Week 11: The Stories Behind the Numbers

Happy Friday!

Thank you for your efforts this week! It was a good week - a short week - and although not quite as eventful as last week we still have much to reflect on. It began with our Ladycat Volleyball team in the state tournament, a very successful Louise Durham Fall Carvinval, Red Ribbon Week activities, and the Middle School Fall Dance, and ended with day number 50 of the school year. A big thanks go out to all of you who made these things happen for our students!

Our performance targets for Attendance and Discipline have been updated. We continue to stay ahead of our attendance target but for the third week in a row, our discipline numbers are higher compared to last year and the year before.

Current Attendance & Discipline

The image below is from the SmartData Dashboard which tracks our discipline numbers, types, locations, and student data. The District PLC Team met Wednesday to look into this data for insights into the surge in behaviors. We did conclude that a portion of this can be attributed to the additional activities and events we have had going on in the district, but there have also been some behavior issues involving groups of students as opposed to isolated incidents.

Still, the image shows that the vast majority of our students are responding to our behavior plans and as we settle back into routine school weeks we hope to see the trend heading back in a favorable direction.

Our Attendance for the district continues to be just above our target of 93.5 percent coming in this week at 93.8 percent. We have had our first series of attendance incentives and learned a lot from those activities about motivation to attend school. We want to continue these incentives but modify them somewhat to involve parents more for our younger students.

Instructional Data

We will be updating our academic targets again soon and as we prepare to look at how our district is doing we will compare that to the instructional practices being used. I have updated the walkthrough data that the principals have been gathering. You can view it here.

One of the things we are noticing is that the vast majority of observations indicate that we stay on the lower level of Bloom’s Taxonomy and our Depth of Knowledge for questions and assignments is mostly on the basic level of 1 and 2 with some level 3 and no level 4. That does not mean that this is not happening but it indicates that it is not frequent enough to be observed.

I have started a file with Depth of Knowledge resources for teachers linked here. There is not a lot here yet except for sentence stems to help with the development of questions. This will also help reach higher Bloom’s levels. If you have resources you use yourself, please add them to this folder.

Future Breaks

I mentioned in the opening that this was a short week and I wanted to remind everyone about this year’s calendar because we will have more, one per month, Mondays with school closed. This was done primarily to build in weather make-up days in the spring so they do not have to be tacked on at the end of the year when serious learning tends to taper off. These days also break the monotony of long weeks with only weekend breaks. It also provides a day for doctor, dentist, or other visits without having to miss school or work.

Closing

Congratulations to our Ladycat Volleyball team for another great season! Our Ladycats’ season ended on Wednesday in the state tournament after an inspiring comeback to defeat Southside Batesville in the first round Tuesday.

Our Junior Bearcats ended their season well with an overtime defeat of Ashdown here at home last night! Congratulations to those players and coaches.

Bearcat Football will be traveling to Ashdown tonight to take on the Panthers. Good luck to Coach Bentley and the Bearcats!

At Mena Public Schools our students are prepared, our staff is supported, and our community is confident.

Have a nice weekend!!