Working in the Clover Park School District is more than a job. It's a way of life.

In addition to long hours and ever-changing standards, teachers are faced with the prospect of ending the school year with an entirely different group of students than they started with.

In the face of increasing concern about students having a difficult time with transitions and not graduating in the last 15 years, CPSD created transition policies for all of its students - whether military or not.

"I think the schools are very receptive and set up for kids who move a lot," said Superintendent Debbie LeBeau. "It's kind of the norm, not the exception. The exception is kids who have been with us kindergarten through 12th grade."

LeBeau said she will go read to classes, and sometimes, only one child raises their hand when she asks how many have been there for just two years.

"We're a district organized around student mobility," she said.

With 41 percent of the district's 11,944 students military dependents, parental mobility is common, too. During the resurgence in Iraq, 90 percent of children at Hillside Elementary on Joint Base Lewis-McChord Main had at least one parent deployed.

"We tell the parents, ‘You do what you need to do to defend our country, and we'll take care of your children while you're gone'," said Ann Almlie, CPSD's director of special education.

Deployments create added challenges for the district's teachers, but they are required to meet the same standards as their peers.

"These teachers have the same accountability as every teacher in the country," said Jim Paxinos, assistant superintendent for elementary schools. "They're the same expectations for academic achievement, on top of those issues."

Military logistics aside, CPSD's mobility rate isn't unique - enrollment in schools across the country has changed constantly since the economy crashed in 2008.

"You go where the jobs are," Paxinos said. "It used to be that when you moved, it was your choice - maybe you were advancing to the next level - and now people don't have a choice. They lost their job or they need to go somewhere else."

LeBeau said she does see a core group of students who have been in CPSD for years.

"But I think society has changed," she said. "It's not unusual to see families moving around a lot more."

One demographic change is that CPSD has a large percentage of Hispanic students, many of whom come to the United States to live with family, and then return home.

Regardless, CPSD isn't losing students. In fact, enrollment is up at most schools.

Some are "schools of choice," meaning that they draw from a broader area than attendance boundaries dictate, so parents have choices about where they send their children.

"We're not losing kids in the community," LeBeau said. "They're moving around from school to school."

They're also arriving from other states - or countries - all year as families are assigned to JBLM, which makes teaching to standards a challenge.

Rather than waiting for the Measurement of Student Progress (MSP) test at the end of the year, CPSD does frequent assessments - some as often as every few weeks - to gauge not only where a student is at when they arrive, but the progress they are making.

"That's where differentiation became a big part of our district," Paxinos said. "We need to service the kids where they are at on an individual basis.

"Even if we only have a kid for three months, I can show you data on how they're doing."

LeBeau cited two elementary schools with high mobility having posted strong results in 2011-12. Beachwood is a military school on Lewis Main. Oakwood is a high-poverty school with a high number of English Language Learners (ELL) students.

"They did an incredible job," she said. "It shows the rest of the schools how teachers working together and using data can overcome some of those challenges with the curriculum and where students are."

Shaffer said CPSD's teachers deserve a lot of credit.

"Teachers who work here know the reality of our mobility," she said, "and they just go with it."