By Superintendent Dr. Joe Clark
Every year I give a State of the School address that looks back at the successes we have had, and I came to realize that I was just conducting a public autopsy of the schools.
The question should not be, “How well did our students score on tests?” The question should be, “What are we doing to help our students for the future?”
Rest assured, I could talk for an hour about how well our kids performed in academics, athletics and the arts. Just this year our high school won two major awards from the College Board for our AP program, a student scored a perfect 36 on his ACT, and treasurer Karen Obratil won her 5th Ohio Auditor of State Award with Distinction.
So this year I want to try something different and instead talk about how we are preparing our students for future success and the resources we have available to help prepare our kids academically, socially and emotionally.
Portrait of a Graduate: The Curriculum Advisory Council is finalizing work on Nordonia’s Portrait of a Graduate. Informed by feedback from students, parents, educators, and community members, the Portrait will define the skills and dispositions the community expects each student to have when they graduate from Nordonia High School.
Having determined and defined these seven tenets–which include Resilience, Communication, Collaboration, Creativity & Innovation, Critical Thinking, Ownership and Caring–we now begin the work of auditing the programming we offer to ensure that we are providing opportunities for students to develop these skills and dispositions.
As I talk for the next few minutes about the work we are doing to ensure students are academically, socially and emotionally prepared, think how this work supports the seven tenets of the Portrait of a Graduate.
Social/Emotional: Let’s start with the work we do in the social/emotional arena. For the last few years, we have had a lot of discussion around social/emotional and general behavior concerns throughout the district. We have made great strides in providing professional development on PAX with all of our K-6 staff. However, we have also been searching for a way to actually teach our students how to properly behave, interact, and understand their emotions. We researched a few different options, all of which had promising aspects. However, we came to the conclusion that we wanted to build our own Nordonia program, to meet our specific needs and have the flexibility to change when needed.
In addition, school districts are responsible for covering components and standards of Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) instruction through classroom management and instruction. We felt that it would be beneficial to provide our staff a prepared curriculum covering these requirements and align it specific to our needs. So, we put together a team of teachers to create a curriculum. This new curriculum is called Class Huddle. Every day for 20-30 minutes teachers from grades K-6 work directly with students to teach important lessons on how to conduct themselves responsibly. Class Huddle also integrates all of the PAX practices so that we have a cohesive PBIS program.
Also over the past few years, we have focused on providing increased mental health and behavioral support services to students throughout the district.
We began with one full time clinical counselor serving all of the students throughout the district. She quickly was filled to capacity and we identified this as a need for more students. Over the past four years, we have increased clinical counselors to the equivalent of three full time clinical counselors serving students throughout the district.
In addition to clinical counseling, we added one additional school counselor to the district. This allows us to have two full time school counselors at both Lee Eaton and Nordonia Middle School. Due to the data indicating an increase in social emotional difficulties to the students in these age groups, this allows the counselors time to meet with students and teachers.
We have been providing behavior specialist support to students throughout the district for years. Over the past four years we have had two days a week of behavioral support. This year we have increased that time to four days a week. This allows the behavioral specialist time to meet with teams, provide direct support to students and provide support to teachers within the classroom.
The district employs a full time Drug, Alcohol, Tobacco, Violence Prevention Program Coordinator. Dr. Deb Wallace provides programming in the areas of tobacco, nicotine, vape education and cessation; bully prevention; teen dating violence prevention; grief support; and many more programs geared to health and wellness throughout the district.
CAST stands for Coordinated Assistance Support Team. In a joint effort with the Summit County ESC, we are piloting this program at Lee Eaton. CAST brings counselors, families, psychologists, social workers, students and teachers together to better support the needs of our kids. The social worker piece is extremely valuable, as they serve as a bridge between the schools and the home life of the students. CAST also has built a network of area businesses and charitable organizations that have committed to give goods and resources to families in the event of an emergency need.
