ELIZABETHTOWN — The Bladen County School Board met for their monthly meeting this Monday for a work session with their 13 school principals county-wide to speak on their schools’ goals, progress, accomplishments, and needs. The board members listened intently to concerns of their schools’ principles in order to pinpoint the areas that need improvement. A hot topic or concern with most of the principals throughout the presentation was the guidelines for the state performance scale.
Some principals feel the state performance scale doesn’t accurately tell the whole story and isn’t a fair depiction of their teachers’ or students’ hard work. The 2020 school year has had a lingering effect on students but the schools marked as low-performing have been working closely with their District Improvement team to get their kids back to where they need to be.
The County Schools finance team also got a chance to highlight their goals and share three main focus-points for the year during the work session. One of the three areas the finance team would like to focus on is blending curriculum and instructional support to help student achievement. While the second of the three areas is adopting a high curriculum that is aligned with rigorous state standards and planning collaborative professional learning to support the curriculum. The third focus area is to support multiple and grant-related programs, initiatives, and reporting requirements.
This is an effort to measure every student with the same “yardstick” through standardized testing. Getting results back in a timely manner will be important in order to get the necessary adjustments in place to start improvement. Migrant education, multilingual education, and the McKinney-Vento department shared an overlay of their goals during the work session. All three departments are in place to identify and help migrant students settle into schools, as well as guide them through their education.
The main goal for the migrant education department is to help students graduate and the multilingual education department is to help students become more proficient through different means of communication such as reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The McKinney-Vento department’s main focus is to ensure migrant scholars are enrolled in school as quickly as possible and get the necessary resources to succeed.
The Social Work department highlighted its desire to help students by focusing on the behavioral, emotional, health, and safety needs of all students. They plan to initiate programs that will provide alternative learning for students that may have been suspended or expelled, and also explain the commitment to limiting the dropout rate and getting students to graduate in a timely manner. The social work department’s three main focus areas were safety, preparedness, and student discipline.
The Communications and Family Engagements department got a chance to set their focus areas out to the board. The three focus areas are the following student meal preparation, expenses(labor, food cost, supplies & equipment purchases, and maintenance), and expanding the summer feeding program to reach more families in need. The maintenance department gave its focus areas which included providing a safe, clean, and healthy learning environment for students. While their second area of focus is ensuring regulatory compliance and their last focus area is maintaining valid data on maintenance costs.
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