The Pickett County Schools designated as “In Need of Improvement,” putting the district in the bottom five among school systems statewide.
This designation is based on performance indicators such as student achievement and student growth. Director of Schools Melissa Robbins said the designation is not what the school system was hoping for, or what they worked toward.
“We know some of the areas that we need to work to improve on,” Robbins said. “On a positive note, some of those measures are already being put in place, and we are working from the data on that plan.”
Robbins said indicators show that the school system is not growing students like they need to. Robbins said to improve student growth, the school system will focus on student growth each week rather than solely focusing on student achievement.
“Whenever the teachers are teaching in a subject area or working in a subject area, they are looking to see are our students are growing over that time,” Robbins said. “We also have a new benchmark that was put in place at the end of the year last year, and it is called MasteryConnect, and we are using that as well. It’s kind of like a mock TCAP, and we will be getting results back on that and how our students are doing this year, probably sometime in January. And so we are looking forward to seeing that data to see if the adjustments we’ve made are showing that our kids are actually improving.”
Robbins said it is tough to overcome challenges being a rural school system. Robbins said another area that hurt the school system’s score was chronic absenteeism. Robbins said chronic absenteeism is a huge issue in Pickett County and likely in other county school districts.
“What we are trying to do is reinforce a positive atmosphere in the school with the students,” Robbins said. “And we are having celebration days not to take away from learning, but to add to the school environment. Making it a place where our kids want ot be and want to come in and learn.”
Robbins said she still believes Pickett County Schools is a great school system.
“I know that the scores did not reflect that this past year, but I know that our teachers are working hard, and our students are working hard, and so we hope to see growth this upcoming year whenever we get those results back. And like I said, we are monitoring that data. So it is a setback, but I do believe we will see better things in the future.”
