Dear Lansing School District Community,
I hope that this newsletter finds you well. As always, it is a pleasure to be writing to you all.
T-minus three days. The reality is starting to sink in. This will be the last "summer" newsletter. School starts on Wednesday. I am extremely excited, and I hope that all of you are too. I just got back from a weekend of camping and hiking at Bay City State Park. It was a wonderful way to commune with nature, be outside, get a little exercise, and revitalize for the school year to come. I hope everyone was able to have a fun final weekend before the wonderful, but hard work of the school year begins.
Last week I wrote about the importance of communication and how all of us need to work at improving this invaluable skill across the district. This week I want to emphasize starting the year off focused on the work ahead. For the first time in almost a decade, we have a new English Language Arts curriculum. To finally have an up-to-date, pedagogically sound, equity driven ELA curriculum across our district is incredibly important. We can finally have something that all of us can work on and hold each other accountable to following. However, the curriculum is only as good as our wonderful educators, along with our diligent students, and supportive families make it.
As you know, historically, our proficiency rates in ELA have been very low. As a district, less than 20% of our students were deemed at grade level last year. Though this is higher than in years past, it is still unacceptable. This is the year we are going to change that. For the last three years we as a district have been working very hard trying to fix the systems and structures that make a district function. We have been doing everything from focusing on the physical, the educational, and the bureaucratic. New classrooms, new programs, new supports have all been brought to Lansing. We have also increased the salaries of our teachers so that our district has one the highest starting salaries in the entire Mid-Michigan area. We have been filling our classrooms with motivated, talented, and caring educators to serve alongside our talented veteran staff. For years, Lansing was understaffed and under-supported. Going into this year, we have more teachers, support staff, and administrators in classrooms and schools than we have had in years.
So now this is the year we have to all focus on helping each other breakthrough the proficiency barrier. If you are a family member, try to learn about our new ELA curriculum and help support your students to succeed with it. If you are an educator, please support our students in following the curriculum to fidelity so that we can all keep on track to get our scholars to the level they should attain. If you are an administrator, please focus on how you can continue to bring our district to a place where our kids are on grade-level and higher.
I know that if we, collectively, focus on proficiency this year, we can get our students to levels we haven't seen in decades. It will be hard. It will be a struggle. We might need after-school tutoring, weekend programs, extra help. But this is our charge – proficiency and beyond. I look forward to visiting classrooms across the district to see this incredible work.
Thank you so much for all of your incredible support of our district. Together, we will do great things for the children of Lansing.
Benjamin Shuldiner, Superintendent
Lansing School District
