Six weeks into the fall semester, Justin Watwood has seen a lot of change at Poe Middle School on his third year on the campus.

As principal of one of three schools in the district operating as resource campuses in the state’s Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) initiative, Watwood is watching what happens when 70 percent of the school’s core teachers hold a Teacher Incentive Allotment designation from the Texas Education Agency, and the rest are well on their way.

The ACE model, which operates on the belief that the most skilled teachers should be matched with the students who face the greatest challenges, has already seen preliminary success in Texas and is now being offered at Poe, Hot Wells Middle School, and Crockett Academy. The model incentivizes designated teachers with an additional strategic stipend on top of their Teacher Incentive allotment, to compensate for additional office hours during the school week and 11 additional teaching days per year. All faculty receive intensive, data-driven coaching and daily planning blocks.

At Poe, teachers stay until 5:30 p.m. twice a week. The time is used for tutoring and evaluating and planning during weekly Professional Learning Communities (PLCs).

“One of the things I was looking forward to is the ability to have additional time on campus where we can actually organize things, set up lessons properly, and adjust and monitor instruction to best fit the needs of our students,” said Riley Cotham, who teaches seventh grade social studies. “Just having more time in general is something that every single teacher needs, and the extra time we do get is helpful.”

In PLCs, teachers gather and look at a specific skill they’ve taught in a previous week to evaluate, articulate what different levels of student success looks like, and gain ideas for reteaching. It also provides a time for teachers to plan cross-curricular connections and needs.

“There is an immediate link between social studies and reading and science and math,” Cotham added. “There's a noticeable difference in social studies. When we have students that aren’t achieving academically in reading, that follows through the social studies. I have some students who are not reading with great comprehension right now. So when our scores in reading go up, our scores in social studies will also go up.”

At Poe, the scores are tracked in the Data Room. On the third floor of the campus, behind a door labeled “Data or it didn’t happen,” the school tracks data for every student in the school, grouped by grade level and achievement level in core areas. Teachers can visually see how their students are moving in each of the core areas, and also as the waves of students move from left to right across the board from STAAR projections of did not meet, to approaching, meets and masters.

With a unified and very visual goal, new and returning teachers at Poe are also enjoying unified systems and procedures.

Social studies department chair Villanka Stroud, who has been at Poe for four years, said a major benefit of having so many highly qualified educators in one space is that it is easy to implement systems campus-wide.

“It's good because all the teachers are either master teachers or about to be a master teacher,” Stroud said. “With all of the kids going through classrooms that have systems in place, they're starting to get used to it. If it's done in this classroom, then it's going to follow through to other classrooms. It’s lot of people, with a lot of systems, that keep the machine going.”

Watwood said it has made a difference in the number of behavior incidents this year.

“You’re not having as many admin calls to classrooms because teachers have those routines and procedures in their rooms,” Watwood said. “So, you're not having as many behavior incidents inside the classroom either, which also promotes learning.”

One of the main differences with the ACE model this year that students and parents are now seeing is the additional instructional days, 11 total, with most of them occurring on days when many other district schools are having professional development time. The first of which is Friday, Sept. 18.

During these days, teachers can provide targeted enrichment and interventions to students as needed.

“We’re able to pull out smaller groups to target what they're struggling and give them that extra help that they need,” said Yesenia Montalvo, who teaches eighth grade science.

The campus is also introducing more than 15 clubs for enrichment, including creative writing, Esports, pickleball, crafts and more.

“You want to do something that's fun, so that they can collaborate and make those nice connections with not just teachers, but with other peers that have same interests as them,” Montalvo added.

But with most teachers sponsoring a club, the students will also get a glimpse into their teachers’ personalities.

“It will be really nice for the kids, as well as the teachers,” said Crystal Rocha, who is new to Poe and teaching seventh grade science. “It allows us to bond with them on a social level, not just academic.”

With many changes at Poe, Watwood said he’s excited for the school’s upward trajectory, as the school has raised its accountability score 10 points last year, and is on the precipice of a C. And the biggest change, he said, is the confidence students are building in themselves.

“The biggest thing is the way that students are talking about their academics and about how they're doing on the tests and how they're growing,” Watwood said. “They're just much more bought in because that's the culture of all the classrooms in the school and all the teachers. It's early in the year, and it's going to keep getting even better.”