Jacob Dimond / jake@yelmonline.com
During a Yelm Community Schools (YCS) Board of Directors meeting on Thursday, March 24, several district office employees provided an update on the work being done by the strategic planning committee.
In this update, Chris Woods, superintendent, Dr. Lisa Cadero-Smith, assistant superintendent, and Kurt Fourre, director of assessments, grants and student data management, each spoke to attendees of the meeting on the work being done by the committee.
“We told you that we’d be giving you updates throughout the year as we continue to meet to review not only the data that will point to how we’re doing in our strategic plan, but also creating the foundation for us to make the necessary changes in our district,” Woods said.
According to Cadero-Smith, the most recent strategic planning committee meeting occurred on Thursday, March 5.
“As Chris was saying, we’re starting with the foundation of data,” Cadero-Smith said. “We determined what our goals would be in the district, and then we built metrics to measure them. This year has been all about putting those metrics in place and putting the infrastructure and the foundation of a plan in place that we’ll then follow over a five year period.”
Fourre added that as the committee has begun looking at mid-year data, the group’s goal was to be able to tell a balanced, honest story about the district hurdles while also celebrating clear wins in YCS.
“We’ve identified three major bright spots that serve as the foundation for everything else. Improved behavior, we’ve targeted academic gains and higher secondary core success rates,” Fourre said. “Our major data supports a vital correlation, a stable school culture that drives academic performance. This is most evident in our improving ninth grade on-track rates, which is the number of kids that are not failing courses — which also remains our most reliable forecaster for graduation.”
He added that targeted growth in elementary-level early math and fourth grade literacy validates that current instructional interventions have served as effective and scalable. According to Fourre, the data received by the committee is “looking pretty good.”
According to Cadero-Smith, the very first goal of the YCS strategic plan is focused on improvements to attendance. She, along with the committee, believes that was the right goal to begin with.
She stated that there must be students at school, first, in order to teach them.
“We have taken on attendance as a district,” Cadero-Smith said. “We joined the statewide attendance challenge. We’ve become a community of practice. What that has made available to us are a set of best practices around good student attendance, so that when we are implementing a plan in our district we are doing it based on strategies that are known to work.”
She added that there’s a framework of concepts within an OSPI model, including: having a district-wide focus; implementing the first-faces concept; having an updated district roster and personal communication.
“We have a district-wide attendance committee that held their first meeting prior to our strategic planning committee meeting,” Cadero-Smith said. “We reported on the work of that committee. That will continue. They provided some very strong recommendations to get us started. One of them was to review our board policy around attendance.”
Additionally, Cadero-Smith says the committee has spoken with other officials throughout the region. She said they’ve given perspective of how board policy around attendance fares to other districts, and how YCS could “shore up” some of its language in policy. The committee will bring forward a new and updated attendance policy that’s “more supportive” of what the district is going to do, moving forward.
“We’re trying to hit this on all fronts, best practices, be welcoming, but also have strong policies and expectations and procedures in place so that we can increase attendance, get them here and then teach them,” Cadero-Smith said.
Woods believes that improvements to attendance district-wide cannot be attained by YCS alone. He turned to parents in the district to assist in this goal, stating it can’t just be the committee or district staff that’s committed to improvements.
“Otherwise, we can only make so much of an impact. Part of it is messaging can’t just come from the schools,” Woods said. “I don’t think we can stress enough the importance of our parents and our community members being partners in this work. It doesn’t do us any good for people to stand back and point out what’s wrong if they’re not willing to partner with us. We’re only going to be as successful as the people willing to partner with us.
“We’ve made it too easy for students to miss school. We’ve made it too easy for families to excuse the absences,” Woods added. “As Lisa said, next month, we’re going to be bringing you some more information about attendance.”
The next strategic planning committee meeting will take place on Thursday, June 11.
“I think we’re doing some really good work and really strengthening the foundation to then get the results that we’re after as we move forward,” Woods said. “I want to say thanks to Lisa, Kurt and Kendall, and their team. They’re doing a lot of the internal lifting, taking the information from our committee meetings, synthesizing it and then we meet and talk about next steps. The three of them are the ones that are doing the heavy lifting as it relates to the next steps. A big thank you to them. I’m looking forward to the work that we’re going to be doing.”
