School Superintendent Board Report For November, 2024

Theresa Laville Superintendent’s Board Report November 5, 2024

Mission: To provide an excellent education

Vision: To prepare and empower all students for current and future success

Academic Excellence
CRSD now has a tutorial program for students grades 6-12. Flyers for tutors have been posted around the communities. Students will have the option to participate in tutoring online or
in-person. Tutoring will be available from Monday-Thursday, 3:30-4:30. Documents will be available during the board meeting.

Tutoring Goals: The Tutoring Program will administer high quality tutoring that is
aligned with the district’s best practices and targeted to high-needs students
a. Improve student learning outcomes for school performance
b. Help students develop strategies to become independent and successful learners
c. Guide students in developing their learning styles and independence

Jared Dale: On October 23rd, a college and career readiness curriculum review was held in the boardroom. Thereview team consisted of 12 students (9th - 11th grade) from Glennallen, Kenny Lake, and Slana Schools. There wasone teacher and one parent/board member. There were other adults who were invited to be a part of the review team, but those individuals were unable to attend. The team took part in four 45-minute demos/walkthroughs with four different vendors that provided college and career readiness programs. After each demonstration, the review committee individually evaluated the different programs. After the evaluations are scored, a decision will be made about which program to select for CRSD 9th-12th students.

A campus tour of AVTEC is being planned for November 19th (from 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM) in Seward. The tour will begin at the main AVTEC building and will include the recreational facilities, the cafeteria, and student services. Thetour guide will talk briefly about each academic program offered at AVTEC and will give our group a “deep dive” of one program along with a tour of its facilities. Based on the survey results that have been collected so far, Industrial Electricity or Diesel Mechanics will be the program we tour; this could change, however. The group will stay the night at Seward High School on November 18th.

The ASVAB CEP that was planned for November 5th has been rescheduled for February of 2025. The ASVABCEP is open to all CRSD students in 10th–12th grade, even if they have taken the ASVAB in previous years.

Instructional Excellence:
The October in-service covered an array of sessions: i-Ready Math, Ahtna Potlatches, Special Education,Cybersecurity, UFLI, and enVision Math. The next in-service is on December 2nd.

Personalized Learning:
College and Career Pathway documents have been created for students. Jared has begun meeting with students in grades fourth through eighth to discuss their career and college interests.

Students have been utilizing the Xello program, grades fourth through eighth, to explore career options. Sample documents will be available during the board meeting.

Unity:
The Coffee/Tea with the Superintendent at Gulkana was a great visit. Evelyn, Roberta, and Raedeen were encouragingand thankful. Raedeen shared ideas for the Ahtna language program next year. For one of her Ahtna college classes, she had to create a video teaching the Ahtna language. I encouraged her to continue making the videos, for they will be great strategies to include in her lessons when she begins teaching the Ahtna language class. We ended the conversation with Evelyn closing with a prayer.

There are two upcoming Coffee/Tea with the Superintendent that will be held at Chistochina and Kluti-Kaah halls.

Kirk Howard and I continue to meet on Tuesdays. Mr. Howard is moving forward with plans for the Ahtna Immersion Language Program. I have shared some resources (The New Art and Science of Teaching and Explicit Instructions) with Mr. Howard to prepare the teachers. I have also provided Mr. Howard with a copy of the district’s syllabus, unit plan, Marzano Focused Teacher Evaluation Model, and the CRSD Strategic Plan. Mr. Howard shared his draft of his curriculum mapping for my review.

The district received the Special Education Compliance Monitoring Report from DEED. The findings focused on training the special education staff. Gail Greenhalgh is a State trainer, and she will continue to provide training to thespecial education staff. Additionally, Gail meets with the special education staff monthly and holds weekly meetings with Amanda Abraham and Andrew Carlson.

The specialists will be in the Copper River School District in November. Alison Barnett (the Physical Therapist) will be here from October 30th to November 1st. Joseph Gerard, the school psychologist, will be here from November 4th to November 7th and meet with case managers and conduct student evaluations. Lauren Reeves (the Speech and Language Pathologist) and Lauren Flynn (the Occupational Therapist) will be here from November 11th to November14th. They are setting up times to meet with each case manager and students on their caseload at each site.

Technology: Johnathan Carty
PowerSchool University: During the week of October 13 - October 18, Johnathan attended PowerSchool University in South Carolina. During this conference, he learned much about the inner workings of PowerSchool (PS) pages, new features in the updated UI, addons that could increase workflow andproductivity, and made several connections with both PowerSchool staff and users. The majority of his classes were taken on PowerSchool Customizations. Customizations dives into how to take the default PowerSchool pages and edit/add to them to create completely custom effects. For example, he learned how to take a default page in PS and edit the fields shown, and their properties, to create custom information pages. This could be used to help streamline information lookup and can help to put helpful information such as medical alerts front and center when looking up a student.

He also took a class on SQL coding, which can be used to create custom reports inside of APEX. The brunt ofthe coding work for customizations is based in HTML. Jonathan will take full advantage of these customizations that he will need to learn and practice in the future. He took two overview classes on addons that he thought could benefit the district, including Digital Document Delivery and Student Analytics. Of the two, Student Analytics seemed the most useful since it allows the district to import data from many different sources and compile it into easy to understand data charts and graphs.

CRSD Website: Starting soon, Johnathan will be working closely with a dedicated team from Finalsite, a company, tobegin work on the CRSD website. This will be a large undertaking, and he will be working with them to design andcreate a custom look for the district’s website. Once the design is in place, then he will start creating the skeleton of the website, and content migration/creation will begin. The new CRSD website will be ready by August 01, 2025.

District Interventionist: Laura Scott
Laura has been providing training to Kenny Lake and Glennallen certified and classified staff on phonics and REWARDS. She delivers the training mostly one-on-one, which gives the trainee the opportunity to dive in andpractice the routines of a typical lesson. Additionally, Laura helped the staff in Slana with mCLASS test administration in with the Program Mapping for the ELA block.

The Literacy Committee voted to have earlier Parent/Teacher conferences the weeks of October 7-18, in order tonotify parents within the AK Reads Act timeline and begin interventions within the required window. Interventions began at the end of October.

The updated information from DEED suggested that only parents of those students with new IRIPs require the initialmeeting with teachers. Parents of students with continuing IRIPS are not required to meet and can attend at regular conference time. Teachers do need to inform parents about re-opening IRIPs.

Migrant Education Program (MEP): Ashley Hicks
Current MEP Count: 208

Last MEP Informational Meeting: October 2, 2024 with 24 attendees
Next MEP Parent Advisory Committee Meeting is scheduled for January 13, 2025 at 5:30 pm.

Ashley has been involved and attended Ahtna Language Workshop Planning Meetings and recently formed a committee to help collaborate on Culture Day for next year. Georgia and Ashley presented a draft of their CultureDay proposal to Mrs. Laville, and they will work on fine tuning the proposal for the next presentation to Mrs. Laville.

Georgia and Ashley also taught a beading class during TREKS to 10 students who learned about the Ahtna culture,language, history and the cultural significance of beadwork. She instructed 10 students on how to bead medallions the first week and invited local artist, Ike Hobson, to help teach one day. The second week, the students learned how tomake and attach the necklace using bone and glass beads. Georgia taught how to make chokers, and some students donated their work to the Vermillion family.