When looking at public education, lawmakers, researchers and news media tend to focus on large school districts and what they’re doing wrong. But a handful of smaller districts — many of them with high-needs students — are demonstrating the kind of nimbleness and creativity that could be a model for all.
Take, for instance, the Elma School District, southwest of Olympia, which educates about 1,700 students, more than half of them low-income. Soon after Superintendent Chris Nesmith started the job, he dove into census and income data provided by The Opportunity Atlas to get a clearer sense of the realities for Elma graduates. He discovered that by age 35, low-income students were on track to earn a paltry $34,000 a year.
“I think we can do better,” Nesmith told his staff.
The route they took is one allowed by Washington state since 2021, but used by only a handful of districts outside of career-and-technical-education classes: Students may demonstrate their mastery of academic skills and concepts in nontraditional ways — like using calculations done in a mechanical engineering class to cover algebra credits, or technical writing to satisfy English — rather than hewing to a set amount of time spent in a specific classroom to earn a passing grade.
That flexibility doesn’t come easily. In Elma, it meant overhauling the way teachers assess their students, and some have embraced this more enthusiastically than others, Nesmith says.
Yet, while test scores have shown only modest gains, college enrollment among Elma High School graduates jumped by eight percentage points in just two years, to the highest rate ever recorded. And in 2024, tiny Elma — along with the Miami-Dade County schools in Florida and Compton in California — was named a national District of Distinction in preparing students for “future-focused career pathways.”
Nesmith described this work as part of a panel of superintendents convened by the League of Education Voters last week. Besides Elma, it included school leaders from Tukwila, Highline, Shoreline and Quincy, each describing innovations they’d made in tackling education challenges.
Rejiggering the metrics by which kids are assessed is no small thing, and Nesmith believes his community bought in primarily because it recognized a crisis: With scant local industry or options for living-wage employment, parents realized their children needed to be prepared in new ways for life after graduation.
But districts of any size could, and should, take Elma’s example as a lesson for maintaining relevance in a changing world.
