Pittsburg schools earn recertification |
Pittsburg USD 250 principals, teachers and administrators received verbal certification from North Central Accreditation (NCA). All four elementary schools and Pittsburg Community Middle School received their five-year certification visit from NCA officials Friday, and USD 250 Superintendent Gary Price said that all passed. "Everything went fine at all of the schools," he said. "We'll be making a more complete report to the board next Monday (Jan. 23) night." That report is likely pending the actual written report that the schools and USD 250 should receive in the near future, but all five schools were verbally informed that they were accredited. And for principals at the local schools, they couldn't be happier. "It was a celebration," Ruth Miller, Westside Elementary principal said. "We've worked hard the last five years. We've improved reading scores, we've made AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) all five years, became a Standard of Excellence School in two different subjects, knocking on the door on our third one. We're pretty excited. We're gonna keep continuing to do the best things for kids." Lakeside Elementary principal Andrew Gottlob had the same results at his school. "It was probably one of the best visits that I've been through," he said. "We were definitely accredited. We started about 9 o'clock. Our teachers presented our math, our reading and our writing sections of our profile and the visiting team asked several questions about how we did things and so on, and they gave us a lot of accolades on what we've been doing to service the needs of kids that were not quite getting what they needed. All in all, it went really well." Cory Gibson, Lakeside Elementary principal, said his school's visit went so well, that the members of the certification board came away with ideas themselves. "Two of our members happen to be principals themselves and were so impressed that they talked about taking some of the ideas back to their own districts," he said. "It's just a credit to the school as well as the faculty." The visit was doubly important for Lakeside and Meadowlark Elementary. Since Meadowlark is made up of students that either went to Lakeside or currently would be in the Lakeside district, they were graded together by the certification teams in many ways. "A couple things happened," Gibson said. "We looked at the data with Lakeside and Meadowlark as they were combined, but our team also asked us a couple, three years ago to separate and pull the data apart as much as we could and just look at the separate teams themselves. We compare ourselves in two facets, one with Meadowlark and Lakeside combined as well as now just Lakeside." Price said the staff at the schools should receive the credit for the marks received by their schools. "It was the result of really good work over the past five years by staff at all the schools," he said. "We really appreciate the efforts they made to work toward school improvement. It was not an accident that they got better." Now with this certification completed, school teachers and administrators are turning their eyes on preparing for the next certification visit. "One of our goals is to continue the reading and math programs we have (Success for All Reading and Everyday Math) and looking to improve upon those programs the best that we can, (add) any updated and new things that are happening with them," Gottlob said. "The other thing that we'd like to take a look at is possibly a writing program to cover our school. That's something that we don't have right now. We would possibly like to inquire into some of those and maybe have that help improve our writing scores a little bit." Gibson said Lakeside's main focus will be to continue to strive to reach all students. "One of the aspects they request of us is to look into the next cycle," he said. "Our team discussed that at length with them. One of the things we talked about doing moreso is looking at those students who may not qualify for special education programming, but maybe have some other challenges ahead of them, and really make sure we key in on each individual student and find interventions that work for them." The Morning Sun, (www.morningsun.net) January 17, 2006 |
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