Math at Vashon High School has always been challenging, said VHS guidance counselor Laurie Martin. While the school offers the same classes as high schools across the state, Vashon teachers hold students to a high standard.

“We have admitted non-residents who on their transcripts had what we consider to be a high level math (course). They’ve been enrolled in one of our comparable math courses and haven’t been able to manage it,” Martin said.

Recently, though, concerns about the number of students struggling with math at Vashon High School have prompted the school district to take a look at how math is taught on Vashon.

School board chair Laura Wishik said that at a recent Let’s Talk meeting at Vashon High School — a forum designed to get parents’ feedback on the school’s strengths and weaknesses — a number of parents said that their children seemed to constantly struggle in their math classes and asked about tutoring options.

“What we heard in the meeting, from parents of freshmen at the high school, was that when kids got into the high school a lot of times they struggle,” Wishik said.

The issue isn’t a new one to the district, though, Wishik said, and it’s something teachers and district officials are already working to address.

For over a year now, a committee of math teachers from Chautauqua Elementary School, McMurray Middle School and the high school has been examining how math is taught at the district. What they’ve identified, said the district’s curriculum director Roxanne Lyons, is that there is a gap in math instruction at the elementary and middle school level.

The kindergarten through eighth-grade math curriculum, which was adopted to meet state standards, focuses heavily on conceptual math, Lyons said. When students enter the ninth grade and are asked to do more computational math, they sometimes lack those basic skills.

“We are very serious about solving this issue,” she said.

Elementary and middle school math teachers have already begun to supplement their math curriculum with additional lessons that emphasize computation. Meanwhile, Lyons said, the committee of teachers has been reviewing math curriculum options that would strengthen instruction and is prepared to adopt a new kindergarten-through-eighth-grade program that would be in place at McMurray as soon as next school year and Chautauqua the year after.

Now, Lyons said, the district is waiting to see whether the state Legislature votes to adopt the new national standards for math instruction, a decision it is expected to make this session. The Legislature’s choice will steer which curriculum Vashon adopts, Lyons said.

“As soon as the state makes a determination, we are well poised, because we’ve been talking about our program and its deficiencies and opportunities. We know where its holes are,” she said.

In addition, district officials hope that a new program being implemented at McMurray will help identify students who struggle and assist them in their problem areas before they reach the high school.

The program, titled Response to Intervention (RTI), involves testing students twice a year in a specific subject and giving them extra instruction and practice where it is needed.

Lyons said Response to Intervention has been used at Chautauqua for three years now to help students stay on the right track in reading, and teachers hope it will do the same for both math and reading at McMurray.

“RTI is great because you not only survey to know where the problems are, but you very specifically design the interventions for the students and implement them,” Lyons said. “In an ideal world, every student will have their grade-level skills in reading and in math when they leave McMurray.”

While the district takes steps to improve math instruction across the board, high school guidance counselors are looking for ways to reach out to students who currently struggle with the subject.

Susan Haworth, a counselor at VHS, said parents’ recent concerns have given her one more reason to ramp up the school’s free tutoring.

The program, which started about a year ago with the help of Islander Susan Sullivan, has flown somewhat under the radar — with just a few community members giving free tutoring to a small number of students.

Haworth said some parents at the Let’s Talk meeting were surprised to learn the high school even offered tutoring.

“I think that a lot of people don’t know about our tutoring program. … Part of it is deliberate because we don’t have enough tutors,” she said.

Haworth said she has a long list of paid math tutors that she frequently gives to students, but she hopes that by recruiting more volunteer math tutors, she can offer free tutoring to students whose families don’t have the means to pay for it.

Sullivan, who started the program by recruiting friends to volunteer, said that while many adults are willing to tutor high school English, most aren’t confident enough in their math skills to tutor the subject. But she hopes to find Islanders — perhaps those who work in the technical field — who would be willing to tutor for just an hour each week.

“We need to drill deeper in the community, because there are people in the community who get it,” she said.

Russ Brazill, a retired math teacher who taught at VHS for about 30 years, said that when he taught, very few of his students sought private tutoring. Now a tutor himself, Brazill said he has recently been seeing more students than ever.

“When it got really busy, one week I had 21 students, and I turned two more away because I just couldn’t work them in,” he said.

Brazill said he’s been asked why so many high schoolers seek math tutoring, and he says he doesn’t believe classroom instruction is the problem. While some of his students lack some basic skills, Brazill said, many of them are enrolled in high-level math classes and are seeking help because they simply want to bump their grades from B’s to A’s. Kids, he added, are under more pressure these days.

“Not only taking the high-level math, but they’ve got to get a good grade in it. They feel so much pressure to get into the prestigious colleges they seek. … I think that’s a big change that’s happened in the last several years,” he said.

More VHS students, meanwhile, may soon find the situation even more challenging, VHS administrators said. Beginning with the class of 2013, this year’s sophomores, high schoolers in Washington state will be required to complete three years of math, compared with the two previously required.

Brazill said he remembers when students had more options to fulfill their math requirements, including a general math class. Now, state standards dictate that high schoolers must complete algebra, geometry and one other math class to graduate, and most colleges require that that third year of math be advanced algebra/trigonometry.

“Advanced algebra is a difficult class,” Brazill said.

Tim Morrison, who taught math at a community college and has a son at VHS, agreed, adding that he believes the three math classes that most students opt to take aren’t always beneficial for their futures.

“The curriculum is all about preparing kids for calculus,” he said. “For someone who is going into the social sciences or other kinds of non-scientific pursuits, other types of mathematics could be more valuable.”

But Martin said the school’s hands are somewhat tied with course offerings. “The whole reason the state went to that three credit graduation requirement (in math) is all the colleges are saying, ‘We want our students to know advanced algebra. We don’t want to consistently give students remedial math classes.’”

Lyons said that students who do struggle in math may opt to take a personal finance class for their third year of math. However, those students and their parents must sit down with a guidance counselor to be sure they understand the ramifications: By choosing that option, the student likely won’t be in the running for most four-year colleges and universities.

“Personal finance is really a choice for kids who are pretty sure they want to go to a trade school and not a college route,” Lyons said.

State standards are constantly changing, though, Lyons said, and new opportunities seem to be opening up. Just recently, she said, it became possible for physics to count as a math credit instead of a science credit. And, she said, national standards that will likely be adopted favor probability and statistics classes, something she believes many VHS students would find beneficial.

“Kids going into technical jobs need to have probability and statistics, and the colleges as well are pushing that more,” she said.

District superintendent Michael Soltman said that math classes at the high school are indeed vigorous, but not unnecessarily so. He said he recently spoke with 15 VHS graduates who went on to college, and they consistently said that the high school prepared them well for their college-level math classes.

“It’s a rigorous program, and there are some students who struggle with it,” he said. “The challenge is coming up with support and intervention for those who need it.”

He said simply making sure parents and students know about their options for help seemed to be a step in the right direction.

“There were a lot of students who weren’t aware of the support that was available,” he said.

Vashon High School is currently looking for volunteers to tutor math. For more information or to volunteer, contact Susan Sullivan at 463-4164.