Written by Andrew Melin, Superintendent
Recently the Valparaiso City Council asked our school system to make a "State of the Schools" presentation as part of the council's annual school board member appointment process. As difficult and challenging as our financial situation has been over the past four months, the presentation gave us an opportunity to show how well our school system continues to perform.
The presentation highlighted the fact that our district's direction and purpose is derived from our strategic plan, which places a focus on three key areas of our school system: student achievement and instruction, finance and operations, and community relations.
From a student achievement perspective, we are very excited about the impact of full-day kindergarten this year. We are also looking forward to placing a greater future focus on individualizing instruction through a Response to Instruction (RtI) concept and through an enhancement of our special education services.
A district advisory group has been working on developing a K-12 RtI system and will be making a presentation at our April 17 board meeting to share its recommendation. In its simplest form, the RtI process identifies areas in which students can improve their skills and an intervention plan is created and monitored to assure students make satisfactory progress.
From a finance and operations perspective, ongoing budget accountability and reaching a balanced budget by the end of 2013 are primary goals. In addition, there continues to be a need to address future facility needs and it is hoped a process for how to move forward in this area can be determined within the next couple of months.
In terms of community relations, although we have made in-roads in improving community engagement and dissemination of information, we can and will continue to work on these two areas. We need to increase the number of parents and community members who volunteer in our school system, and we want to continue to expand partnerships with post-secondary, business and nonprofit organizations that can help us better serve our student population.
Several accomplishments were identified in the "State of the School" presentation including: three Indiana Four Star Schools (Ben Franklin Middle School, Central Elementary and Northview Elementary); our 95 percent passage on the state's third-grade IREAD assessment; our five state champion academic teams, and our numerous athletic individual and team accomplishments.
Future areas of focus include: Individualizing Education, Curriculum Enhancement, Staff Development, Parent Engagement and Facility Utilization. We will be sharing more information related to these areas over the next several months.
Overall, it is essential for our school corporation to continue to emphasize quality and excellence. We are fortunate to have talented students, committed parents, dedicated staff and a supportive community. We are proud of our accomplishments, but understand the importance of continuing to challenge ourselves to maintain our legacy of excellence.