By Charles Romans
Carter County Times
Carter County Schools Superintendent Jennifer Fraley said that there are a lot of things for staff and students to look forward to in the current school year. New procedures and new teaching programs, as well as working on the new school, are all exciting challenges the school system has to look forward to, but there is one thing that remains a constant in Carter County.
“We have wonderful students in Carter County,” Fraley said. “And everything that we do is designed to help them succeed.”
“We have a lot planned,” Fraley continued. “We are getting ready to go to bid for our new tech center. We have run up against some obstacles with funding like most districts have. But what we are going to do is go ahead and build our Career and Tech Center and part of the new school. We’ll build as much as we have funding to do. And that will go to bid in March.”
Fraley said there is a lot of preparation to get ready for that process, but they are moving forward.
Academics, Fraley said, has a lot of exciting things on the horizon.
“We have been very lucky this year that we have a new curriculum in place for both reading and math in grades K through 12,” she said.
The school has been doing a lot of implementations built around that curriculum and getting ready for testing, Fraley said.
“In Kentucky, state testing is always the last 14 days of the school calendars,” she explained. “So, until we get that calendar set, we won’t know exactly when the testing will start.”
Fraley said that she has set three district priorities around instruction for this school year.
“We have been working really hard to make sure those are being implemented. The first priority is making sure that we are all working together to maximize instructional time,” she said. “We’re making sure we are utilizing every single second we have in smart ways. Our second priority is to make sure that with this new curriculum that we are spending our time planning and preparing for instruction.”
“It’s new for teachers and students,” Fraley noted. “So, we are making sure we are spending the time getting into that curriculum and knowing what is expected of the students and what is expected of the teachers.”
The last priority, Fraley said, is making sure that they are doing a good job with assessment and determining that they are providing really good questions for students.
“We want our kids to be the ones doing the thinking in the classroom,” Fraley said. “We want to make sure they are being challenged with questions. Those questions will give our teachers a good idea if our students are understanding content, or if we need to go back and do things differently.”
Fraley said that everyone is spending their time on those priorities, and said she has started a superintendent and teachers advisory council so they can all meet to discuss what is working well and what needs improvement.
“We have also been working on our L3, Local Laboratories of Learning,” Fraley said. “We want to get those reinvigorated, (and then we can) invite our community members in to work with us about ways we can get our students prepared for the next level of education; post-secondary, whether it be a career/technical path or a college path.”
“What we are working on with our L3 right now is to get input from the community and educators around a local accountability dashboard so that we are really understanding what our community values in terms of data,” Fraley said. “Our state assessment data is important, but our community is really interested in more than that.”
“They are interested in things like how many of our first-grade students are reading on grade level,” Fraley said. “They are interested in what student and staff attendance looks like. What are those extracurricular events and community events that are being offered, and how can we get more community engagement in those things?”
“So, we are working on developing a dashboard that will be displayed on our website, our Facebook page, and all those places,” Fraley said.
She said she believes those things would be of more interest to the community than simply titles like novice, distinguished, or proficient.
“We want them to really get in there and see what is going on in their school system,” she said. “And we want to be more transparent about those things so that we can really start to identify ways that we can engage in those types of reciprocal activities.”
Fraley said that type of interaction is what she is really excited about.
“There are ways the community can come in and help us, and there are also ways that our students can get out into the community and make it better as well.”
Contact the writer at charles@cartercountytimes.com
