ACTION PLAN NARRATIVE 1

Action Plan Narrative

Mary Brownrigg

Saginaw Valley State University

ACTION PLAN NARRATIVE 2

Action Plan Narrative

Mary Brownrigg

Saginaw Valley State University

Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement.

Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is

inevitable (William Pollard). This quote is great because it correlates directly with

school improvement and I agree with it. Schools need to change to improve. It needs

to constantly change because what the schools are doing may be working, but what if

there is something out there that is better and can improve your school?

In the school that I teach at, there has been a very big issue with bussing and

getting the students off the bus and into the classrooms in a timely manner. My school

is very different then general education schools. We have students who have

moderately cognitive impairments, severely cognitive impairments, and severely

multiply impaired. Some of our students are wheel chair bound and need help getting

off of the bus to their classroom. This is the job of the staff in the school to help

students get off the bus and to the classroom. There is a staff from each room that

goes on bus duty to help the students. When there is a student in a wheel chair, there

needs to be two staff that holds the chair while it goes down the chair lift.
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Our school starts to unload busses around 8:50 and the last bus gets unloaded

around 9:30. Lately, the last bus has started to get unloaded at 9:55 which means it is

taking over an hour to unload all of the busses and get the students to their classroom.

This also means that all of the classrooms are starting their days later. It is really

affecting my classroom because my students are severely cognitively impaired and

some are in diapers. I do not have bathroom in my classroom like some of the other

classrooms have in theirs. Which means my staff and I have to take our students down

the hall to boys and girls bathroom. We have to shadow and monitor most of my

students as they go to their locker to put their belongings away and then to the

bathroom. This takes time to do and with students still coming in at 9:45, I am not

starting my day until 10am when I should be starting at 9:30. Bus duty is taking away a

half hour of my day that I could be using to teach my students functional academics or

vocational skills.

For the last two months, I have participated in the school improvement meetings

at my school. The school improvement team has been working on the school

improvement plan for our school to submit to the state. This has been a great learning

experience because I have been able to learn hands on about the school improvement

process and what our school is trying to improve. Also, our last professional

development, each category (moderately, severely, or severely multiply impaired) met

with all of the staff from each classroom to discuss the parts of the school improvement

plan. This was to get all the staff involved and have a say in the school and how we

were going to try to improve it.

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If my classroom is starting our day later then it should, then I figured other

classrooms were starting theirs later also. I decided I would talk to the school

improvement team and start asking them how they felt about our bus duty and if their

students were coming into their classrooms later then they should. Then, if determined,

we would send out a survey to all of the teachers on how well they think bus duty is

going and if they think it should be changed to get the students in faster. With the data

we receive from the surveys, we can start trying to improve bus duty to make it faster

and more efficient.

Over the past two month, the school improvement team and I have discussed

different ways that we could improve morning bus duty so teachers and students are not

losing two and half hours per week in instructional time. As a group, we decided that

this problem is so big that we should develop a transportation committee and their job

will to develop a plan to make morning bus duty go faster. The transportation

committee discussed the different problems the school was having with morning bus

duty and came up with a solution that could solve all of them.

Over a few weeks of meetings, the transportation committee came up with plan

and shared it with all of the staff at the March staff meeting. The new plan for bus duty

included that each classroom, would have at least 2 staff go out for bus duty. This

meant only one staff member would be in the classroom. One staff member could

come back to the classroom once there were too many students for one staff member to

supervise. There are two sides of the school that have buses that need to be unloaded.

Seventeen buses in the front, and fifteen buses on the side need to be unloaded during

bus duty. There are about six or seven students who are able to walk on each bus, and
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about four or five students in wheel chairs that need to be assisted down the lift. There

would be 25 people on side bus duty and about 40 in the front. Half of the staff will be

outside to assist the students off the bus, and the other half will be at the inside doors to

greet the students, take them from the staff, and assist them to their classroom if

needed. Every student has a tag on their backpack. There are three different kinds of

tags. A green tag means that the student can walk to their classroom independently.

Yellow tags mean that students need to be shadowed to their classroom by a staff

member. Lastly, a red tag means a student needs to be assisted to their classroom by

a staff member. Bus duty should go a lot faster because most of the school staff is out

on bus duty which will help unload the busses faster. Hopefully, this will solve the

problem of the congestion in the school parking lot and the busses blocking the main

road.

I will communicate the vision of the plan with the staff of the school through a

professional development which will give the school improvement team and I enough

time to explain why we are changing the way we do bus duty and how we will

implement the changes. This change does not really involve the students, but we will

tell the students that they will be getting off the bus faster and they will have more time

to learn during the day since they will be in the classroom longer. We use

Not all of the buses can get into the school parking lot which means that they

have to wait out on the main road by our school. This causes problems not only for the

bus drivers, but the parents trying to get in and out of the parking lot to drop off the

students, but it also causes backups on the street and can make irate people in the

community. We will have a meeting with the parents at the PTO meetings and also
ACTION PLAN NARRATIVE 6

send out a letter apologizing to the community on how we are trying to fix the bus issue

so buses are not blocking the road.

