Whatcom Creek Trail Improvements

The clouds parted Feb. 16 as volunteers spent two hours planting native vegetation on a stretch of Whatcom Creek Trail.

The City Lights Condo Association entered a partnership with Bellingham Parks and Recreation Department last fall and adopted a stretch of the trail along its Alabama Hill property west of Saint Clair Park. Whatcom Creek Trail runs from Whatcom Lake to Maritime Heritage Park and Bellingham Bay. The group contacted the department with concerns about invasive Himalayan blackberry plants and alder trees on the land between the trail and homes.

“It’s been increasingly invasive and it’s amazing, it was just solid trees and blackberries,” said Margot Day, a member of the association. “But because of the forest behind, the trees were all leaning perilously in this direction. And you get a storm and they fall down and they damage buildings.”

Whatcom Creek Greenway and Trail is a priority project in the city Parks, Recreation and Open Space Plan. While the city does not have the funding or staff necessary to maintain every trail, it provides support and encourages groups to join the Adopt-A-Trail Program. Groups such as Kiwanis, Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association and businesses along the trail have already partnered with the Parks Department to improve habitat and trail quality.  

“When you remove non-native species like Himalayan blackberry, there’s more diversity in the vegetation, which supports greater biodiversity in wildlife and insect life. A biodiverse edge is more able to respond to changes in the environment,” said Rae Edwards, the Parks Volunteer Program coordinator.

Each project is approved individually after a Parks Department employee evaluates the site and identifies what changes community members and the city want to accomplish, said Michelle Baragona, an AmeriCorps volunteer coordinator. After doing a walk-through of this site, association members signed a contract agreeing to take over after the initial volunteer work parties.

“[The goal is] to remove the invasive species and replant with natural habitat and that will allow for a healthier, stronger forest,” Day said. “So it benefits all of us. It’s really been generous of the parks to work with us.”

In November, volunteers and Parks Department employees removed invasive blackberries and alder trees from land behind Day’s home before covering the cleared area in mulch. Mulch is a mix of organic materials such as bark, grass and leaves that is placed around plants to prevent the growth of weeds, retain moisture and add nutrients to the soil.

However, improving forest health along the Whatcom Creek Greenbelt will take time.

“This one will take at least five years to get to a maintenance level as opposed to a restoration level,” said Baragona.

           

The Parks Volunteer Program provided shovels, buckets, gloves and the roughly 150 plant starts that were carefully lowered into their new homes. The species planted such as vine maple, Indian plum, Pacific ninebark, snowberry and redosier dogwood will hopefully sprout leaves come spring, Baragona said.  Day’s dog, Kobe, kept volunteers company as they spread mulch around the leafless sticks speckling the plot of land.

For Virginia Vicente and her son Alberto, it was just another Saturday work party.

“I like to help my community,” said Vicente who has lived in Fairhaven Neighborhood for 18 years. She and her family attend as many work parties as they can.  

Improving small connector trails is also a top priority for Puget residents. The Puget Neighborhood Plan outlines goals of supporting pedestrian and bicycle travel by improving trail access and signage. 

“There’s so many cul-de-sacs that if you’re going to drive to your neighbor’s house down below you, you would have to drive three quarters of a mile where maybe its 75 feet from your house,” said Mary Chaney, president of the Puget Neighborhood Association.

Establishing better access within the neighborhood and to other areas of Bellingham is especially important to walkers in Puget Neighborhood.

“Where I live there are a lot of walkers. People being out and conversing with each other -- apparently all the dog walkers know each other and their dogs -- it’s social,” Chaney said. “It’s exercise and fresh air. And it gives kids that access where without the trails they don’t have good mobility.”

The next Whatcom Creek Trail work party is scheduled for March 30 to remove weeds around the young plants. There is the risk that ivy, reed canary grass or herb Robert, also called “Stinky Bob” for its pungent perfume, could move in before volunteers have a chance to weed, said Baragona.

“The biggest challenge is keeping blackberry down,” Baragona said. “It’s an insane plant. You can clear it out in the winter and by spring it could be waist high.”

Maintaining the progress made by volunteers is the true obstacle.

“All the seeds that dropped on the ground will germinate,” Edwards said. “In the next seven years those seeds could sprout. The last part is consistency. If you continue to go back in the next few years to pull them when they’re seedlings it’s a lot easier.”

Without the resources to conduct regular weeding parties, much of the maintenance work falls on trail stewards, like the City Lights Condo Association, said Edwards. But Day and other association members are optimistic about the greenbelt’s future.

“I feel so pleased with the momentum we’ve got going here,” said Day. “We have lots of sections more to go. It’s just a wonderful collaborative effort. We really appreciate the willingness of the Parks Department to partner with us on it.”

Bellingham Adopts Standards Based Reporting

Bellingham middle school students won’t be seeing As on their report cards this year. Instead, 4, 3, 2, and 1 will speckle the paper report cards mailed home Feb. 12.

Bellingham School District is joining a steady wave of schools that are moving from a traditional grading scale of A, B, C, D and F to a standards-based reporting system, which uses a scale of 1 to 4. According to the district website, 4 means exceeding expectations, 3 means meeting expectations, 2 means approaching expectations and 1 means well below expectations.

While elementary schools have already been grading students on a 1 to 4 scale, it was implemented in middle schools last fall. This report card is the first of the school year to sport numerical marks.

