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Schools

New Portola Principal Tackles Challenges with Collaboration

Matthew Burnham, who is moving from vice principal to principal at Portola Middle School, draws support from parents and teachers.

In May, ’s principal, vice principal, and two students spoke to the El Cerrito City Council, outlining both the school’s strengths and challenges. (A video of the May 16 meeting is available here. Portola  is item 4 on the agenda.) The last week of school, parents and administrators worked together to survey students on topics from safety to what motivates them to learn.

Matthew Burnham, who this summer is transitioning from vice principal to principal at Portola, talks often about collaborating. It’s the support of others like parent volunteers and teacher leaders, he said, that will make taking on the top post at the school manageable when there won't be someone to fill his old job. The school will not have a vice principal because of lower enrollment.

Burnham, who grew up in Davis, was inspired to become an educator by his parents. His mother taught for 25 years. For his father it was a second career, “and he loved it.”

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Matthew Burnham taught in Japan for a year. In the West Contra Costa Unified School District, his first substituting job was at Portola. His first full time job with the district was teaching English and later multimedia at Richmond High School. Assistant Principal Marcia Hataye became his mentor, giving him increasingly greater responsibility outside the classroom. He eventually became a project assistant at Richmond High, a position held by a teacher but involving administrative tasks. In that role, he said, he became fascinated with how funds could best be used to support a school’s goals.

After seven years at Richmond High School, he moved to a district role, serving for a year as coordinator of state and federal programs. He was vice principal of Portola for three years. 

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“In the classroom, I really, really enjoyed working with the kids and seeing them improve over the year,” he said. Serving as an administrator, he said, gives him the opportunity to see all the students do better.

He received his administrative training at UC Berkeley’s Principal Leadership Institute, which aims specifically to train administrators for Bay Area urban schools.

“It’s a very rigorous program,” he said. “They had us do a lot of research.” Particularly helpful were activities in which the institute students role-played a conversation they might have as an administrator with a teacher or parent, then analyzed video of the interaction with classmates.

“It was intense but excellent training for what I’ve dealt with in this job,” he said.

Burnham is proud of the progress the school has made as he has worked alongside outgoing principal Denise Van Hook, who is taking over as principal of Pinole Middle School, and said he’ll build on that progress rather than introducing major changes.

“Our teacher collaboration has strengthened over the last couple of years, which I think is essential to improving classroom instruction,” he said. Teachers regularly look at data on student progress and modify what is being taught, and reteach as needed.

 “We had a good year this year in terms of safety and discipline,” also, he said. That, too, he credits to teachers working together — in that case, to look at how they interact with students. “The more we talk about it as a staff and the more we bring parents in to talk about it, the better it will be.”

While one set of state data gave Portola a ranking of  2 out of 10 (with 10 the highest) against other middle schools in the state, and 1 out of 10 against schools with similar demographics, Burnham noted that the Academic Performance Index report released earlier in the year that looks at a school’s progress measured against improvement goals set by the state, showed that the school, with a gain of 22 points, met its schoolwide target as well as the targets for all subgroups. The purpose of the subgroups, which are based on race and other factors, is to ensure schools are meeting the needs of all students.

Those scores, he said, are a better indicator of the school’s progress. “The more that you break the data down, the more you get a picture of how the school is doing.” He credits the gains to “the tremendous effort of the teachers and parent support.”

Portola also has programs, like its drama and band offerings, that not all middle schools have, Burnham said.

Still, he acknowledges, there is plenty left to be done.

“I think we are a good school. I think we can be a great school, especially if we can bring kids back” who leave for private schools or other school districts.

Parents will continue to be a big part of the school’s improvement, he said. He hopes to have more parent-teacher conferences next year and to continue work with a group of parents Burnham said “are really a part of the solution and part of changing the way we do business.”

The group, Parent Academic Rigor Committee, developed this past school year as an expansion of a group originally only for the parents of a small percentage of high performing students that the district has designated GATE (Gifted and Talented Education).  The intent of the new format is to welcome all parents and embrace the concept that all students need in-depth, challenging assignments.

 “He is open-minded to change," parent Sally Fraser, who chairs the committee, says of Burnham. “Students enjoy his humor and respect him.” She also notes, “Matthew is working with administrators and teachers at to ensure good continuity between subject matter at the two schools.“

The last week of school Burnham worked closely with the academic rigor committee to administer a written survey to students about such things as how they best learn, whether there is an adult at the school who is concerned about them, and their perceptions of Portola compared to other schools. The surveys are still being tallied.

“Matthew is very interested in what the students are thinking and wants to use the results of this recent survey, in addition to future surveys, to improve the educational experience for all students at Portola,” Fraser said.

Burnham is counting on support from people like this parent group as he goes into the coming year without a vice principal, a decision that was based on the school’s dropping enrollment. A major factor in the lower numbers is the fact that, with the Elementary School in the fall, Portola will have only seventh and eighth graders.

Burnham said that will create another challenge – finding a way to bridge the leap from elementary school to middle school. While the school has had sixth graders, through scheduling they were kept fairly isolated from the seventh and eighth graders for most of the day. This provided a more gradual introduction to middle school than the new configuration. Burnham said he’ll be working with the elementary schools that feed into Portola to look at ways, such as visits by sixth-graders to the middle school, to ease the transition.

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