Dear Lansing School District Community,
I hope that this newsletter finds you well. I can't believe this is the last newsletter of the calendar year. It seems like just yesterday we were opening school up in August. Thank you to everyone for getting us through to the end of the year!
As folks normally do in the "end of the year" message, I would like to take some time to look back at all the amazing work our staff, students, and families have done. But I would also like to look forward to some of the ideas and plans we have to strengthen our school district even more.
After just three years of clear-eyed focus and thousands of hours of work, we have been able to raise the district's graduation rate by almost 25%. Even though I have written about this previously, I can't help but lead with this statistic. No single data point is as meaningful for an entire school district as graduation. It represents 13 years of hard work by students, 13 years of hard work by educators and district staff, and 13 years of hard work by families and the community. I hope everyone in Lansing can recognize just how incredible the current unaudited 86% high school rate is.
To put it in perspective, when I arrived in the Lansing School District, the historic 4-year graduation rate had never broken 70%. The year before I arrived, the grad rate was 62.10%. In just our first year, we raised the graduation rate by more than 6% to 68.16%. Two years ago, we raised it by 8%, hitting a 76.37% graduation rate, the highest ever recorded for Lansing. And after last year (2023-2024), we appear to be on our way to hitting our goal of having an 85% 4-year graduation rate. The growth has been incredible. The idea of hitting an 85% graduation rate was a pipedream when we first started talking about it. Now, this year, we are steps away from reaching that number. We will know if we hit the goal when MDE releases the finalized numbers in February 2025. Thank you to each and every one of you for making this dream a reality; it was an entire community effort.
The next huge and powerful number is our daily attendance rate. Coming out of COVID, our attendance rates took a nosedive. 18 months without entering a brick-and-mortar school set a dangerous precedent of absences. Additionally, the severe bus driver shortage made travel to school difficult for many. Our 2021-2022 daily attendance rate was 70.53%. For 2022-2023, our finalized daily attendance rate was 76.49%, a full 6%-point increase. Last year, 2023-2024, our rate was 83.72%, a 7%-point jump and a 13% increase over two years. During these last two years, our high school attendance rate has been tracking higher than our pre-COVID levels. Much of this is due to moving our high school students to gas cards, and CATA passes. Sadly, we are still suffering from low elementary school attendance rates, mainly because of transportation issues. But this year has been much better than last, even in elementary, thanks to Dean Transportation hiring more wonderful bus drivers and our schools and families working together to get more kids to school. I am happy we are making significant progress and tracking well for the future.
The next thing I want to mention is that all of our staff are now under current, mutually agreed to contracts. These contracts make our staff some of the highest paid in all of Mid-Michigan and set a high standard for years to come. I want to thank all of our union presidents and bargaining teams for working collaboratively with the district to find a path to thoughtfully agreed-upon contracts.
This is now year four of free universal pre-K, our second year of Lansing Tech, and the second year in a row for having two high school football teams in the playoffs. We have created a robust middle school athletics program, strengthened our arts and music programs, and breathed new life into our extracurricular activities. More students are participating in middle school sports than in years. More students are participating in high school sports since COVID. With the creation of the Department of Enrichment, we have started to build more seamless K-12 programs in the arts. We just increased our funding of the band programs and are in the process of creating a strings program at Willow. We started a youth football program in partnership with the Lansing Cowboys and have a vibrant youth soccer program at Gardner School in collaboration with Real Lansing FC. This year, we started a 16-week arts program at Dwight Rich and Everett in conjunction with REACH Studio Art Center. I am very excited about all of these new and vibrant extracurricular programs.
The other main point to discuss is the fact that we have raised our proficiency levels throughout the district. However, we are not nearly where we need to be. This leads us to the year ahead. This coming year, we will be focusing on creating more tutoring and mentoring opportunities. We are also creating an enrichment program for students who are exceeding standards. We are strengthening our program for our most at-risk students. We are also creating specific tutoring support programs for students who just need a little push to get to grade level and proficiency. We have brought in a new ELA curriculum and are going to start a new math curriculum in the Fall.
We know that we, as a district, have to do better with the academic outcomes for our children. If we are able to finalize our graduation numbers above 85% this year, I think we should unveil a new district goal around raising our proficiency rates so that we hold ourselves accountable to more of our students being on grade level and above. I can't wait to share these new goals with the community soon.
The last thing I want to talk about is our community relations. We, as a district, have tried to increase our communications with families. We have more robust PTAs. We have our Family-Superintendent Roundtables. We also have our Equity Committee and our Multi-Cultural Taskforce. But we know we can do more. That is why this coming year, we will also be focusing on increasing our connections to our families and the broader Lansing community. Stay tuned for some new district programs to help with this endeavor.
As always, if anyone reading has more ways that we can get better as a district, please let us know. We have made it such a long way in such a short amount of time, but we know there are miles to go. Thank you so much for being on this journey with us.
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
