Farmington Schools Set Lofty Goals

Catherine Cost, assistant superintendent, admits it’s possible that too much of many good things may have been, well, too much.

At the Nov. 15 Board of Education meeting, she said that last year, seven members of the district’s Instructional Leaders Team were working on multiple projects at once: the instructional five-year plan, the superintendent’s goals and the NCA/AdvancedEd accreditation process and a district instructional plan.

Teachers told Cost that they were getting lost in the sea of documents, and Cost said communication about how multiple projects overlapped could have been better.

So the team got together to set some clear goals and come up with a clearer vision. They researched how other districts have improved student achievement. Cost distilled the research down to two ideas: A district needs to have an achievement goal, and the district needs an instructional goal.

“These things need to be non-negotiable,” she said. “No matter what" and even in the face of budget constraints and other outside factors.

The team created something they call the Farmington Public Schools Instructional Plan, which pulls in the five-year plan, the superintendent goals and the district improvement plan.

The instructional plan includes broad ideas, such as “Everything we do is focused on learning” and “We are all accountable for our students’ success.”

Those are followed by specific achievement goals for students at every grade level. Students in elementary and middle schools will “demonstrate one year’s growth in one year’s time as measured by the multiple assessments,” for example. And the high school students “will achieve ACT scores of 21 in reading, 18 in English, 22 in math and 24 in science,” Cost said.

Instructional goals for teachers include all staff annually increasing expertise in research-based strategies, and annually increasing their knowledge of current content standards.

The plan will completed and submitted as part of the accreditation process in the spring. The team will seek input from teaching staff, who Cost said “are still feeling stretched; the administrators are still feeling stretched.”

Board member Frank Reid said he would like to see included in the plan some means to help instructors gain access to resources they will need to implement the many facets of the plan. Likewise, board member Deborah Brauer said she is encouraged to see that communication is a crucial part of the plan.

Often, she said, the staff feels stressed because the information “never trickles down and they don’t feel supported.”