GRAVETTE — Gravette Superintendent of Schools Andrea Kelly spoke to an all-faculty meeting at the Performing Arts Center Friday morning.
After introducing members of the school board, she outlined facility improvements completed during the past summer, reflected on the success of the previous year and directed attention to particular challenges of the coming year, including new Common Core State Standards and how the district will address deficiencies.
Board members are president, Marion Harris; vicepresident, Dan Yates; secretary, Jim Singleton; and members John Edwards, Jack Skillett, Jim Hendren and Danny Alsup.
Quotes from Kelly’s address include:
“As we look forward to the first day of school weextend a big thank you to the people you never read about but who have spent all summer breaking down and putting back together in very short order two freshly painted buildings including new ceiling tiles and gridwork, provided oversight for the construction of new parking lots, kept the campus grounds in beautiful order, cleaned inside of buildings, stripped and waxed floors, moved furnishings and installed a new web-based operating system, among many other tasks.
“We need to take a few minutes to reflect on the successes of the previous year: Full accreditation of the district from the North Central Accreditation Association, successful reviews of the Gifted and Talented and Special Education programs, installation of a web-based operating system, provision of the expertise of a literacy coach, change in math and literacy programs in the K-5 grades, effective formation of communities of learning with the Curriculum Coordinating Council and the three alignment teams as well as the collaboration of grade level and subject content teams within the buildings.
“A focus on mining data to the student level to gain a perspective on individual student learning achievements, a strong leadership focus by Mr. Vanderpool, Dr. Hastings, Donna Rush and the Glenn Duffy teachers to start this school year with the new Common Core State Standards, a host of awards to students in the technical training programs, music and fine arts programs and a successful athletic season all across the board, a National Merit Scholar, Bob Johnson, named by his peers as “Educator of the Year” in the state, and further integration of digital instructional technology in the classrooms.”
“I want to turn the remaining minutes of my comments to our teachers and building leaders, who are the heart of who we are,” Kelly added. “Every day we undertake a monumental task of educating future citizens for participation in our free and democratic society. And we extend a big thank you to you as well.
“You have successfully transitioned into and migrated the mandates of NCLB and even before the end of these mandates you are now successfully transitioning into the studentlearning expectations of the Common Core State Standards. Many of you served on various committees last year to facilitate the transition. And we will again ask you to serve as we balance both commitments to NCLB and Common Core State Standards for the next three years.
“I’m pleased to announce that we made AYP in the high school and made great strides in our scores in the Middle, Upper Elementary and Glenn Duffy buildings, but we were cited because of the scores in two subpopulations - special needs and low socio-economic. We should not take this report as a negative. We will learn from it and focus our attention on differentiating our instructional strategies andmaking responsive learning interventions for these two groups of students.
“As defined in law, the district is required to contract with a private service provider to offer after-school and Saturday tutoring programs to the two subpopulations. We will receive instructions from our ADE very shortly to begin the process. A part of the mandate is the setaside of a percentage of our Title I funds to provide the service. For this district, that equates to $85,000.
“In all other areas of math and literacy and the seventh grade math and science scores we have every reason to celebrate our successes and I thank you for a job well done. All of you deserve a big pat on the back,” Kelly said.
Community, Pages 11 on 08/17/2011