Valentine. We looked at all nine areas and highlighted a couple we thought we could put into effect right away. The bottom third can definitely use some help but maybe the top third kids are not being challenged enough. I have a couple of daughters who wish they would have gotten more out of high school to be better prepared for college.

We have home room in our schools and we find it helps with the teacher-student relationship. It’s a great place to do some housekeeping. If a kid has a concern they get to air it there.

In the individual personal learning, we look at the needs of our students. I’m going to go home and interview a lot of my students. I’ll ask them what would make them more excited about school. We need more communication. Sometimes we get so busy with going from chapter to chapter that we don’t take enough time to see what’s working. We have school improvement programs and maybe we could have a survey to find out from everyone what would make it more exciting.

We tried to come up with our mission statement Literacy is important. Our kids need to be able to function in society. They’ll end up as criminals or on welfare. We need to prepare this bottom third to be good citizens.

Our assessment innovation still needs focus. I don’t like grades so I hope we can get away from that.