The principals of Mount Vernon’s schools gave an update on how they are obtaining academic, behavioral and cultural goals set for the school. A full presentation will also be made at the May school board meeting for how the schools have done.
High School
High school principal Steven Brand said that in cultural goals, the school was working to improve their performance on the Every Student Succeeds Act’s report card. Last year, the building had been noted as a targeted school for special education results lagging.
“We have been much more intentional in our professional development groups to have a Professional Learning Communities have structured time to meet and talk about their development in classes, what has worked for them,” Brand said.
Teachers also have worked at implementing more of their What I Need Now times to be accessible to students during their class or in other portions of the school day to help students who are not getting a certain concept getting the individualized instruction they need.
When it came to behavioral goal, the goal for the school was addressing chronic absenteeism in the school.
Activities director Matt Thede said that a committee meets weekly to review the attendance rosters and identify students who have been missing multiple days of school to see if there are solutions.
“What we found in this second semester is when influenza hit, there isn’t much we can do to change that bug going through the schools and impacting our attendance,” Thede said. “If kids are sick, you want them to take the time away from the building not to let that spread.”
With the strep, influenza and other bugs in the winter, average attendance dipped to 71 percent of students in building, 29 percent who were not.
The target for the building over the school year is 90 percent of students being at the school 90 percent of the time.
Thede said that the junior class is the one having the most absenteeism, and direct communication with students and their parents usually helps curb that problem.
Linn County school districts and Grant Wood AEA districts reflect an average of 83 percent attendance.
They are looking to tackle the metric as Iowa School Performance Act has chronic absenteeism as one of the criteria schools are measured on.
Thede said that the district does get some hits for their online learners who power through their learning in one day, and are counted absent on other days.
Superintendent Greg Batenhorst said chronic absenteeism is an issue all districts face, and has only gotten worse since COVID-19.
Academic goal was tied to Iowa Statewide Assessment of Student Progress, which will be completed yet this spring so it’s unknown what improvement on scores have been made.
Middle school
At the middle school, principal Bob Haugse said they were focused on chronic absenteeism as well.
Haugse said a lot of letters and communication go out to parents about the matter, and the biggest impact is usually a call to students and parents at home.
“What we are noting is that chronic tardies are counting for our absenteeism rates, and that can be someone who is running anywhere from five minutes to an hour late each day,” Haugse said. “They’re all counted equally.”
Haugse said he has personally went to homes to pick students up if it gets them to school on time.
The buildings academic goal was focused on better implementation of PLC teams.
“Basically, we’re empowering our teachers to know as much as they can about what students are learning in the grades below them, what they’re teaching and what the grades above them are teaching,” Haugse said. “It’s helping our teachers know where students are meeting he standards we expect students to know.”
The cultural goal for the building tied to the Leader in Me program the district has been rolling out. This year was the first year implementing the program. The sessions are supposed to be 5 to 10 minutes lessons every day. Some teachers have worked on fitting those lessons into sessions every other day to allow to fit in their schedules.
Washington Elementary
Elementary principal Kate Stanton said the academic goal was to have students meeting 85 percent of the standards for math and 80 percent of standards for reading by the end of the year.
At the third quarter, students are reflecting at meeting 71 percent of the standards for math and 73 percent of the standards for reading.
“Last year as a building, we had students meeting 80 percent of the proficiency in math and 75 percent in English and Language Arts,” Stanton said. “We’re on track to meeting our goals this year, with some of the standards for math and reading still coming up at the end of the year.”
Behavioral goal was making sure that all individualized education plans are documented for all students in the district.
That also worked alongside the cultural goal of implementing positive behavior and intervention supports in the building.
Stanton said the goal was to increase excitement for PBIS, which was shown recently in their Leap Day activities.
She noted that having a staff person who is keeping track of certain supports that are in place and what has worked for other students has helped the district be successful as well.
“That consistency and insight that Jessica Fitzpatrick provides to some of our students helps that intentionality of these supports,” Stanton said.
Curriculum updates
Michelle Boyden, district teacher leadership instructional specialist, gave an update on the efforts to update curriculum and better meet standards. The district started the English and Language Arts curriculum review last year, and will begin a curriculum review with physical education and world languages this year.
Implementations also happened in science and math instruction last year, with teachers looking at ways they can better collaborate and teach the materials to students at all levels to better focus on hitting the standards moving forward.
Boyden said in mathematics, there are ways to reiterate the concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and continue building math learning as students continue in math. For science, it’s harder. Physical science education doesn’t have similar building blocks and reviews.
The district was reviewing a new text for English and Language Arts and had narrowed down the curriculum they were looking to use that was more intentional in how it addressed concepts related to the science of reading.
“We found we needed to slow down on purchasing those texts and extend that timeline a little more,” Boyden said.
Part of that is the Iowa Department of Education is implementing new literacy standards and will have their own resources identified for those standards that the district may want to look at.
“We need more time to look at those new learning guidelines and see if the texts we’re exploring will still work, or if there are others to look at,” Boyden said.
The goal is now to implement that new curriculum purchase next fall for the district.
MV School Improvement Advisory Committee discusses MV schools goals
Nathan Countryman, Editor
March 28, 2024
About the Contributor
Nathan Countryman, Editor
Nathan Countryman is the Editor of the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun.