.

The 511 students who attend grades K-5 receive instruction that has produced increasingly high numbers in every category, year after year. Aleksak said the targets the school has set have paid off.

“We know what our goal is, there is a commitment and dedication on the part of the staff to get there,” Aleksak said. “It’s really just a matter of having a clear vision, a clear goal.”

Principal Rick Aleksak of Victoriano Elementary School in Moreno Valley

Soaring Numbers

Since 2002, the percent of socioeconomically disadvantaged students—who make up 63 percent of the entire student body—performing at grade level has gone up roughly 50 percent in both language arts and math.

Victoriano Elementary is also the only elementary school in the district to receive a “good” performance score at every grade level in mathematics, according to 2008 Just for the Kids-California (JFTK-CA) data. In addition, it was the only school to receive a “good” performance score in three out of four grade levels.

Aleksak says the high scores of his student body—which is about 47.4 percent Hispanic, 29.9 percent African American and 11.9 percent white—are a direct result of two key strategies.

Strategies

Common lesson planning is one strategy used by all 18 of Victoriano’s teachers at each grade level. The goal is to get each teacher, at each level, working off the same lesson plan.

“If I go from one class to the other to the other, there will be a little bit of variation because of pacing, but they are all teaching the same material,” Aleksak said. “So if a student goes from one class to another, there is really no difference in the instruction that they are getting.”

At the district level, the Professional Learning Community model (PLC) is used to promote collaboration between all of the schools. Under the PLC model, teachers come together to look at information and data as it relates to what the students in the district need. From that information, each school then plans accordingly, Aleksak said.

“That has really created that sense of team unity and cohesion in working together very closely,” Aleksak said. “It’s not just this teacher or that teacher looking out for their own kids; it’s a grade level of teachers putting their heads together.”

Looking Forward

The strategy has worked so well that the ceiling for higher performance scores is getting shorter.

“We have kind of closed the gap as far as how much room we have to grow,” Aleksak said. “We have come to a point where we’re really looking at things differently as to how to really refine.”

The direction now, he said, is to move away from focusing on school-wide performance scores and toward a specific and direct focus on individual students who need assistance. The school is aiming to meet the needs of every single student and develop a plan to help those who are struggling to be at grade-level proficiency by the end of the school year.

“Whether you call it ‘No Child Left Behind’ or ‘every kid proficient’ or whatever, we want to make sure we are getting every kid over the bar,” Aleksak said.

This profile is another in an Alert series highlighting public schools identified by the California Business for Education Excellence (CBEE) Foundation as high performers, based on academic achievement tests. More information, including easy-to-access test data for schools throughout the state, is available on the free Just for the Kids-California website, www.jftk-ca.org.