Officials from Sampson County Schools are moving forward with goals to improve education in 2018 and future years.
The district’s NC Star/District Improvement Plan for 2017 through 2022 includes many achievement targets through the program. NC Star is a web-based initiative focused on guiding schools through the process. The plan was recently presented by Dr. Wesley Johnson, director of digital literacy and accountability and secondary education, Jeana Carr, director of elementary education, and Sheila Peterson, director of middle grades.
Sampson officials selected research based indicators from the department of public instruction. Some of them include setting goals to help subgroups of students, making sure current strategies are effective, providing support for technology and data needs, and recruiting highly-qualified teachers.
“As we get less and less teachers who are graduating from institutions with degrees in teaching and education, we’re having to go out of state,” Johnson said about the overall recruiting efforts.
Johnson mentioned that Dr. Wendy Cabral, assistant superintendent of personnel services, has plans to travel to Pennsylvania to recruit.
Another indicator is to establish a pipeline of potential school leaders. One of the action steps is to develop a needs assessment for a leadership academy to make sure there’s viable options in place for school leaders as they retire.
“It’s having a pipeline to make sure we can continue this forward momentum by having people in place who are prepared and ready to take that next step into school leadership,” Johnson said.
When it comes to support, it was noted that positions and quality service training for classroom teachers, aides, clerks, custodians and cooks is important. A big push during the school year is mental health training. An additional goal is to include parent organizations in the improvement and support process.
For the current academic year, many school systems used the NC Star program. It was previously noted that regulations state that the role of data in developing school improvement plans must be “clear, unambiguous targets, explicit indicators and actual measures, and expeditious time frames for meeting the measurement standards.”
Although the program is listed as a five-year plan, some of the goals and plan may be accomplished by 2019 or 2020 based on completed work. Most of school throughout Sampson County have 12 key indicators for school improvement, which aligns with the overall goal of the district.
