Dear Parents, Students, and Staff:

It’s hard to believe, but we are more than one quarter of the way through the school year. Not only have we been hard at work, but we’ve been hard at play. We’ve enjoyed an exciting fall season filled with many student accomplishments on the athletic fields, in the auditoriums, in the classrooms, and in our community!

In a few days, we will hold parent-teacher conferences, which serve as an excellent opportunity to share information and review individual student progress. As an educator, I feel strongly that each student’s performance should be evaluated using a variety of measures.  I think the same is true when rating a school’s performance.

For the second year, the Pennsylvania Department of Education recently released the School Performance Profiles (SPP) for public schools throughout the state. The SPP is comprised of a number of data points that includes state testing results, graduation, promotion, and attendance rates, along with other measures of student achievement and growth. With two years of data, we can better examine what we have done and how it has impacted student improvement. We have seen positive and negative changes in our performance over the last two years.

Prior to the release of our SPP, we have been focused on analyzing our areas of strengths and weaknesses at a District, building, grade, and individual classroom level. We have looked at all aspects of our program, including curriculum, instruction, and assessment and one result of this analysis has been a heightened emphasis on revising our curriculum. Teachers have been an integral part in not only identifying gaps in our math and reading curriculum, but in the development and recommendation of resources to address those gaps.

I encourage you to review the School Performance Profiles for all of our schools, but to also take a moment to review our school websites that contain information regarding events, programs, and other initiatives. While the SPP score provides a valuable mechanism for identifying strengths and needs of our schools and will be used to set goals and direct resources, I think we can all agree that improvement and growth cannot be measured in a single number.

On December 18, we will provide an overview of our SPP data to the Board and discuss ways we can use this information to improve academic performance. The public is welcome to attend the meeting or review the presentation online. In the meantime, if you would like to discuss information related to a specific school, please feel free to contact the building principal. 

On a final note, I would like to thank the parents and members of the community who supported our Middle School Career Awareness Fair. We had approximately 35 representatives from a variety of career fields. Thank you for making the event a success!

Sincerely,

Todd B. Stoltz, Ed.D.