Whitman Elementary - Tulsa Public Schools

closed 14 schools due to under‐enrollment, the plan (“Project Schoolhouse”) was met with
healthy debate and minimal public discord.
TPS is clearly on a path to improved teaching and learning for all students. Each professional
employee in the district (teachers, leaders, principals and administrators) has had their job
performance thoroughly reviewed. Teachers have received testing results on each student and
can make instructional adjustments based on individual scores.
In fact, Tulsa Public Schools’ new teacher evaluation system beat out two national models in
being selected as the “presumptive state default” as Oklahoma’s primary new model for
evaluating public school educators.
Parents As Teachers
In partnership with Community Action Project, Parents as Teachers (PAT) is a voluntary early
childhood parent education and family support program for parents who have children from
birth to three years of age designed to help all parents give their children the best possible start
in life.
The Tulsa Parents as Teachers program serves families with children younger than 3 years old at
no cost, thanks to grants from the state and federal Title I funds.
Services include:
• Personal Visits: A parent educator, knowledgeable about child development and brain
research on early learning, helps parents learn what to expect as their child grows and offers
practical suggestions on encouraging learning and managing challenging behavior.
• Group Meetings: The group meetings allow parents to meet other parents to gain new
insights, share experiences and discuss parenting topics. They also give them the opportunity
to participate in parent‐child activities.
• Screenings: Parent educators administer screenings periodically. They are used to assess a
child’s overall development and to provide early detection of potential problems to prevent
difficulties later in school.
• Resource Network: Families are helped to access other community services that are beyond
the scope of the PAT program.
Mental Health Providers/Partnerships
• Social workers in the high schools: in June 2011, an anonymous donor provided TPS with
$175,000 to fund eight service specialists/social workers in high schools for the 2011‐12
academic year. The eight social workers had been previously eliminated from the budget on
June 14 due to $4.2 million in cuts to the TPS special education budget due to the end of
2009 stimulus funding by ARRA (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) and
reductions in state funding by the Oklahoma legislature.