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At Somerset High School in mid-May, juniors walked into math teacher Loren Spencer’s statistics class, grabbed graphic calculators from a container attached to the wall, and prepped for the start-of-class exercise: a review of the normal curve.
In big black letters in the front of the classroom is the phrase, “You got this!”
“All right, all right,” Spencer said to draw his students’ attention to the front of the class before reading the first word problem.
“The number of minutes high school students spend texting or messaging someone they have a crush on each day is normally distributed with a mean of 90 minutes and the standard deviation of 15,” Spencer read.
“What is my percentage that I'm missing here?” he asked.
“16,” the class replied.
“Good. Excellent,” Spencer said.
At the back of the room observing the lesson is William Mock, who oversees math curriculum and instruction for the high school as the executive master teacher.
Right now, Mock said math classes like this one have to embed in lessons to cover what students missed during the pandemic.
“With that pandemic piece, like, of course, we had some gaps that we had to fill, but what we did is we kind of do a baseline test at the very beginning of the year,” Mock said. “And then once we know those deficits, it's like, ‘Hey, now how do we kind of spiral those and build some more practice for our students so that way they can get back to on grade level for us?”
But the work Somerset has done the last five years to catch students in early grades up likely means less review will be needed soon.
In 2019, Somerset students in 3rd through 8th grade were more than a grade level behind the national average on math and almost two grade levels behind in reading. Now, they’re ahead of the curve in math, and just a half a grade level behind the 2019 national average in reading.
That places Somerset in rare company, according to an analysis of state and national tests called the Education Recovery Scorecard produced by professors at Stanford and Harvard universities.
The researchers behind the scorecard found barely 100 districts across the country that had recovered from the pandemic in both reading and math, including Somerset. Somerset’s neighbor to the east, Southside ISD, is also on the list — two of only 11 districts in Texas.
Those results are even more rare for districts with students navigating the challenges of poverty and historically disadvantaged backgrounds, like Somerset.
Researchers found that the national gap in grade levels between high-poverty and low-poverty districts increased after the pandemic.
Somerset Superintendent José Moreno points to the district’s culture of striving for excellence as a big part of their success.
“Zip code doesn't matter. So, if we can all accept and adopt that belief, then that's half of the ball game,” Moreno said.
Moreno also credits the district’s culture of constant improvement.
“I've been in some other school districts, we strive to this being the exemplar, but culturally, they're not there, and here, it's here,” Moreno said. “You have to know that it's OK not to know something, or it's OK to receive feedback, because the culture allows it to know that that's part of how we grow together every single day.”
And the mechanism for building that culture at Somerset is their master teacher model.
“Every level of mentor, or even a master teacher, it's a coaching model,” Moreno said. “I'm coaching you along the way every single day based on the data that we have.”
Somerset has career teachers, mentor teachers, master teachers, and executive master teachers like Mock.
“I oversee all the master teachers and career teachers here and just provide another layer of support,” Mock said. “We're the go-to if they have issues with the student or curriculum. We're seen as the experts to help and support the teachers to help with student growth.”
Each level of teacher comes with higher pay, and Somerset also gives additional incentives for meeting student performance goals.
“We have teachers that that make anywhere from — our starting salaries at $58,000. Then from 58,000, we have some that make up to $110,000,” Moreno said.
Some of that money comes from the state, but the district uses local money for incentives too.
Somerset also had another advantage during the pandemic: It was one of the first districts to have weekly COVID tests on campus.
“As soon as we had enough research to be able to get kids back in school, I can tell you that we had probably over 80% of kids back in school,” Moreno said. “So, it did pay dividends, because it allowed us to get back to where we are right now, a lot sooner from where we were at pre COVID.”
Somerset has also invested in programs designed to keep interest up and keep kids coming to school — like a four-year EMT certification program at the high school.
During a recent EMT class, instructor Jamie Hernandez walked senior Alyssa Diaz and her classmates through checking a model patient’s airways.
“For an actual patient, why are we doing this? When would I do this?” Hernandez asked.
“Respiratory failure,” the students said.
“Respiratory failure, correct,” Hernandez said.
On a model, Diaz checked the pulse, then checked for chest rise, completing all the steps she would on a real person in the field.
After high school, she plans to go to college and study nursing. She said she hopes the EMT certification betters her chances of getting into a nursing program.
“Also too, while I'm going to college it will be expensive, and EMT will be a job that I can always rely on,” Diaz said.
In order to continue to improve student outcomes, districts across the country, including Somerset, need to improve attendance. Chronic absenteeism — being absent over 10% of the year — doubled nationwide after the pandemic.
Somerset’s chronic absenteeism rate was 32% in 2022. It dropped down to 26% the following year.
Moreno said they’re boosting attendance through programs that pique student interest like EMT certification and by providing mental health support.
