Officials from three schools in the Petal School District outlined their annual School Improvement Plans during the district’s Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday night. The plans are designed to outline grade-level and academic goals for the school year.
“What I like about it is that it’s teacher-initiated,” Superintendent Matt Dillon said. “It’s that shared and collaborative leadership between the teachers and the administration to build the best plans for the students for this current year.”
Petal Primary School
Principal Tessa Trimm was accompanied at the meeting by six members of the Petal Primary School Data Team: Amanda Goff, Monica Allgood, Kim Hopkins, Sarah McClure, Kelli Hill and Melanie Friend.
Goff, a kindergarten teacher and ELA representative for the school, said officials are aiming to have 75 percent of kindergarten students be “transitional” or probable” readers on the MKAS assessment by Spring 2019. Transitional readers are those that are considered to be learning and ready to take the next step in reading, while probable readers are children who are already reading.
“Our focus is to develop a strong phonics foundation by implementing research-based strategies and best teaching practices,” Goff said. “We plan to do that by using our Integrity Unit Awareness book, which helps us with rhyming and sounding out words – just basic foundational skills for kindergarten students.
“We’re going to study these Star Early (Literacy) test documents that we have; they further explain the skills that our students are being tested on.”
Petal Elementary School
Based on math scores from last year’s state assessment tests, elementary school officials are focusing on third- and fourth-grade math operations, algebraic thinking and fractions.
“So both of the operations and algebraic thinking had to do with word problems – that multi-step,” Principal Wyn Mims said. “And so we’ve had lots of conversations about what some of our bigger pushes can be as a whole school.
“One of our big pushes is collaborative learning, where we’re giving our students problems – not just a numeric problem, but a real-life problem and how to solve it. We’ve found that they’re taking the foundation of that number sense that they had, and they’re actually able to put it to use in real-life situations. And we’re doing that through our science lab and through our STEM Lab, as well as teachers incorporating STEM activities in the classroom.”
Officials will also begin to utilize speaking and listening standards in math classes.
“So a student sees a problem, and rather than just getting a pencil to start working on it, they’re going to immediately think about what they’re going to do,” Mims said. “Then they’re going to discuss it with a friend.
“So we teach them that as adults, that’s how we solve our problems – we think about it, and then we’re going to go talk to a friend or whoever we’re working with to come up with a solution to it.”
Petal Upper Elementary School
Principal Emily Branch presented the upper elementary’s plan along with teachers Lori Johnson, Merideth Myers, Tyler Shows and Katie Windham.
Elementary school officials are hoping to see about 5 percent more growth in terms of proficiency levels throughout the school. Johnson said the first step to that is to increase the amount of student reading, as well as widening the variety of reading materials available to students.
To that end, the school has initiated the 40 Book Challenge – in which students are encouraged to read 40 books across different genres during the school year – and the English Language Arts Boost Club, a voluntary after-school learning program.
In the fifth-grade math groups, officials have set a goal of 82 percent proficiency.
“This would be meeting their current proficiency,” Shows said. “We always want to raise their proficiency, but what we’re looking at right now is a group of kids where only 18 percent of our fifth-graders are not proficient in math.
“So we’re really hoping to meet that goal of 82 percent proficiency. We’ve also set a goal of increasing the percentage of students that we have scoring in the advanced categories.”