The first strategy we will use to motivate staff is using a competition between the

two sides of bus duty. Whichever side finishes first gets one piece of candy and the

bragging rights of finishing before the other side. We thought that having a friendly

competition would be a great motivator for our staff. When using competition in the

classroom, it makes the students get excited and motivates them to do well so they can

win the competition. If competition motivates students, then we thought it could motivate

staff since change is a hard thing to do.

Our school has a PBIS program called the Gotcha program. The second

strategy will be giving out Gotchas to staff that are going above and beyond their

duties for morning bus duty or staff that are always on bus duty on time and are not

socializing with other staff. That is another issue we have had problems with. Some

staff do not go out to bus duty or get distracted during bus duty due to socializing with

other staff members. The Gotcha program works with students, and we have started

to use it with our staff and it seems to be motivating.

The last strategy we implemented for the program is telling the staff how this

program will benefit them and their students. With gaining two and half hours of

instructional time, teachers will be able to teach students longer each day so it could

possibly get the students to reach their IEP goals faster.

There will be a meeting during professional development to explain the new bus

duty and what the expectations will be. Each day after bus duty we will log what time
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the last bus was unloaded. We will test the new bus duty system for a month to see

how well it does and if we are getting done with bus duty earlier. There will also be a

survey that goes out to staff for them to tell us how they think bus duty is going and

write any suggestions they have to improve bus duty. There will also be a letter to our

community to tell them what our plan is to fix the issue with our busses blocking the

road. The parent group at our school meets often so we will also present this idea to

them so they understand we are trying to make it easier for them to get in and out of the

parking lot to drop off their child.

This action plan does not have anything to do with the curriculum except for that

it will give teachers more time, about two and a half hours per week, to teach their

students functional academics and vocational skills. This schools curriculum is based

off of the Michigan eGLCEs and the Common Core Essential Elements.

The new program I developed for bus duty is an idea that I got from our sister

school but tweaked it a little bit to fit our school. I have learned that a few years ago,

our sister school, whose school environment and demographics are the same as ours,

was having the same issue with bus duty and it was taking a lot longer than it should

have been. Now, with the new program they implemented, their students are getting

into school a lot faster than before. So I decided to take their data that they had for the

new program and look at it. That is how I decided to try to take their program and tweak

it to ours.

We will assess the new bus duty system for a month and collect data on it every

day so we can see how it does. I want to see what time bus duty is finished with every
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day and see if the new program is helping. It is also important that the staff lets me

know how they think it is going and what suggestions they have that could make bus

duty even more efficient and better. We will have a suggestion box in the main hallway

so the staff or parents can share their suggestions, concerns, or even positive thoughts

to help us improve the new program. Surveys will be sent out after the first week of bus

duty and at the end of the month to see how everyone thought bus duty worked. We

will then have a meeting at the beginning of the next month to discuss the data we

collected and overall if the program is working and if we should stick with it.

This action plan employed problem-solving skills because we had to develop a

new program to help improve our bus duty because the old program was not working

how it should. The school improvement team took some time to think of and develop a

plan they thought could reduce the amount of time it took to get the students off of the

bus and into their classroom. It took about a month, about three meetings, to plan a

program that we thought could improve bus duty.

This action plan will help the community members understand we are trying to

solve the issue that is possibly causing issues with the community and blocking a main

road. After implementing this program, hopefully it will create more time for teachings to

instruct which means it will positively affect student learning.

We will be using surveys online to get the stakeholders ideas and suggestions of

the new program. Also, we will have the data that we collected put into an excel sheet

and develop it into a graph to show how the new program has helped. This will then go

into a PowerPoint to show the staff and parents at the staff meeting and at the parent
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meeting. This plan helps advocate for all students with the diverse conditions because

it is helping the students, no matter what disability, get into school faster and get a half

hour more of academics per day.

I remained cognizant to make decisions based on ethical and legal principles

while creating this action plan by making sure all students and stakeholders will benefit

from this action plan. There is not one person who will not benefit from this plan and I

know everyone will be for an extra half hour of academics per day.

In conclusion, this new morning bus duty program will help get back two and half

hours of instruction time to the teachers and students. The busses will move quicker

throughout the parking lot which means that the parents will be able to get in and out of

the parking lot a lot easier. Lastly, the main road the busses have been blocking will not

be blocked, or blocked for as long since the busses will be moving faster.
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References

Chen, C., & Chiu, S. (2009). The Mediating Role of Job Involvement in the Relationship

Between Job Characteristics and Organizational Citizenship Behavior. Journal of

Social Psychology, 149(4), 474-494.

Platow, M. (1995). Social Value Orientations and the Expression of Achievement

Motivation. New Zealand: The Journal of Social Psychology

Stocks, N. (2015). B. School Morning Bus Duty Program [Personal interview].

Turnbull, A.P., & Turnbull H.R. (2001). Families, professionals, and exceptionality:

Collaborating for empowerment, 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice

Hall.