RCE
page School Improvement and Accreditation
What is it?
The Raymond Central School District is fully accredited by the
North Central Association under the AdvancEd national network for school
improvement. Accreditation is awarded every 5-7 years for the work principals
and teachers do to improve the learning in their school through the school
improvement process.
School improvement is an ongoing process in each building that involves
analyzing achievement data, finding strengths and weaknesses, setting an
improvement goal, and implementing a plan to improve student learning. The plan
depends upon the improvement of instruction and professional development for
teachers.
The goal of school improvement and accreditation is to improve
learning.
How does the school improvement process work?
The professional staff in the district conducts an analysis of
national, state and district assessments. The analysis reveals strengths and
weaknesses in student performance, which provides the basis for the
district-wide school improvement goal.
The school improvement plan is developed to focus the entire school on the goal
using research-based strategies for curriculum, instruction and assessment. In turn,
teachers work with their colleagues to improve teaching and learning in each
classroom. The school improvement belief is that all students can learn.
How are
schools held accountable for their goal?
All schools are accountable for improving learning every year.
Learning data and instructional strategies are monitored throughout the process
to determine whether learning has improved. Every 5 years, a visitation team
comprised of experts from outside of the District, meet with the school
improvement team. The visitation team reviews the school's goal and improvement
plan in order to provide feedback on strengths and weaknesses. The purpose of
their visit is to evaluate the progress of the improvement plan and offer
support and suggestions. The formal visit from an outside team results in
recommendations for district accreditation by the North Central Association.
Raymond Central School District’s Goal and Improvement Plan
The goal that the district is focusing on for school improvement is that, “All students will improve reading comprehension.” We have chosen to implement strategies based on the research of Marzano and Pearson’s 6 Effective Reading Comprehension Strategies plus one for vocabulary to increase reading comprehension. These strategies will be explicitly taught to all students.
1. Visualizing
2. Prediction
3. Summarization
4. Think alouds
5. Questioning
6. Text Structure
7. Vocabulary
From Sept. 2007 to the presents Raymond Central staff have met in Professional Learning Communities (PLC). The PLC’s have focused on research and implementation of the chosen strategies. The groups also look at data to determine if the strategies being implemented are having a positive effect on reading comprehension.
In the 2009-2010 school year the elementary schools adopted a new core curriculum to help improve reading comprehension. They have also instituted a 90 minute language arts block. At the middle school and high school level reading classes have been added to give extra support to students who need it.
Continuous School Improvement (CSI) Steering Committee
Nikole Farr, Lori Maxwell, Pam Rasmussen, Steve Rose, Delores Smith, Shelly Dostal, Kolin Haecker, Paul Hull and Dan Ingwersen