Englewood Superintendent Highlights Successes, Challenges

Englewood Superintendent of Schools Donald Carlisle is proud of how far the school district has come in his roughly year-and-a-half on the job, but he says there’s still a lot of work to be done.

In an interview with Patch this week, Carlisle talked about what he sees as successes during his relatively brief tenure, as well as changes students and parents can expect and challenges the district faces moving into the new school year.

He said that even before he arrived in the district in early 2011, he was told that Janis E. Dismus Middle School was in need of improvement, and that turned out to be an accurate assessment.

“It was not good,” Carlisle said. “But we’ve made a lot of changes.”

Among those changes are better teamwork and common planning among teachers and moving away from tracking, or putting kids into broad categories like “college prep” or “honors,” although he said the middle school still has honors Math.

“The whole climate changed there, much for the better,” Carlisle said. “I call it the talk of the town when I speak about the middle school. And it happened over a short amount of time.”

He said Dwight Morrow High School, to a lesser degree, has shown improvement, but he added, “there’s a lot of work to be done” there.

“I think the overall, general climate of the school system has improved,” the superintendent said, noting improved attendance and discipline across the district.

But he also said academics have not shown nearly enough improvement, and that is therefore going to be a focus moving into the new school year.

“We still have schools that are not performing to the levels that are acceptable to me personally and to the Board of Education, even to the state and even to the community,” Carlisle said. “I just think there’s a higher expectation of success in our test scores; that’s the best way to achieve.”

Carlisle said one big change this year and something he hopes “won’t be misunderstood” is the at D.A. Quarles Early Childhood Center, where pre-K and Kindergarten students will be wearing uniforms for the first time

In addition, he looks forward to continuing the Math in Focus and Responsive Classroom programs, both of which will be in place for a second year.

“It’s going to change the whole mindset of how we do Math,” Carlisle said of Math in Focus, describing it as a “hybrid” of “Singapore mathematics with maybe an American flavor to it.”

“It’s a whole different type of Math,” he said of the program he piloted at his previous school district in Westchester County.

“When I came here, it made a lot of sense because Math was our weakest area,” he said. “If you look at our scores, it’s clearly our Achilles heal.”

Carlisle described Responsive Classroom, which he also brought with him from his two previous school districts, as “a way for teachers to conduct business in their classrooms,” starting with morning meetings, often led by students, and instilling mutual respect and responsibility.

“There’s a little bit of character education built into it,” Carlisle said. “It cuts down a lot on discipline problems.”

Both the Math in Focus and Responsive Classroom programs are currently being used in pre-K through sixth grade classrooms in the district, Carlisle said, but Responsive Classroom may at some point move to the middle school as well.

Carlisle said that the Academies at Englewood program has “probably plateaued as far as image” after about 10 years, with so many other options now available for people, including charter schools. But he also said he hopes that under the new leadership of Claire Kennedy the program will be reinvigorated.

He called Kennedy a veteran leader with a “true commitment” to the program.

“She’s got a lot of passion for it, and we’ve convinced her to take that lead,” Carlisle said of Kennedy. “She’s going to be the supervisor for the Academies. It’s gone through changes over the years, and I’m now trying to reload.”