But Solomon said it wasn’t until he and a team of educators from his district began participating in the Consortium for Public Education’s Middle-High Forum, that he “was able to get the buy-in” to undertake the rigorous application process.

Working with the Middle-High Forum and its coaches “made us take a look at ourselves,” Solomon said in an interview in February after receiving word that South Allegheny had earned the Schools to Watch distinction.

Only 167 schools nationwide have been selected as Schools to Watch since 1999 when the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform launched the competition. Winners must demonstrate a three-year history of improvement and map a plan for continued progress. Among the improvements that made South Allegheny stand out were a 13 percent increase in the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment’s (PSSA) math scores and a 5 percent gain in PSSA reading scores.

The Middle-High Forum helped set the school’s team on course for obtaining the designation with a “self-evaluation” that required members to examine their school against a slate of performance indicators, Solomon said, noting the slate takes in all 37 of the indicators used by sponsors of the Schools to Watch program.

The overlap of the indicators gave Solomon’s goal of pursuing the designation “instant credibility” with his team, he said.  With encouragement from Mary Kay Babyak, the Consortium’s Director of Initiatives and leader of the Middle High Forum, Solomon said he harnessed their appreciation of the concrete guideposts to move the application forward. The team tapped Robert Furman, Ed. D., a Middle High Forum coach and Director of the Educational Administration and Supervision program at Duquesne University’s School of Education, for insights about the application process. Furman sits on the board of Pennsylvania’s affiliate to the Schools to Watch program.

The Consortium offers the Middle-High Forum in conjunction with Duquesne University as a medium for teams of educators to improve their districts by focusing on the major transitions students make during their school careers, particularly from the middle grades to high school. Now in its second year, the program currently is supporting 14 districts in designing, implementing and evaluating interventions to bolster academic achievement and improve graduation rates.

Understanding the obstacles students encounter during critical transitions and overcoming them “is a constant battle,” Solomon said. Following the Middle-High Forum’s self-evaluation, he said he and his team “were all on the same page about what we needed to improve.”  In general, the team felt they needed to provide students with extra support academically and also with additional social support.

Among the academic supports South Allegheny adopted was Response to Intervention, or RTI, a process recommended by the Pennsylvania Department of Education for helping individual students with learning difficulties as soon their problems surface.

Among the social supports South Allegheny chose was a peer-mentoring program launched with grant support from the Consortium’s Power of Peers initiative. As the program is structured, eighth grade students become “parents” to seventh graders. Teachers supporting the mentors become “grandparents” under the model, which South Allegheny chose because a good many of its students haven’t experienced the relationships inherent in traditional nuclear and extended families.

South Allegheny’s gains in PSSA scores are not the only evidence of improvement. Among other signs, the school also has seen improved attendance and fewer disciplinary referrals.

Solomon also has bigger goals. “I want this to be the best school in the Mon Valley and to be as good as, or better than, the schools you hear about all of the time” when awards are being announced, he said.