Week 1: A Good Start

Happy Friday!

Thank you for all of the hard work and effort in the days leading up to last Wednesday and our students’ first day of school for the 23-24 school year! These first three days have been rather smooth with only minor issues that were easily resolved or are being resolved. This speaks to the foresight each of you used to prepare to begin school with our students as your focus.

This Wrap-up will be short as I only have a few things to update you on.

Our Academic Goals

The building principals met with Mrs. Buckley and me this morning to review how the first days have been and to set some deadlines for creating our goal-monitoring dashboard. We will start to screen and pre-test students next week to develop baseline data to build from as we are not going to use the ACT Aspire data as our starting point this year.

It is our goal to have all of our baseline data, building goals, and Professional Growth Plans (PGPs) completed by Friday, September 15th. Our interventionists have developed plans for the early assessments to be given to our students in multiple academic areas. This will give each PLC team in every building the data they need to start driving instruction.

Last year, reading was our only academic goal but this year we will add math, science, social studies, and writing, to the list of academic goals with ‘on grade level’ being the threshold of concern. The buildings will establish their SMART goals and the district will use them to base our overall goals. We will continue monitoring behavior and attendance, as well.

Speaking of attendance, Mrs. Buckley was informed by one of our DESE officials that attendance will likely no longer be included in the formula for the school report cards. We will know this for certain in the weeks to come. Also, DESE will be creating the definition of ‘on grade level’ for Arkansas this year, which means that our threshold could be too low or high depending on what those definitions are.

Details of our academic goals will become clearer for everyone as we work through this beginning process.

Attendance Goals

We will continue to shoot for a 96% attendance rate for our students and focus on overcoming chronic absenteeism. Besides that, we will also create targets for employee attendance. Each building and department principal/supervisor has last year’s attendance and will be making plans for improvement. We each need to be doing at least as well as the students where attendance is concerned but we are also sensitive to the reasons employees miss work and will take that into consideration.

Closing

Thank you again for making the start of school a success! Come back Monday prepared to go full throttle at our mission and vision. At Mena Public Schools our students are prepared, our staff is supported, and our community is confident.

Have a nice, restful weekend!