Educator Works From the Bottom Up

The job description: help Ventura County’s lowest-performing schools boost standardized test scores while crafting solutions that will improve struggling schools across the state.

It may be a tall order, but it’s one that Valerie Chrisman, the passionate and persevering principal of Lincoln Elementary School, is determined to fill.

For the past three years, Chrisman has led Lincoln’s effort to lift Stanford 9 scores from well below the national average to far surpassing it. The turnaround earned the school--where half of the students are considered economically disadvantaged--a national award last year.

Now, as director of a new state project run out of the county schools office, Chrisman is putting her energy toward the Ventura County campuses with the lowest Stanford 9 test scores and the highest number of educational hurdles: poverty, language barriers and lack of support in the home.

“I know how frustrating it is feeling like you’re doing everything you can but the scores aren’t changing,” said the 53-year-old Chrisman. “We’re saying, can we take the knowledge of what has worked and use it other places?”

Several districts have already volunteered to take part in the program, although specific schools have yet to be chosen, said Ventura County Supt. of Schools Chuck Weis.

Once the schools are picked, Chrisman will visit each and find out what their needs are based on a variety of factors, particularly Stanford 9 test scores. Then, she and a team of specialists will come up with ways to help and support the schools’ teachers, principals and students, drawing on existing county resources.

“Sometimes when you’re in the forest, all you see is the trees,” Weis said. “Being an independent and new set of eyes, maybe we can help develop new strategies that will make the difference.”

Ventura is one of four counties in the state--chosen from more than a dozen applicants--to receive a $150,000 grant to fund the program. The others are Riverside, Santa Cruz and Stanislaus counties, said Wendy Harris, an assistant superintendent in the California Department of Education.

As a component of the state’s new accountability program, the project’s goal is to build a local network of support for struggling schools and then disseminate what they found to other counties.

Those who have worked with Chrisman say if anyone can do it, she can.

Perfectly coiffed and standing barely 5 feet tall, Chrisman is an unassuming powerhouse, her colleagues said.

“She’s very organized, and really good at looking at test data to find patterns, trends and needs,” said Aleta Lepper, a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at Lincoln.

At Lincoln, Chrisman also found money--mostly through grant writing--to give teachers more time to work directly with students and create before- and after-school intervention classes. Establishing individual learning plans for each child, something that’s possible at a school of less than 300 students, also contributed to the Stanford 9 gains, Chrisman said.

Fourth-grade teacher Barbara Green said her former boss was a workaholic with high standards for every child.

“She always worked long hours, weekends and vacations,” Green said.

Chrisman began her career in education as an elementary school teacher while her husband, Joe, finished law school. When the couple moved to Ventura, she taught at Cabrillo and Balboa middle schools for four years before quitting for 20 years to raise two children.

When her son was a senior at Ventura High School, she returned to the profession as a fill-in Spanish teacher--a language she perfected when she and her husband drove for a year through South America in a Volkswagen bus.

In the time her children--Beth, now 24, and Joe, 22--went through Ventura Unified, Chrisman was active in the schools and did philanthropic work in the community.

“You get your heart so filled with the experience of working with people who need help,” she said.

When a principal at Lincoln left on short notice three years ago, the district’s then-Supt. Joseph Spirito, who knew Chrisman mostly from her involvement as a parent, appointed her to the post.

For her new endeavor, Chrisman has taken a one-year leave of absence from Lincoln--former Anacapa Middle School Principal Dave Myers is filling in--and will reevaluate at the end of the year.

Though slightly nervous about her decision to leave the small midtown Ventura school, Chrisman said she wants to help more children who she believes have the potential to improve.

“You don’t let any issue become an excuse, and you don’t lower your expectations because a child is at-risk,” she said. “You just flat-out say, ‘We’re going to make it happen.’ ”