REPORTS TO THE BOARD

WHS Report

To:      Michael Green
From: John Shoup
CC:      School Board members
Date:  5/01/09
Re:      April 2009 Review

Here is an overview of the key activities we worked on in relation to teaching and learning this month.

Monday's: All of the Monday's this month were designated for department collaboration meetings.  Staff was mostly working on setting department goals, establishing power standards for their courses and developing common assessments for those standards.  It was quite beneficial to have many consecutive Monday's to work on these projects.

Other information: We finished WASL testing this month and anxiously await results. We did hear back from the state that of our 18 students who presented one or more "collections of evidence" in either math or reading, all but one met standard. The one student who did not meet standard can still meet state WASL requirements by passing their current math course. Therefore, we have every senior who is planning to graduate in June on target with WASL requirements.  This is terrific news.  Also, we had the bulk of our seniors present to high stakes panels their final culminating projects.  We had a high percentage of seniors who were successful.  The seniors that did not present or did not make standard will have another time period in early May. As you are aware, the deaths of Eddie Denson and Katie Blacklaw hit our school hard, but I am proud of how well our staff handled this tragic event. Our Opportunity Time task force met at the end of the month to discuss progress and possible changes.  We are going to make one minor "tweak" to our system this spring, and plan to revise our pyramid for the fall.  Overall, the anecdotal feedback from staff and students has been very positive.  We did look at our 3^rd quarter "F" numbers and compared them to our numbers from 2008 and were quite encouraged by the significant drop in the number of students and total "F's" this year. I have attached a copy of the data for your review as well.