Liberty Middle School Goals 24-25

We are off to a great start at Liberty Middle School. We are building relationships, learning routines, and practicing safe behaviors. We've already seen growth in many learners! As we launch, I wanted to share with you our goals for the year so we could partner together. If you would like to discuss any of these goals in more detail, please reach out anytime.

Sincerely,

Dan Holder

Principal

Education has been a challenging career for a long time but those challenges have increased in recent years. As a result of this, as you can imagine, more educators are deciding to leave the field and less are deciding to enter it. We are extremely proud of our Liberty educators because of their skills, experience, and passion for middle school and the field of education. We are also extremely proud to report that we had 90.7% retention from 23-24 to 24-25! Across our nation, in the 22-23 school year, 23% of teachers left their school.

We hear from educators each year that are struggling to remember why they chose this profession. Liberty Middle School has been a place for these people to land and remember their "why" again. Last spring I had a thank you note on my desk and it explained how close this person was to just leaving education altogether but they decided to give it one more year and give Liberty Middle School a chance. No longer is this person looking for the next career. They are looking for the next school year!

Together, as a community, we can change the lives of young people and adults by showing grace and gratitude every day. It is a small amount of time but it is no small thing. Let's do this together!

For the 24-25 school year, we are increasing our efforts supporting student wellness. Throughout the last two years, we have been working to build systems and collect data to monitor progress of all learners. As a result of this, we are able to get a much better picture of how our student wellness is distributed across our student body and how it fluctuates throughout the school year.

I am thrilled to share that one of those systems has been focused on collecting positive recognition data. Every staff member has QR codes and learners can scan those codes with their iPads. When they do, it is recorded and the learners are entered into a drawing for weekly and quarterly prizes. We started this in October of 23-24 and averaged over 3 positive recognitions to every 1 recorded discipline report. We believe it is a worthwhile goal to see if we can maintain a 3:1 ratio for the entire school year in 24-25. Notice this ratio is affected both by increasing positive recognitions and by decreasing the need for discipline referrals.

If all our systems work as designed, we will have well over 80% of our learners successful with our standard levels of support.

Our educators were challenged two years ago to dig deep and face the challenge of achievement gaps due to COVID shut downs. As we have monitored our standardized test scores, we saw BIG gains in 23-24. Our educators can and should be very proud of this work! Classroom rigor is critical to this effort so we will challenge our educators to dig even deeper this year to consider how, when, and where we can continue to increase rigor. This might seem easy to do at first, however, it is a quite complex task.

Professional Learning Communities are small groups of content teachers. E.g. 7th Grade Language Arts or 8th Grade Earth Science. These educators gather weekly to focus on the 3 big ideas and the 4 critical questions as illustrated by the following videos. A PLC cycle consists of asking and answering the 4 critical questions about the actual learners in their classrooms. We will challenge our PLC's to complete 4 complete PLC cycles that include all 4 critical questions.