This year our faculty and staff have been engaged in developing an updated five-year strategic plan for 2019- 2024. We conducted a needs assessment and developed an overview of our school beliefs, culture, current levels of achievement and future academic, social and professional goals. Our goal is to systematically teach and practice skills and strategies that contribute to each student developing a successful South Carolina graduate profile.
Our school currently represents high levels of diversity; 62% of our population qualifies for ESOL services; 74% of our students qualify for free and reduced lunch indicating high levels of poverty, low socio- economic demographics and high levels of need for academic and social emotional support. We have developed capacity to reach out to our students and families through direct literacy and math interventions, an active Response to Intervention assessment and implementation process. We have 3 literacy teachers to directly serve students. A literacy and math coach are in place to serve the teachers and students. To meet the needs of our English as Second Language Learners we have 4.5 ESOL teachers who serve students in reading, writing, speaking, math, language development and monitoring support. We have a full time School Social Worker, a full time Bi- lingual Liaison, and a Parent Volunteer Coordinator. Due to our high special education population, we have two assistant principals. We have a guidance counselor serving prekindergarten through second grade, and a guidance counselor serving third through fifth grade students. Both guidance counselors regularly assess and complete evaluation of services, programs, and ongoing student needs.
Our core beliefs in bringing out the leadership potential of each child is infused throughout the school through a learning through leadership model, The Leader In Me. Through examination and reflection, we have identified strategies and systems to build positive choices through the seven effective habits, roles and participation models to demonstrate leadership, and accountability systems to measure and evaluate individual, classroom, grade level and school wide data points. Our school climate has improved; discipline referrals have substantially decreased.
Student capacity and achievement are demonstrated in scores that meet and exceed district and state norms, even while we continue to have students enter our school with significant gaps in readiness skills and literacy and math knowledge. Our school is recognized as having one of the highest student growth indexes in Beaufort County School District; especially in our English as Second language subgroup. Our students begin demonstrating accelerated growth in closing academic gaps in third grade. Fourth grade scores are consistently high in ELA, math, social studies and science. This is commiserate with research that indicates language proficiency develops on a social and academic level differently, with 2- 3 years needed for social fluency, and 3- 5 years needed for competency in content oriented language and competency. The fifth grade is examining delivery and content to focus on improvement.
Results of the 2019 AdVancEd Student Engagement Survey indicate a high level of committed engagement in the behavioral domain ( 62.06%),Cognitive domain (62.94%), and Emotional Domain ( 68.53%). Our overall results are similar to Beaufort County School District's results as a whole. As a school, it is our intent to consiously build skills to become leaders actively choosing to demonstrate they are so engaged in their tasks that they see challenges as opportunities.