“The driver behind it is that we believe, and the research helps support, that the standard state system results in higher performance of students meaning the academic standards that we have set for them,” said Trina Hall, Bellingham School District program administrator.

School districts such as Spokane, Snohomish and Kent already use standards-based reporting. In 2011, Washington state became one of 45 states to adopt Common Core State Standards. These nationally based standards, developed by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, define the skills and knowledge that particular grade levels should have in the areas of English language arts and mathematics.

“The idea behind that is to have, across the nation, similar expectations for students,” Hall said. “A key piece is that it separates the reporting of academic performance from the learning or success attributes – behaviors that support learning like effort, participation, attending to detail, being on-task, task completion. In a traditional grading system, they’re all mixed together.”

Where the old system averaged scores, this separate scoring of behavior and understanding puts the emphasis on learning and allows students to better understand their responsibilities.

"If a kid wants to raise their grade it's not just a conversation about looking through missing work and all the things that may be distractors. Instead, the conversation is, 'Great, let's look at how proficient you are towards all the math concepts you're supposed to know.' I can then point out, 'It looks like you did pretty well here. On the other hand, this skill here, I haven't seen that you're able to do it yet. Let's get you better at this skill," said Bryan Berreth, a 7th grade math teacher at Kulshan Middle School.

Along with many other teachers, Berreth has been implementing standards-based reporting techniques in his classroom for more than five years.

"In the past couple of years because of standards-based practices I started minimizing homework completion and participation from students' grades. The change resulted because I wanted my As, Bs, Cs and Ds to be reflective, as much as possible, of their math understanding,” said Berreth. 

Assessments of understanding put students in a growth mindset, said Berreth.

“The questions the kids ask me are more consistently now about, ‘How do I get better at this?’ As opposed to, ‘How do I get my grade up?’” said Berreth.

The school district began planning for the change in December of 2011 with the intent of implementing standards-based reporting in the 2012-2013 school year. The district used Kentucky’s statewide standards-based reporting system as a model. With the launch of a new online platform this year, called Skyward, the grading change was a natural step.

“Teachers have been teaching in a standards-based curriculum for a long time, but they haven’t had the capability to communicate their scoring mechanisms with students and their families with standards-based reporting format,” said Rachel Williams, co-chair of the Parent Advisory Council to the Superintendent.

The grading scale transition has been a regular topic of discussion at the monthly committee meetings. The group acts as liaison between parents and Superintendent Greg Baker, voicing parent concerns and helping parents understand changes.

Through Skyward teachers generate report cards and record grades and comments.

“One of the great pieces about that is that at the middle school and high school we have family access, so the families can log in and see the teachers’ gradebook,” Hall said. “So they can see what assignments are coming up, what assignments might be late or missing and they just have more information about how to support their child at home.”

For Williams, this tool improves communication and helps her support her son’s long-term learning.

“He might do really well, but if he’s still not being really tidy or he’s late about getting things in, that’s going to matter more and more as he gets older,” said Williams of her son who attends Fairhaven Middle School. “I like that they keep those things separate. If you have a kid that’s really struggling, you might be able to find that they have something that they excel at that you didn’t know before because they can get a really high score in one thing that would have been really diluted if it was mixed into one score.”

However, change can be difficult. The school district and teachers don’t expect the transition to be without growing pains.  

"I think one of the challenges is that a lot of families, a lot of teachers, and a lot of students have had quite a bit of success with the old system. Based on that, they may wonder, 'Why change?' It's a reasonable question. At the same time, those students will still be successful under the new system. My belief is the more specific feedback and information can encourage an even greater number of students to be successful,” Berreth said.  

In addition to a grading guide that accompanied report cards, the district has been making efforts to help parents and students understand the change. Each elementary and middle school hosted information nights in the fall to provide parents with information about how the change would affect their children, said Hall. More information is available on the district and school websites. 

Surveys will be conducted next week to gauge how families feel about the report cards, said Hall.

“We’re following that up with a survey to parents, some students and staff next week to get information on, ‘Were they easy to understand? Was there anything confusing?’ You know, kind of just how the information is being received at home,” said Hall.

Teachers and principles representing different schools and grade levels will work in Steering Committees to evaluate the system’s success by gathering information and solving problems to help the school districts make improvements, said Hall, who oversees the committees. The group will look at the data and surveys and gather information from their schools to evaluate what support or communication is needed.

“The ideas around this change are based in research and best practice, they’re not just a whim,” said Hall. “As we work together in our teaching team, it will take time. To do really good work takes time.”

For some students, the switch may be easy.

“That’s been the fun part. Students seem to just get it,” said Hall. “At the curriculum nights and some of the open houses that I attended I’ve notice that the students and the teachers – it makes sense to them. The students have a good grasp on what the different scores mean and what they need to do to earn those scores to show their performance. I think that’s been one of the nice surprises. I think some of the people that can explain the program the best are the students.”

Through the transition, the district’s priority is ensuring that families, students and staff feel supported and ask for more information as it is needed, said Hall.

“The whole idea behind the report card is that it’s not just a report card, it’s a reporting system where we have ongoing, different ways of communicating with families about their child’s progress in school,” said Hall. “It’s just really a support for good, high quality classroom instruction.”