Best Buddies is an international organization that helps to create an inclusive school climate for students and a community culture of acceptance. The Nordonia High School Best Buddies Chapter operates as a student-run friendship club, which creates buddy pairs between students with and without special needs. Students participate in social activities with their buddies including movies, park visits, shopping trips, and other things in the community. Students and staff also have the opportunity to attend an annual leadership conference that offers valuable training opportunities and celebrates diversity and inclusion at all levels.
As a district, we understand that an increase in technology also requires an increase in technology safety. Nordonia utilizes a suite of software from GoGuardian that is designed to keep our students safe in district and at home. GoGuardian can:
- Intelligently block explicit websites and browsing attempts on our devices
- Notify district personnel of self-harm related browsing – allowing for immediate intervention
- Provide robust browsing history for all students – to track behavior trends as needed
Academics: When students are mentally and emotionally prepared for school, we can focus on academic needs.
The Nordonia Hills City School District is set up as a PLC district. PLC stands for Professional Learning Communities. Most of our teachers belong to a grade level and/or subject area PLC. On in-service days, PLCs meet to discuss real-time data that drives future instruction. This collaboration time is essential for teachers to share best practices, make adjustments to their curriculum maps, and discuss results from common assessments. The ultimate goal is to use the time to improve teaching skills and the academic performance of students.
The district continues to address students who struggle to read. The Fountas & Pinnell Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) is a powerful, short-term intervention, that provides daily, intensive, small-group instruction, which supplements classroom literacy teaching. LLI turns struggling readers into successful readers with engaging leveled books and fast-paced, systematically designed lessons. The goal of LLI is to lift the literacy achievement of students who are not achieving grade-level expectations in reading.
Over the past few years, we have continued to maintain and grow our 1:1 technology initiative at all grade levels in the district. We have made a commitment to provide devices for every student in grades 3-12 to take home, as well as enough classroom devices for our students in grades K-2 to utilize, at no additional cost to our families.
Aside from our 1:1 initiative, we have made a concerted effort to increase the presence of Maker Spaces within our district. The Technology and Business Departments have combined resources to provide our students with 3D printers and other STEM related content. We hope to expand these offerings moving forward.
For our high school students, we are excited about the expansion of our Student Enrichment Series for this school year. Implemented last year, the Student Enrichment Series’s goal is to provide students with high-interest learning opportunities on relevant topics outside of the normal classroom setting during staff professional development days. Students do not attend school on in-service days and instead can use this time for self-reflection and personal development.
Last year, all of the workshops were provided at NHS and topics ranged from leadership development to time management. Led by a combination of Nordonia staff experts and professionals in the field, the workshops allow students to devote attention to gaining strategies for success that are applicable to every aspect of life.
This year, the program grew to be a combination of in-house trainings and exploratory field trips to college campuses, businesses, and health care facilities. For example, earlier this year a group of students visited Hyson Manufacturing in Brecksville to explore the fields of engineering, chemistry, and manufacturing. Another group went to Syracuse, New York to explore the environmental science opportunities at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and the acclaimed School of Engineering at Syracuse University. In the Spring, students will visit the Innovation Learning Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. All trips investigate fields that build and sustain the future, and provide students a window into future careers they may never have considered.
We have recently made an investment into our High School IMC (Media Center) – transforming an old, often-unused computer lab – into a collegiate/collaborative environment our students will see when they move on from Nordonia. We will continue to analyze other spaces district-wide, in hopes of fostering collaborative environments across all grade levels.
Finally, let’s talk about facilities. The Board voted to allow the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission to conduct assessments of our buildings and properties to help us know where to invest improvement funds. In addition to the physical condition of our buildings, the OFCC will also conduct data analysis of future enrollment projections, and other economic factors that will help us make better informed decisions regarding our facilities.
Once we receive the data from the OFCC, we plan to develop a community-based committee to review it to help us determine the best path forward.
I hope you enjoyed this year’s state of the schools. Instead of looking at past successes, I wanted to give you an idea of the work we are doing to make sure our future is bright.
