Principal’s Notes
This week in our leadership meetings:

Academic Awards Night- Directors are beginning the process of collecting names from you about academic awards in your courses. This is an outstanding evening that really provides us with an opportunity to honor the hard work of students in our classes. Your personal participation in the evening truly makes a difference for the students. Collection of student work from all departments was also discussed.

Competency Document- We discussed the presentation format for the course competencies. It was agreed that organizing our competency work would occur over the summer and be managed by directors.

Professional Learning Communities- We discussed the value and the possibility of implementing weekly opportunities for teachers of common courses to meet about curriculum, instruction and assessment. We also explored how we might provide teachers from different departments with the opportunity to meet to review literature and share practice.

NECAP and AYP- We reviewed the Adequate Yearly progress data in Math and Reading. The data reveals we did not meet the performance target of 84.0 in Reading in two sub–groups. The performance target in Mathematics was 58.0 and three sub-groups fell short of that level. Although our 2005 scores exceeded the performance targets in all areas, our 2004 scores in mathematics did not meet the AYP target. The 2006 testing was considered a pilot test and did not count toward this designation. Because we did not meet the performance targets for three consecutive years (2005, 2007) in mathematics, the State has designated SHS as a school “In Need of Improvement” for Mathematics. Reading is now in its first year falling short of the performance target. We will be examining this data to determine our plan for improvement.