To: Michael Green
From: Phillip Pearson
Date: April 25, 2022
RE: WHS Report
Master Grid Building Underway
As student forecasting wraps up, the student services department turns now to building the master schedule. The master schedule is an interesting document because it’s the most practical and direct statement of what’s most important in a school. The year’s forecasting numbers are encouraging because they show students stretching themselves in a number of ways. Among others, student requests in world languages, culinary arts, advanced art, marketing and media, advanced math, advanced social studies, and advanced English language arts are all up. The students are telling us that they want to be challenged in new and interesting ways. Now it’s our job to turn those student aspirations into reality.
Senior Saturday
In my 20+ years in education, I’ve never encountered a snow day in April. Although I’m sure our students appreciated an unexpected, long weekend, it did leave us 1 day short of a full school year. For seniors, that left us with some tough choices. We could delay graduation. We could bring seniors back for a day of school after graduation. Instead, the senior class pretty convincingly chose to run a Senior Saturday. May 21st, seniors will attend school from 9:00 to 11:30. Lunch will be available on a grab-and-go basis from 11:30 to 12:00. Selected staff will be on hand to assist seniors who need to work on missing assignments, tests, and quizzes that need to be completed, or pieces of the senior project that are not quite done.
A Word About SBAC
Standardized tests are imperfect, incomplete measures of a student’s and a school’s academic status and progress. There are skills and habits of mind that will serve our students far beyond high school that will never be measured on a standardized test. We engage in all kinds of activities on a daily basis at our high school that are not testable content on the SBAC exams. All of that being said, our school’s results on SBAC do matter. For starters, meeting state benchmarks on the SBAC exams is one of the key ways students can document a path to graduation. Additionally, as imperfect as they are, SBAC results do provide an important diagnostic data point as we evaluate our growth as a program. Perhaps most importantly, I believe that excellence begets excellence. A rising tide lifts all boats. When our students excel in the math classroom, it helps to create excellence in the field. When our students excel in the field, it helps to create excellence on the stage. Our excellence should show up, and that includes SBAC results. Although SBAC results don’t tell the whole story, they do matter. Our kids need to show up and shine in the testing room too because that’s a way of life.