To my fellow citizen of the STC School District

This is my sixth and final week for talking about our school system and what I’ve learned as a board member. This week is about our academics. This is the main reason I ran for this position of school board in the first place. For many years I have asked a lot of people in our school system why we tested so poorly. I have heard a lot of reasons, so let’s talk about them.

#1 – It’s because of our diversity. I think our student body’s diversity is a huge plus and should be celebrated. I don’t believe this is why we score so poorly on our testing. Every parent, no matter their ethnicity, wants the same thing I did for my children and that is a great education.

#2 – Another comment I heard was because of our free and reduced lunches. This is another point I disagree with. Our school is 61% free and reduced lunch, the state average Is 42%. Some correlate this to being poor. Again, this is a very general statement that I disagree with. I wonder if students in this category are scrutinized and given up on sooner. I don’t know that answer.

#3 – The next reason I have heard is because our high IEP (individual education plans). STC has 15.9% of the student body with an IEP. The state average is 13.4%. So we are slightly over the state average in this category. Students can have an IEP for many reasons and can overcome some challenges such as reading, spelling, and speech etc. I think with parental involvement and working with the teaching staff, students can overcome some of these challenges and be taken off of an IEP.

#4 – English Language Learners. South Tama student body is 14.4% ELL. To me, this category is the hardest to teach. If I put myself in the student’s shoes, it would be really frustrating and difficult to be learning English and subjects like math or science at the same time. From what I can tell, our schools do a great job of accommodating students throughout our district, regardless of the grade level. Over 53% of our ELL students are at the elementary.

Today I want to compare our high school with others in our area or of similar size. As you can see by the graph, South Tama has some work to do if we want to truly get better. So how do we change for the better? I know everybody has ideas and so my purpose is to start a conversation that can be bought into by everyone involved. The board sets policies, the school administrators job is to enforce these policies and the teaching staff’s job is to implement these policies. The students may not care either way. So, if everyone, including our community, engages to become better than we currently are, I know we could all be successful on one simple goal. I believe we could be in the top 25% of all school districts in the state of Iowa.

According to www.schooldigger.com, the STC high school is currently ranked 307th out of 331 high schools in the state of Iowa. Okay, enough of the doom and gloom. How do we change the direction of our district? The good news is we’ve already started in the last several years. Our teaching staff have started several initiatives to learn how to become more effective instructors. South Tama started the LETRS instruction as an investment Into our teaching staff and it is paying off. Just recently, we hired a new curriculum director, Janelle Pirkl, to our district. Janelle, with Sam Peska’s help, is off and running since July 1st to identify and repair gaps in our education plan from kindergarten to graduation level. Janelle is also helping to bring cohesiveness to the 8 or 9 different committees. She brings experience as a teacher, a middle school principal and recently an AEA educator that brings a lot of professional development skills with her.

Now, other ideas that have been talked about lately include the removal of cell phones during class time. To me this is an easy one to fix. The students can do several things with their phones: # 1- leave them in their locker or # 2- place it in a caddy at the classroom door and get it back on the way out after class. This will help keep the student’s attention in class and have less distractions to others during class. I look at it this way, it’s no different than working at your job and working for someone else that pays you for your attention and work. Only the student’s pay is an education! We pay our teaching staff to do their job with proficiency, so it would be a win-win.

Another thing we can improve on is rigor. Increased rigor can influence your depth of knowledge. It is measured on a scale of 1 to 4. We just recently reached level two up from level one this last winter in some areas. The rigor level goes up the more in depth you teach any given subject. This is one area we have been working on. How do we accomplish this in the classroom? I say homework(practice) !! Most generally our students don’t do homework. I bet the top 25% of schools in Iowa do. I’ve always heard “practice makes perfect”. So what’s wrong with students practicing outside of the classroom setting? Most students do NOT have study hall time scheduled in during the day, so it needs to be done at home. Practice makes perfect!

My next point is on discipline. Discipline is a hard one to deal with, it has to start at home or it is an uphill battle. Whether students are riding the bus routes or attending extracurricular activities, they should not be hitting, swearing, bullying, or creating havoc. Some people think their child or grandchild never does wrong. It should not be the responsibility of the school administrators or teaching staff but it is. This is another huge waste of their time and our money.

We’ve also had recent conversations about our drug policy and having the local drug dog and sheriff department make random visits and arrest any violator caught. Every child in school deserves to have a drug free environment! I would bet 75% of all drug related problems in society start at the high school level.

And finally, I believe we should keep personal opinions about today’s politics out of the classroom. Let’s stay with the curriculum provided in class and raise our proficiency scores.

If our district engaged in a common goal to be in the top 25% of schools in Iowa, what would it look like…. I would bet everyone in our district would have a renewed sense of pride. Maybe, just maybe, we could lure more businesses and families to our community. Maybe some of the 35 students that go to school out of our district would come back. At $7,865 per student, it could make a real difference. Maybe it would be easier to attract and retain teachers to our school system. There are a lot of real reasons to be the best we can be. And lastly, as adults, it’s up to us to make the difference for the students and their future.

And to wrap it all up, my goal for writing about our district the last 6 weeks was to be transparent and open. Again, I ran for the board with the purpose of improving the learning in our schools. I hope you’ve learned a few things about our district, I know I have and will continue. We have so many positive things happening in our school system, I hated to overshadow them with negative news about our district. But, I’ve had a lot of conversations about these very topics. So now a few things are out in the open, let’s talk about them. Talk to the school board members, administrators, teaching staff and other community members. Ask questions about our goals for the future. Talk about your expectations of having a better education for your kids. Let’s keep our eye on the target and maybe, just maybe, we’ll get there.

As of now, that’s how I see it.