To: Michael GreenFrom: John ShoupCC: School Board membersDate: 10/5/2011Re: September Review
Here is an overview of the key activities we worked on in relation to teaching and learning this month.School Improvement Planning: Our staff worked together 1 day before school started and will again on Monday, October 10th to review school goals and our school improvement plan. We had excellent scores on our HSPE writing, reading, science and End of course exams in math which helped us to meet our goals from our previous School Improvement plan. Our new plan has three new goal areas (math, 9th grade credits and climate). Our new class, which has at risk freshmen paired up with seniors is going really well and Mr. Blackwelder is very encouraged by the early results. The students meet every day during 6th period for 1st semester. Our plan is to ensure all of these students progress to sophomore status at the end of this year. In addition, our math teachers have been working with a new "model" for some of our low performing math students and again, the early anecdotal reports are positive.
Monday's: We used the three Monday's in September for staff to refocus their energies in group norms and power standards and to meet with the rest of the district staff for a presentation by Michael. The focus of our collaboration time is to make sure we can clearly identify and properly assess the key learning standards in everyone of our classes and this was all developed in collaboration with teachers who are teaching similar classes.
Other information: We believe we had an excellent start to the school year and the climate of the school "feels" right according to numerous students. Our new Advisory plan appears to be working well. We will have our first look at grades and attendance data during the week of October 10th, so that will be interesting and beneficial to see. Our new staff members, Mr. Joel Hingston and Mrs. Devon Hillman have been great additions to our staff and have acclimated rather quickly to our school.