By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Starting her 29th year with Dowagiac Union Schools since Si Miller hired her to teach high school English, new Superintendent Peg Stowers needed no introduction Thursday to Rotary Club, which inducted her as a new member.
"I'm not telling you something you don't know," she said, "but we have an awesome school district. It doesn't begin with me, but with people like Larry Crandall and Ron Jones and all the people who sat in that office, and, more importantly and as importantly, the people who are in those classrooms every day doing an outstanding job. An example of that outstanding job was in the Dowagiac Daily News yesterday" about the district's selection by Standard and Poor's in New York as one of Michigan's 43 "outperformers."
"That means, given the socio-economics, the diversity and the kind of demographics we have in our community, Dowagiac goes above and beyond to insure its students are learning," Stowers said.
"That's a pretty big honor to receive. I'll hand that over to years of planning and commitment by Dowagiac school boards, administrations and staff. We don't take our job lightly. We know that we need to prepare students to walk out and be successful community members, whether it's as parents or in employment fields."
"What's interesting about it is it allows a Dowagiac to be in an outperforming category with schools like East Lansing and Okemos. We may not be where East Lansing and Okemos are, but they're compared to their peer group in terms of demographics and diversity, so Dowagiac is compared to a group of like schools and we are outperforming. We are doing things that typically schools at our level should not be achieving."
Contributing to Dowagiac's status as an outperformer is consistent, long-term, data-driven professional development based on student achievement.
"There's no better way to plan for students, what they need to learn and what they need to be able to do than to look at what our students are doing and to analyze that data appropriately.
"We have an excellent 25-year plan that's on a rotation," she said. "Every three to four years, five years total, we review a core curriculum and our minor curriculums to make sure we're up to speed with our standards and benchmarks provided by the state and then also to enhance the teaching materials and teaching skills that go with them. There are not many districts in our area that have such a plan."
Stowers said another factor is, "Our teaching support staff is dedicated to making solid instructional decisions, not based on what they like to teach, but based on student achievement needs. Unlike most districts, we have a strategic plan that is bought into by our school board, our administration, our staff and our community stakeholders that says where we want to be three to five years from now and how we're going to get there."
Dowagiac "has met all standards put forth by North Central Accreditation (NCA) this year in all of our buildings," she said. "We are the second school in the county (along with Edwardsburg) that can boast that. And we work for a K-12 big picture. It's important for staff to know what the teacher did in the grade level before them and what they need to do. We approach education in Dowagiac from the standpoint of when a child enters kindergarten, we're already planning for them to graduate. We know that everything we do at ever level builds successfully on the next level. I'm really proud of the kinds of things we do in Dowagiac and I'm really proud of the kind of people who are dedicated to working in Dowagiac."
"When I started in Dowagiac, I didn't think I was going to stay," she admitted. "It happens. But when it happens, and you look back at your career, you should always say, 'It was an awesome ride and a great adventure, and look at all of the good things we were able to do along the way."
Stowers listed "focusing on the now and the future" as a goal. "It's kind of scary to prepare kids for jobs we don't even know exist. What they'll look like, what kind of training will be needed. But we do know we have to prepare students who are competent, independent learners who, regardless of what they pick up and are responsible for doing, they'll find a way to tackle that information."
High school itself "is a paradigm that's got to shift, it's got to change."
While "we don't know what high schools are going to look like in the future," Stowers said, "we know that in change they're not going to look like they look today. Within this county we have such a rich opportunity to work with a community college, a local intermediate school and only four local school districts."
And while it's not getting any easier with limited resources and upkeep on aging facilities, "We must maintain fiscal responsibility," Stowers said. "We have to analyze the data we have out there and make sure that we spend the dollars that we have very wisely, keeping in mind that our very first mission is student achievement."
"Finally," she said, "promoting ourselves. Sometimes Dowagiac is guilty of not boasting enough. You can only boast if, truly, the information behind that is true. I think we need to continue to promote Dowagiac schools in our county, in southwest Michigan and in the state because we have a lot of fine things going on here by fine educators and leaders and we don't take a second seat to anyone."
City Clerk Jim Snow, seated next to Edwardsburg school board member Doug Stickney, asked Stowers to differentiate between accreditation and blue-ribbon schools.
"Edwardsburg is also accredited," she answered. "Blue ribbon is just one more distinction you can strive to achieve. They are very parallel. In fact, they go hand in hand in some ways. In some other ways they're not exactly parallel. I can tell you we're going to be looking at that. I'm not going to say that's an area we're going to do. In some ways it's not as rigorous as North Central accreditation. But blue ribbons are something communities do visualize and understand more quickly than NCA. We clearly can meets some of those standards, and it will be an individual board choice as to whether that's something we pursue. We agreed a number of years ago that first we were going to get our NCA accreditation. We managed that last year, but we're still in that process, so we certainly don't want to take on too many things at one time and do none of them well because then you're doomed to not being the quality program you want to be. (Blue ribbon) is just another stamp of approval out there. That may be something down the road that our board and our district choose to go after."