Wilmette Public Schools District 39 administrators now have an updated strategic plan with four new goals: improving student attendance levels, restructuring the school day, encouraging student growth at all performance levels and improving school social climates – in part by educating students, parents and educators about the difference between healthy social conflict and bullying.
Board members approved the plan, which sets goals that will stretch into 2018. Administrators will report back in October about how they plan to reach those goals. Staff will continue updating board members in January and February of next year and beyond, Katie Lee, the district’s interim curriculum and instruction administrator, said Tuesday.
During her Sept. 26 presentation, Lee said, “We must develop a common understanding” of what constitutes bullying.
To do that, and to reach a goal of improving empathy and equity in district school life, everyone involved in that life – teachers, students, parents – needs to be able to use the same definitions of what bullying is, and what normal “age appropriate” school social conflict is, Lee said. That will help create a district-wide culture of empathy, according to the report she presented.
School board member John Flanagin asked if administrators know how many reported incidents of conflict stem from racial or religious tensions. Denise Thrasher, the district’s assistant superintendent for student and special services, said there were probably fewer than five such incidents in the last year, “but even one is too many.”
She also told board member Tracy Kearney that she believed more parents were willing to talk to school officials about conflict-related incidents or perceived bullying in general: “We don’t have an exact number, but it seems more and more parents are talking to us about things that happen outside the school day.”
When she discussed school attendance goals, Lee said staff want to hike the number of students who have positive attendance records – being absent fewer than nine times a year – from the current level of 71 percent, to 80 percent by June 2018.
School board member Cindy Levine, noting that attendance levels have hovered near the 71 percent level for about five years, said the goal posited a very dramatic increase. The district might be better off focusing solely on the most chronically absent students, those who miss more than 18 days a year, she said.
About 6 percent of the remaining students fall into that category, Lee said in her report.
She said Tuesday that district administrators know they have set a high, and broad, attendance goal, “but from our perspective, we feel that we want to try because it’s important.”
The district will definitely work with students to who Levine referred, Lee said, but looking at the attendance patterns for all students is important “because we want to focus on all our kids.”
Thrasher said at the meeting that by focusing on all student attendance rates, the district can help prevent what she called the slippery slope that can tumble students into the chronic absentee category.
Part of preventing the slide is preventing the growth of bad attendance habits in students as young as kindergarten or first grade, Harper Elementary School Principal Sue Kick said.
“One of the other factors we talked about was school avoidance and school anxiety” that prompts absenteeism, Lee said Sept. 27, a concept that can also be explored via the social climate goal.
Lee said district staff also plan to bring school day scheduling recommendations back to the board next spring. The hope is to provide more time for teachers to collaborate with each other, and more time to teach students, she said.
The final goal, of measuring and analyzing the amount of growth students exhibit in the school year, then setting goals for that growth, differs from more traditional student achievement goals and strategies, Lee said Tuesday. For instance, she said, a student who consistently meets academic and other goals by staying within the 90th percentile of their classmates may still not be performing to his or her optimum: “They’re maintaining, but haven’t gained.”
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy
