Principals discuss plans for upcoming school year

CHIPLEY – Principals from Chipley High School, Roulhac Middle School, Kate Smith Elementary School, Vernon Middle School and Vernon Elementary School gave presentations of perspective plans for the upcoming school year to the Washington County School Board during the regularly scheduled meeting on August 10.

“We want to put an emphasis on those areas we’re doing poorly in when it comes to test scores,” said Principal of CHS, Steve Griffin. “Which is in the area of science and writing.”

He said that they have added “learning strategies for ESE students to facilitate success across the curriculum,” and “reading remediation for all Level 1 and Level 2 students in grades 9 -12.”

“We have a mentor program designed to target black and the economically disadvantaged population and math remediation for 11th and 12th grade students that did not pass FCAT math,” he said. “Our percentage of students making learning gains in science and writing has declined.”

NOTE: Superintendent Dr. Sandra Cook noted that Griffin was describing a category as defined by the state Department of Education when he used the term black.

Principal of RMS, Mike Park presented the results of their action plan for improving student achievement for the school year ’08-’09.

“The school grade improved from a ‘C’ to an ‘A’ and scored the most points in school history, which was a 541,” he said. “We improved in five of the eight measured areas and met the criteria for the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) at 92 percent.”

He said the main ideas for the ’09-’10 school year for improving student achievement was “a new teacher assignment for sixth grade math, a teacher with experience and proven results; build into our master schedule and advanced Language Arts Class to better meet the needs of our higher achieving students; meet with the staff during pre-planning and continue to make the Action Plan a collaboration of their ideas and strategies.”

“We’re going to improve the strategies that worked and remove the strategies that did not work,” he said. “What makes this so important is that this isn’t a plan I’m handing to them; this is a plan we’re working on together.”

KMS Principal Jerry Register said that one of the reasons KMS did so well is because they have a regular staff that works well with one another.

“Kate M. Smith is an excellent elementary school, receiving an ‘A’ on the Florida School Grading program and has constantly increased the percentage of students meeting high standards in reading and math for the past eight years,” he said.

“We have identified areas in need of improvement through AYP and have addressed them by selecting and retaining high performing ESE instructors, retaining or removing non-high performing ESE teachers from the KMS staff and retaining or removing teachers where the students in their class show little or no learning gains as measured by standardized testing.”

He said he is looking forward to the upcoming school year.

Chris Beard, principal at VMS, said he was very proud of his staff and students.

“The mentor program seems to be a success; the students were more involved in school activities and the numbers of discipline referrals decreased drastically over the last few years,” he said. “These changes reflect how student’s behavior is positively impacted when they feel important.”

He said an example was that Out of School Suspension (OSS) had decreased by 48 over the last two years.

“Data shows the addition of the fifth grade math block positively affected the percentage of fifth graders meeting high standards but the percentage making learning gains dropped roughly twelve percent,” he said. “Therefore, it appears we are definitely creating a stronger learning environment for the average student, but our efforts on the lowest 25 percent need to focus more on individualized instruction to meet the specific needs of the students.”

He said that their plans are on the right course. “I like where our schools heading and I hope we keep it going,” he said.

Principal of VES, Peggy Adams, said that she is looking forward to starting the school year as VES’s new principal and that she’s ready to “get to work.”

“The specific deficient area negatively affecting our school grade is FCAT percentage of lowest quartile making learning gains,” she said. “Specific strategies targeting subgroups is the creation of the Mentor Program, in which teaching staff members either select or are assigned two to four students from the lowest quartile list representing all subgroups to build a proactive mentoring relationship supporting the academic and social needs of students.”

She said that she looks forward to getting started, but warned of changes coming.

“I’m going to heavily emphasize not wasting class time,” she said. “That means there will be no early preparations to leave class, like closing and putting away books 15 minutes before class is over.”