Gaston County Schools' plan to address low proficiency scores

The 2023-24 state test score results for Gaston County Students were recently released, showing improvements in some areas and room for growth in others.

At a meeting Monday, Sept. 16, district officials discussed a multi-part plan to address the gaps.

The plan is broken down into focus areas, opportunities and actions that will be taken.

Focus areas

Tonya Kales, the district’s associate superintendent for academic services, and Kelly Cunningham, chief accountability officer in the academic services department, spoke on the topic at the September meeting.

According to the spokeswomen, the top five priority areas include:

• Focusing on high quality teaching and learning
• Creating a positive school and workplace culture
• Creating strong internal communication habits
• Working on student and teacher retention and recruitment
• Providing support for administrative and district leaders

Opportunities

• Some opportunities for improvement in next year’s scores identified by the district include:
• Increasing the number of students that achieve grade-level proficiency
• Getting more Gaston schools to meet or exceed growth expectations
• Decreasing the number of schools that are considered low performing as a result of state scores

How

The spokeswomen said students deserve highly qualified teacher,s and teachers deserve highlight qualified educational leaders.

So, district officials will place more focus on working with principals and teachers.

They said they plan to:

• Redesign existing meetings and forms for principals to highlight focus areas.
• Facilitate monthly principal meetings and support tools focused on teaching and learning with visits to classrooms.

For teachers, the district plans to:

• Require administrative walkthroughs with development-focused feedback loops
• Require content-teacher professional development
• Create a new position for a director of professional development
• Offer guidance on curriculum scope and sequence, and provide assessment tools

For students, they said they plan to:

• Follow pacing and unit guides in accordance with state standards
• Lean into existing resources provided by the school district
• Focus on meeting the needs of multilingual learners
• Monitor student development more closely through professional development conversations, principal support tools, and assessments

District wide

Finally, Kales and Cunningham rounded out the presentation with some district-wide plans for Gaston County Schools going forward.

According to the spokeswomen, district staff members will be deployed to struggling schools for extra support, a new board will be created to advise and support in the new plan, and a teacher pathway grant will offer new opportunities for teachers and leaders to develop.

This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: Gaston County Schools' plan to address low proficiency scores