One part of JCPS Superintendent Brian Yearwood’s current plan to address the $188 million budget deficit is to cut 150 academic instructional coaches (AICs) and centralize the role. Forty-eight regional academic coach positions will be created in replacement.
Twenty-two coaches will be allocated to elementary schools, seven for middle schools, seven for high schools and 12 for Choice Zone schools. Choice Zone schools are schools in the West End that give students the opportunity to attend specialized schools. This will dramatically limit what AICs can do.
High School Level
Omar Rodriguez-Camacho is the AIC at Manual. He started in February of 2023. He is the Comprehensive School Improvement Plan (CSIP) Lead, DMHS Systems Lead, Embedded Professional Development Lead, Manual Achievement Center (MAC) Lead, Extended School Services (ESS) Lead, Professional Development Lead, Journey to Success Lead, New Teacher Induction Lead and Racial Equity Co-Lead. He also provides Assistant Principal Supports.
A CSIP is a document that schools in a district must develop to improve student performance and address areas such as safety, staffing and culture. With this position, he supports the professional learning community (PLCs), the areas where teachers meet together to plan lessons. He makes sure that the PLCs are following the district’s curriculum.
Rodriguez-Camacho evaluates the PLC cycle documents to see if there is congruency between the standards that they chose and the summative and formative assessment. Formative assessments are low-stakes on-going checks, such as quizzes and discussions. Summative assessments are high-stakes evaluations such as final exams and projects. He also supports PLCs when students are not meeting proficiency.
Being the CSIP Lead also includes being the lead on the walkthrough system. Rodriguez-Camacho develops the walkthrough schedule for the entire school, ensuring every teacher is receiving one walkthrough evaluation every nine weeks. He gives teachers their areas of strengths and growths and meets with them to discuss these.
Rodriguez-Camacho is also the DMHS Systems Lead. This includes being the College Equipped Readiness Tool (CERT) Testing Lead. Rodriguez-Camacho establishes a plan for how CERT tests will be conducted. After testing, he takes the data from the entire school, analyzes it and identifies all the students that are below the benchmark. The students scoring much lower than the benchmark are then put into the MAC to give them extra support.
Along with this, Rodriguez-Camacho is the MAC Lead. He oversees the MAC with Katie Riley (MAC) to provide student support. His job in the MAC is to make sure that interventions are producing results. He sees the diagnostic data that comes from CERT, and then he schedules the kids for seven to eight interventions. After the student retakes CERT, he looks at the data of the students performance from before and after the intervention.
He is also the ESS Lead. He comes up with the schedule for ESS, which is a program that provides after school help to students in core content areas. He ensures that all of the content areas are spread throughout the week and not overlapping, so that every student has the opportunity to make it to each one.
Every time a student attends ESS, he has to collect the time sheets from the teachers and verify that the teacher stayed that day due to them being paid overtime. He also approves the payroll for the secretary. For every student that attends ESS, he has to go into their Infinite Campus and log an intervention entry for them for the time they stayed. He also creates a report on ESS on the outcomes of the program based on CERT.
Additionally, Rodriguez-Camacho is the Embedded Professional Development Lead. He collaborates with administrators and teachers to create a Professional Development (PD) plan for the entire school year. He also reminds administrators to ensure Manual is in compliance with the state.
Additionally, he is the Professional Development Lead for the district. Each year, teachers need to have a certain amount of PD hours; teachers that work the full year need 24. Rodriguez-Camacho’s job is to keep a count on how many hours each teacher has completed and give them reminders to complete them.
Rodriguez-Camacho is the Journey to Success Lead. He creates the entire system for how the Journey to Success is going to be implemented in the school. Journey to Success is a program that showcases what students have learned and skills they have developed in their years at school. Seniors present a defense displaying this as a graduation requirement. Rodriguez-Camacho handles the defenses for all of the seniors that are in the school. He has to ensure that every single senior has completed their Journey to Success defense by May 1.
He is also the New Teacher Induction Lead. Every time that Manual has a new teacher, it is his job to ensure that they have all the information they need and feel welcome. He also observes the classes of the new teacher to give feedback.
Furthermore, he is the Racial Equity Co-Lead. His job is to ensure that the PLCs, lesson plans and what is happening in the classrooms are equitable for every student and teacher.
Lastly, he provides Assistant Principal Supports. Since Assistant Principals have a lot of work to do, he helps with extra work. For example, he has Good Standing Conversations with students, covers lunch, scores for HSU applications and helps with the EVOLV metal detector procedures.
“Its very important, because as I said, Assistant Principals are very busy, especially with referrals, and I support all of those Assistant Principals. So if I am already supporting in all of these ways, imagine if I wasn’t here, and then who would pick up the job that I do?,” said Rodriguez-Camacho.
Middle School Level
Jacquline Raque is the AIC at Noe Middle School. This is her second year in the role.
In the AIC position, Raque collaborates with teachers to understand the standard based grading system. She collaborates with the administration team to help with walkthroughs, where she looks for things that teachers are doing well and things that could improve the learning environment.
Raque is also the lead for the Journey to Success.
“I try to do whatever I can, if it’s a school-wide thing, to make it easier on the teachers. I want more work to be on me, prepping it, so it’s easier for them,” Raque said, reflecting on the Journey to Success process.
Raque is currently coaching five teachers that are first year teachers or have specifically requested her help. She also teaches a Reading Learning Lab for some of the students at Noe.
Additionally, she uses a variety of data to place students into Learning Lab, which is a new part of the schedule for Noe students. She also works with small groups of students if they are struggling to help them understand the material.
Raque collects various data to report back to teachers and administrators for instructional purposes.
“I support the teachers and the students and sometimes their voice with the admin side to try to be that middle ground between the two,” Raque said.
Elementary School Level
Sara Queen is the AIC at Cane Run Elementary School. This is her first year in the position.
Queen facilitates professional learning community meetings where each teacher and their grade level come to her room where they focus on math and literacy. They do internalizations where they look at a whole unit that’s coming up for the teachers to teach, and she will go into the classrooms to see how it is being implemented.
Queen helps facilitate MAP testing. When she gets all of the MAP data, she creates a multi-tier system of support meetings with teachers where they will look at their MAP data, reading fluency and math data to decide if their students need any extra support.
She also helps students through helping the teachers. Sometimes when she is coaching, she will step in and help lead a lesson. But mostly she helps teachers by coaching them, then helping the students improve with the improved teaching.
“I think I bring in an overarching view of being able to see the big picture of learning. I see how kindergarten leads into first grade and first grade leads into second grade and so forth,” Queen said.
