By Theresa-Marie Wilson

Three schools in the Lucia Mar Unified School District have made the grade. Paulding and Judkins middle schools and Arroyo Grande High School were among 373 schools to receive the California Gold Ribbon Schools Award.
“These schools are academically successful, vibrant and innovative centers of learning and teaching,” state Superintendent Tom Torlakson said in a news release. “They provide great examples of the things educators are doing right — embracing rigorous academic standards, providing excellence and creativity in teaching and creating a positive school climate.”
The newly created award is part of the California School Recognition Program, which includes awards programs honoring exemplary students, teachers, classified employees, and schools for advancing excellence in education.
The California Gold Ribbon Schools Award was created to have a program focused on honoring schools while the California Distinguished Schools Program is on hiatus during the period of time required for California to transition to new assessment and accountability systems.
“We get a lot of awards at Arroyo Grande High School,” said Principal Conan Bowers. “This is another indicator that we are doing a good job for our kids. There is a lot of student success happening here.”
Currently, AGHS has 2150 students and was last recognized as a California Distinguished School in the 1990s.
Their application focused on the school’s professional development model where teachers have two hours during late-start Monday mornings to work on becoming better teachers.
“It is teachers becoming learners,” Bowers said. “It will ultimately effect student achievement. We use student achievement data to guide our instruction of our teacher development. Using that weekly data we know where students are headed and what students are learning.”
The new award recognized middle and high schools in 2015 and will award elementary schools in 2016. This year 193 middle schools and 180 high schools received the honor.
“The focus of the California Gold Ribbon Schools Award will be to recognize California schools that have made tremendous gains in implementing the academic content and performance standards adopted by the State Board of Education for all students, including English learners,” said Torlakson.
Those gains include English Language Arts, California English Language Development Standards, and Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, and Next Generation Science Standards.
“We are very honored to get this award for the hard work that we have done, especially in the inaugural year of the Gold Ribbon Award,” said Paulding Middle School Principal Edward Arrigoni.
Paulding was selected for the award based on the school’s data driven intervention system as well as its small learning communities. The 600 students are divided into teams of 150 kids that work with multidisciplinary teachers who monitor achievement levels.
“The teachers meet in a common prep period and talk about the students,” Arrigoni. “They all know the exact same students. If they need to progress, there is a further level of intervention, which, for us, basically starts with classroom based intervention.  Then we use money from the Local Control Accountability Program (LCAP) for short-term pull out tutoring for students to see if that is was they need to be successful.”
The school also provides tutoring at lunch and after school as well as a full period at the end of the day for additional intervention in English, math, English learners and English language development.  LCAP money is also used to fund a late bus to take home the students who stay after school.
Arrigoni said that student’s achievement levels have noticeably improved. The students who have gone through some sort of intervention showed testing improvements of nearly double that of their peers over the same period of time.
Paulding is also a California Distinguished School as well as National Blue Ribbon School.
Schools applied for the award based on programs that their school has adopted, including standards-based activities, projects, strategies and practices that can be replicated by other schools.
“I was really pleased, in particular for the teachers, because it is an acknowledgment of a lot of hard work that we have done together over the last four years,” Judkins Middle School Principal Ian Penton said. “I think it is neat to celebrate that for them.”
Judkins was last a California Distinguished School in 1994.
Penton said the school’s application focused on the implementation of the Teacher Advancement Program or TAP that was designed to recruit and retain good teachers, provide them opportunities to advance professionally, and offer them better pay
“We have been working under a federal grant for the last four years,” Penton said. “We really just got a lot of positive results from the work that we have done—a lot of evidence of student achievement and those kinds of things. All of that was basically put in the application, and when they came out to validate, it kind of just spoke for itself. What we have done over the past four years is really a major progressive school-wide reform. Every single teacher on this campus has a hand in it. It’s neat because everybody can say, ‘I played a role in that.’”
Arroyo Grande High School and Judkins Middle School were also recognized as Academic Achieving Schools. This additional recognition is given only to schools receiving federal Title I funds that assist in meeting the educational needs of students living at or below the poverty line.