Educators have their own language and during this school year I’ve been learning it as best I can.

In August I interviewed Heidi Maurer and Joe Potts for the first time as part of a story on new principals in Covington schools.

Potts I had already met in 2009 while he and Maurer were both assistant principals at Kentwood High.

Maurer, for some reason, I didn’t know. But, like Potts, I’m starting to spend more time talking with her because she’s working on a similar culture change at Cedar Heights Middle School which feeds into Kentlake High where Potts has taken over.

But, I remember Potts said this term, “vertical alignment,” that kind of made me scratch my head. And, honestly, it annoyed me a little. I don’t speak the educator language. Well, at least not fluently, so I didn’t have the slightest clue what he meant. Not at first.

As I’ve spent time on the Kentlake Site Council I’ve come to understand the importance of “vertical alignment,” in other words, collaboration from kindergarten through 12th grade among teachers and principals to speak the same language among themselves and with their students, to present a united front as well as a united curriculum.

This ensures when students transition from one place to another they are hearing the same things at Cedar Heights they heard at the elementary school, and when they arrive at Kentlake High they will be totally familiar with the expectations and goals.

“Potts keeps saying that the success of Kentlake is dependent on the success of Cedar Heights,” Maurer said. “We joke around about it, but it really is the truth.”

Both are addressing their challenges, Potts said, “by doing the same things.”

“We’re focusing on expectations and standards and collaboration,” Potts said in a phone interview Tuesday. “Those are the three main areas where you will find the most similarities. We’re raising expectations. We’re focusing on students needs to meet standard. We’re encouraging and facilitating to some degree not only collaboration not only between the teachers but between the schools.”

Maurer explained to me last week what she’s been doing at Cedar Heights to help change the culture there. Like Kentlake, a student climate survey and discipline data showed quite clearly the challenges she was facing as principal, a disconnect between staff and students as well as a need for a new approach.

“So much of what we have to do is to readjust the culture at both schools to make sure the bar is set high enough, to where it should be for both students and staff,” Maurer said. “One of the things that Julie (Lynch-Allen), the assistant principal, and I focused on was that we had to set up some specific expectations. When we talked to the staff, they said that discipline was something that we had to tighten up on around here.”

Maurer and Lynch-Allen went to each classroom and spoke with every student.

They explained to teachers and students that there is a dress code and it would be enforced. There would be no more inappropriate bracelets and there would be no more saggy pants.

Expectations for all aspects of how students would behave were clearly defined including seemingly simple things such as how kids would enter and exit the cafeteria, something Maurer said “was a huge shock for the kids.”

“That was the first step and that’s more of a reactive step, ‘Here’s what’s going to happen when you make that poor decision,’” Maurer said.

From there, the emphasis is shifts to making good decisions and helping students do that regularly.

They brought in a motivational speaker, Stu Cabe, who tailors his presentations to a school’s needs. He talked about a significant issue at Cedar Heights: bullying.

It was part of an effort to bring together a number of smaller group efforts to address the topic and launch the concept of Pack Pride — the mascot for the school is the timberwolf.

“He told some great stories,” Maurer said. “He was great, he was thoughtful, he was hilarious, he was poignant.”

Cabe told a story about elephants that were moved to a wildlife preserve. It was determined that the best thing to do would be to move young elephants to this preserve, which also happened to be the home of an endangered rhinocerous, the only natural enemy of the elephant.

Turns out the baby elephants had not been properly socialized because they were separated from the adults and as a result they would gang up on the rhinos and kill them.

So, a decision was made to bring in big elephants to teach the baby elephants how to behave.

Those big elephants immediately stepped in to stop the baby elephants from killing rhinos.

This story led to a conversation starter, Maurer said, where they would ask kids if they were baby elephants and being bullies or if they were big elephants who were responsible and making good decisions while discouraging others from making bad decisions.

Another story Cabe told was about his daughter. She wanted to go to school one day dressed as a princess but she was teased by her classmates for the choice.

“He talked about from a father’s perspective how upsetting it was,” Maurer said. “He said he wished he could send his daughter to school with a chalkboard around her neck so she could write on it things like, ‘I’m a great soccer player.’”

The idea was to encourage students to see beyond the surface, to not make snap judgments and make an effort to get to know their classmates.

That led to another conversation point phrase, “What’s on your chalkboard?”

Cabe spoke on a Monday in February to launch a week dedicated to teaching students about Pack Pride. Maurer said they told students after the presentation the staff would introduce core values to help crystalize the concept for them.

Maurer said students at Cedar Heights are expected to embody four core values: compassion, respect, integrity and responsibility.

“You’re starting to see it coming up everywhere,” Maurer said. “It’s really become a part of the conversation. The core values are on the reader board. You see it plastered around the school.”

And to keep the spotlight on the core values and Pack Pride, she noted, during fourth period students get a lesson on the core values.

“Consistency is really important,” she said. “The more kids hear the same consistent message, the more they are going to start to live it. Bringing the staff on board to be part of this process, that’s why the Caught Being Pawsitive award is important, so they can be an active part of this.”

Parent involvement is also important, also, to complete full community buy in on what is a very intentional change.

“What I’m finding is that it’s starting to take on a life of its own,” Maurer said.

And connecting Cedar Heights to Kentlake to create that “vertical alignment” so the message is also consistent as the students move from middle school to high school is crucial for both Maurer and Potts.

Having worked together for five years at Kentwood, Maurer said, they already have a common language and common expectations.

For example, Cedar Heights dress code is the same as Kentlake’s because “we’re preparing our kids to be successful at Kentlake.”

Kids get it when presented to them in that way, Maurer said, so they take off their hats and put away their cell phones in class. By the time they get to Kentlake it will just be habit.

But, there’s another important piece to creating a stronger connection between the two schools.

“The other way we’re working to change the student culture piece is through the teachers as well because our teachers have to model that constantly,” Maurer said. “We’ve been doing learning walks… to see best practices.”

Kentlake teachers have visited Cedar Heights and vice versa. They’ve sat in each other’s classrooms and observed.

“What it brought to light is that we have to have this common vocabulary so that when they transition from here to Kentlake (they understand),” Maurer said. “More importantly, it’s helped open communication between the two schools and the staffs.”

Potts said those have been positive experiences and helped build the vertical alignment both he and Maurer are working toward.

“The ability for kids to meet standard depends on everybody working together to help kids meet their full potential,” Potts said. “We’re encouraging people to spend time talking to each other and learning from each other.”

Like Kentlake, Cedar Heights is in stage five of AYP.

“We didn’t get to year six, stage five of school improvement overnight, so it’s going to take some time to get out,” Maurer said.

Potts told me in the fall he thinks it will take three to five years to transform Kentlake into the school it should be and Maurer feels the same way about Cedar Heights.

In fact, there were moments where the commonality between the two principals was striking, times where Maurer echoed something Potts had said at a site council meeting or an individual interview with me almost word for word.

Like Maurer’s belief that failure is not an option. She has a sign over her office door which says that and she had blue motivational bracelets made, much like the popular yellow Live Strong foundation bracelets, with the message “Cedar Heights, Failure is NOT and option” stamped into it. She wears one.

“It’s about not quitting on kids,” she said. “I can’t tell you how important that it.”

Hmm. Potts said basically the same thing at the last Kentlake Site Council meeting.

So, from where I sit, these two don’t just talk the talk. They walk the walk.

Now that I’m getting to know Maurer I plan to spend some time at Cedar Heights like I did at Kentlake in the fall.

I think I need to see this “vertical alignment” stuff in action while I continue to learn the language of education.