Abram Lansing Elementary School recently put into action an improvement plan to ensure that the school is using all available resources in a collaborative effort to help students succeed.
Read the full Abram Lansing school improvement plan.
The plan was developed in response to Abram Lansing receiving a designation under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the main federal law for K-12 public education. One of the tenets of ESSA is educational equity, which means that all students succeed and thrive in school no matter who they are, where they live, or where they go to school.
With that in mind, the New York State Education Department has established a new set of indicators to measure school performance, with standardized testing as a focal point.
Based on test results from the 2018-19 school year, Abram Lansing was classified as a Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI) school. In developing an improvement plan, stakeholder groups composed of teachers, parents and students were surveyed and interviewed.
“This was a good opportunity for us to evaluate what’s working and what’s not,” Principal Cliff Bird said. “Our teachers are good drivers, but we haven’t always given them clear destinations and a GPS to get there.”
The improvement plan includes five overarching goals: increasing ELA growth scores, increasing Math growth scores, communicating more positive feedback to parents, implementing additional supports to identify student needs and implement intervention strategies, and decreasing chronic absenteeism.
“We believe these are all reachable goals for the second half of the school year,” Bird said.