POTTSTOWN — Perhaps no school transition is more anxiety prone than the one from elementary to middle school — all the more so when that transition takes place starting fifth grade.
So as part of what sometimes seems likes its relentless search to make that transition easier, improve academic achievement and make the entire middle school experience more productive and worthwhile for students and families, the Pottstown School District has some big changes in store there this year when school starts Monday.
Hector Wangia is the new principal at Pottstown Middle School. (Emily Overdorf – Pottstown Middle School) First and foremost is a new principal — Hector Wangia, a Kenyan native who arrives by way of Exeter School District. Wangia replaces Brian Hostettler, who had held the post since 2017 and left to take a similar post in Fleetwood, where he and his family live.
Wangia has 11 years of experience in education and when he left Exeter, he was the director of social, emotional and academic interventions. Prior to that he worked in the Pottsgrove School District as a science instructor and then as the program coordinator for Pottsgrove’s Falcon Academy. Wangia holds a master’s degree in education from Cabrini College.
But the middle school is not just getting one new principal, it’s getting five. In addition to Wangia, each of the four grades in the middle school will now have its own principal.
The other four principals are: Danielle Davis, fifth grade; William Lawless, sixth grade; James Dargan, seventh grade; and Jesse Turner, eighth grade.
The large turnout of fifth-grade families during the Pottstown Middle School open house is just one indicator of the level of interest the transition to middle school represents.
And all four will be a kind of mobile principal. That’s because in an effort to build stronger mentoring relationships with the students, and stronger relationships with their families, the four grade principals will stay with their student cohorts as they move up through the grades — a practice called “looping.”
So, for example, Davis — the Pottstown veteran of the group who most recently served as the school’s fifth and sixth-grade principal — will be the fifth grade principal this year and next year, will move with her students to the sixth grade and on through their years at the building.
“When you spend years with a student, you have repeated opportunities to demonstrate that you care, you’re not trying to single them out, you’re trying to help,” Lawless said.
This “house model,” said LaTanya White-Springfield, the district’s director of student services, serves several goals including sustaining and improving academic performance, particularly in reading and math; building closer relationships between students, their families and mentors by decreasing the number of students administrators keep track of and increasing the time they spend with students through looping.
Hector Wangia, the new principal at Pottstown Middle School, mans the protector during the open house for fifth grade families last week.(Photo courtesy of John Armato)Hector Wangia, the new principal at Pottstown Middle School, mans the projector during the open house for fifth grade families last week.
So a building of about 1,000 students gets broken down into more manageable cohorts of 250 students for each principal, “and gives them four years to learn how an individual students learns, what issues may be affecting their performance.” An increased crew of counselors, social workers, intervention specialists and coaches will be on hand this year to move quickly to address those issues without allowing them to linger, she said.
Two of those new staff, a social worker and home visit specialist, are minorities “which we hope will give them a unique ability to create positive relationships with student families quickly,” White-Springfield said.
Dargan said COVID-19 was an incredible challenge in education, but also set educators back on their heels and created a chance to “reevaluate our practices and start asking ourselves how we can be more impactful.”
Danielle Davis is the fifth grade principal at Pottstown Middle School. Danielle Davis is the fifth grade principal at Pottstown Middle School. All of which brings the building closer to the district goal to “prepare each student, by name, for success at every level,” said Wangia. “We’re building a multi-tiered system of support,” which educators, who never met an acronym they wouldn’t adopt, call MTSS for short.
The system for both academics and behaviors “is the umbrella for everything we’re doing in the building,” White-Springfield explained.
Wangia said each of the principals also was chosen very deliberately for the unique additional skill set and experience they bring to the team to provide support when issues crop up.
William Lawless upper bodyWilliam Lawless is the new sixth grade principal at Pottstown Middle School. For example, while Davis is an expert working with data, Lawless, who most recently worked in Philadelphia schools, has a deep background in behavioral issues and social emotional learning, or SEL, the matrix Pottstown uses to move beyond simple discipline to teach empathy and help students understand how their actions affect others.
James Dargan upper bodyJames Dargan is Pottstown Middle School’s seventh grade principal. Dargan, the new seventh grade principal brings 13 years of experience running the alternative education program at Pottsgrove School District, where he also served for more than three years as assistant principal at Lower Pottsgrove Elementary School, with an additional expertise in special education.
Jess Tupper upper bodyJess Tupper is the eighth grade principal at Pottstown Middle School. And Tupper is a Pottstown Middle School teacher who is being promoted with five years of experience as a coach, teaching the MTSS approach.
Wangia said Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez worked with him to assemble the team with an eye toward “supporting individuals students, the academic team and increasing parent engagement,” which is certainly appropriate given that Pottstown Middle School has declared this school year the “year of the parent.”
“We knew this year would be a building year, but we’re very pleased with the progress we’ve made in a short amount of time,” Rodriguez told the school board Thursday when reporting on the middle school changes.
Not everything has changed.
The WEB ambassadors, the eighth grade students who volunteer to help show the fifth graders around, remain a staple of life at Pottstown Middle School.
As you may have guessed by now, WEB is yet another school acronym, this one for “Where Everyone Belongs” and Tupper offered up an example from last week’s open house about how well it can work.
“I had this one fifth grader come up to me, so excited, and she said she is going to work hard so she can be a WEB ambassador when she’s an eighth-grader,” she said.
Goodwill ambassadors, evidently, come in all ages.
Interest among fifth grade students and parents about what to expect at the middle school, was high during last week's open house.(Photo by John Armato)Interest among fifth grade students and parents about what to expect at the middle school, was high during last week’s open house.
White-Springfield rolled out another acronym — PBIS, which stands for Positive Behavior Intervention and Support — when talking about how the school will programatically encourage the kind of behavior in Tupper’s example.
Social emotional learning initiatives will be established at grade levels “to model wanted behaviors.” Class time will be scheduled simultaneously in each grade so those who are making progress can move forward to a different class without creating a scheduling tangle.
“We don’t just want compliance in school,” Davis explained. “We want behaviors to change. So when a kid comes to school Monday and I already know about an incident that happened over the weekend, hopefully as the result of relationships built with the student’s family, I want them to know that I’m trying to help make things better.”
“We’re under no illusions that this will miraculously turn everything around overnight,” said Wangia. “But we’re not just looking at relationships, which is great, but how to leverage those relationships into growth for individuals over many years not just in school, but out into the world.”
The team is focused on the goals and constantly evaluating what works and what doesn’t right down to the individual student, Wangia said.
“We don’t have a fall-back plan,” he said. “This is what we intend to do.”