Collective impact: Permian Basin leaders host a collaborative education summit

from INSIGHT—Summer 2021

by Texas Association of School Administrators

HIGHER EDUCATION Lessons learned from students and teachers: space and learning

by Dacia Rivers

School districts are one of the most important foundations in any community. When people are thinking of moving to a certain area, the question, “How are the schools?” is always top on their list of priorities.

In the Permian Basin, a large chunk of West Texas that extends into New Mexico, the answer to that question hasn’t always been a positive one. Many Region 18 students live in poverty and struggle academically. COVID-19 caused even further setbacks for schools in the area, with STAAR results sagging and thousands of students going unaccounted for as districts juggled the pandemic.

Ector County ISD is the largest school district in Region 18, and at a recent TASA txedFest presentation in Austin, Superintendent Scott Muri said he chooses to view these challenges as an opportunity.

“There’s a lot of work to do in our region, but we can’t do the work on our own,” Muri said. “We can’t spend 10 years making up for what our kids experienced, and as we begin to unpack our own local data, we see it’s a problem beyond many of our own individual capabilities.”

Adrian Vega, executive director of the Education Partnership of the Permian Basin, agreed, noting that the unique aspects of the community create localized challenges for schools in the area. The Permian Basin has an energy-driven economy, and periods of boom or bust are the norm. In good economic times, young people in the area can get high-paying, entry-level jobs in the field with minimal education, making it a challenge to entice them to pursue college degrees, even though those jobs might not last.

“If we were already at the bottom, and you layer a pandemic on top of that, and an economic crisis on top of that, where does that really lead us?” Vega asked.

Recently, several oil and gas companies in the region came together to form the Permian Strategic Partnership, with an eye on investing in the area to improve infrastructure, housing and education and help develop a local talent pool for hiring.

“As a community, there’s been this groundswell for everyone to come together and come up with some macro solutions by trying to tie all the resources in our region together in a much more integrated way, so that we can move forward as a region,” Vega said.

Along those lines, Muri, in collaboration with the superintendent of Hobbs Municipal Schools in New Mexico, T.J. Parks, began to form an idea: to host a summit that would bring together administrators from area school districts, members of the Permian Strategic Partnership and the Education Partnership of the Permian Basin along with others from the community, including philanthropists, elected officials, educational support organizations and business leaders.

They held the summit in early May, at the time when federal pandemic funds were about to be released to schools, with a goal of networking and brainstorming, to decide how school districts in the Permian Basin could best allocate these funds to make the most difference in the community. The event was attended by about 100 participants, including administrators from 24 Texas and New Mexico school districts.

“Sometimes, as educators, we get locked into our own world, but I can tell you, it makes a difference to engage in meaningful conversation with all of these groups at the same time,” Muri said.

The group met for four hours, working in heterogeneous groups for the first two hours before returning to their own teams for the second half of the summit. Attendees were asked to consider three particular areas of importance to school districts: increasing quality learning time, recruiting and retaining top talent, and meeting the social and emotional needs of staff, students and families.

“The problem that we are all facing is, what are we going to do with these significant federal dollars,” Muri said. “How are we going to wisely invest those dollars in our own school districts? How can we forever change and improve the quality of education for the children we serve?”

The group provided playlists on each area of importance, full of resources to help spark ideas. Attendees were asked to brainstorm solutions in their groups, and then work to find one good idea and evolve it into a great idea, meaning one that would have a high impact and be easy to implement.

After a working lunch, attendees returned to their peer groups with a list of ideas, and were given planning tools to help them decide which of these ideas they could implement and how they could best get started.

“At the end of that four-hour period of time, each school district walked away with some big bets,” Muri said. “These are actionable items that we can take back to our school districts and utilize with the students we serve — not necessarily one idea for the whole district, but a variety of different strategies and tactics associated with those three areas of time, talent and social-emotional wellbeing that we can implement.”

Rather than sending everyone home with great ideas and then leaving them alone to implement them, Vega and his team worked to provide support on the implementation aspect. In a post-summit survey, the majority of attendees expressed an interest in meeting again, so one month later, the group held a virtual follow-up session.

At this meeting, the Commit Partnership provided a look at the data about learning loss across the state, and three districts shared the details of the plans they developed as a result of the summit. Representing ECISD, Muri shared the “big bets” his district had come away with: outcomes-based contracting, a virtual tutoring program, virtual coaching for teachers, an opportunity culture plan to reward the district’s best teachers, a community education center to support families in the district, and a more intentional social-emotional support network. “These are big bets that none of us can do on our own,” Muri said. “The only way these are possible is because of a variety of different organizations and entities coming together to make these things a reality within the Permian Basin.”

“We had community members say, ‘None of us can do it by ourselves,’” Vega said. “‘We need a backbone organization.’ And that’s the idea. That’s the strength behind collective impact for any community.”

Due to the positive response from participants, Muri and Vega said these educational leadership summits will continue in the Permian Basin. They both noted that even within their community, the needs of each individual school district are varied and unique, and they believe that any community could benefit from hosting similar collaborative events.

“People are hungry for conversations and gatherings,” Muri said. “There’s such a power in bringing a diverse group together. Everyone has skin in the game.” n

Dacia Rivers is editorial director of INSIGHT.