"The Countdown"

Yes, it is back up and counting - counting down! 8 of you guessed correctly, the mystery number on the marquis in front of Sioux Trail is the number of days left until school starts. As of today's blog post that number has dropped to 43! Enjoy those summer days and make every day a wonderful day!

I'm always excited about school and if I could, I'd have a much shorter break and keep school in session longer than 173 days. Why am I excited about school? I'm excited because when we are working together around a common goal we can do incredible things. I'll use the 2009-10 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA) results as an example.

Here our overall MCA results
Reading:

2008-09: 78.65% of Sioux Trail students were proficient
2009-10: 82.6 % of our students were proficient, an increase of 4 percentage points!

But we didn't stop with reading, there was also noticeable growth in mathematics:

2008-09: 76.16% of Sioux Trail students were proficient
2009-10: 85.4% of Sioux Trail students were proficient, an increase of 9 percentage points!

Under the "No Child Left Behind" Act all public schools are required to make annual progress towards having all students proficient on the MCAs by 2013. Here is additional good news -
at the end of the 2008-09 school year we were identified as not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in 6 areas.

In Reading we did not make AYP for the following subgroups: Black Student and Special Education students
In Math we did not make AYP for the following subgroups: Black, English as a Second Language students, student eligible for Free or Reduced Price Lunch and Special Education students

Are you asking how this is good news? The answer is in the the 2009-10 results.
We are making Adequate Yearly Progress in 17 out of 18 areas, great improvement from 2008-09. The one area that we are not making AYP in is Special Education Reading.

I'm excited to get back to work and to keep guiding students on the TRAIL to student success and we do have some work to do. Because are not making AYP in one area we will be writing a federally required school improvement plan, families may choose the sent their child to another ISD 191 school and we must keep moving forward. I welcome these challenges and I'm excited to continue working together as a large team with one goal - student success.

I'm counting down to another successful school year and I look forward to working with all staff, students, families and our community to make it happen again.