TIPP CITY — The Board of Education heard from the principals of each building in the Tipp City Schools district on their updated goals for the 2022-2023 school year during their work session on Monday evening.
Each building principal attended Monday night’s meeting to give a brief presentation on the academic and environmental goals for their buildings in the 2022-2023 school year.
Dan Barnes, principal of Tippecanoe High School, has two building goals. One goal is to continue to utilize the weekly collaboration times for teachers. The collaboration time includes small groups of teachers split based on subject, department and course level. The collaboration time has allowed teachers to better meet the academic needs of their students but using classroom and testing data to make informed instructional decisions. Barnes’ second goal is to continue building better relationships in the classrooms and the building as a whole through things like homecoming week with different themes for students to dress up in throughout the week.
Following Barnes, the principal from Tippecanoe Middle School, Diane Voress, presented her goals for the current school year. Voress and the staff at Tippecanoe Middle School decided it would be best to continue with their two main academic goals from the previous school year to continue improving. The academic goals are more meant for their teachers to meet. Meeting these goals benefits the teachers but more importantly the students. Their first goal is to have all teachers in the building create student centered standard spaced learning objectives for every lesson and the second is to provide timely and specific feedback to students to help them improve on their learning outcomes. Both of these goals come from the Ohio Improvement Process.
“Our teachers are working diligently on making sure that they know in their head, they know in their lesson planning what the objective of the lesson is, what the learning target is, but so often we forget to tell the kids. We know the path we’re taking the child down for them to learn, or we know what the end result we want, but we forget to bring them along the way from the very beginning,” said Voress.
Teachers are provided a rubric to help keep themselves accountable and measure themselves as they work across the rubric. The administration uses the rubrics to help with their check-ins through the Ohio Evaluation System to see where teachers are and what their needs are to better help the students and see if their standard spaced targets are set and if the students are engaging in that learning target.
The middle school’s third goal is a climate goal to push the spread of kindness with students and staff. They recently created their new Red Devil group that consists of students from each class that were chosen by their peers to help staff check in with the student body.
Next Galen Gingerich presented his goals for Nevin Coppock Elementary School. Gingerich’s building goals is to implement systems of support to ensure that the students all reach their growth potential. The school uses multi-tiered systems in academics and behaviors including PBIS and the newly mandated dyslexia assessments.
His other goal is geared toward climate and culture. This year, Nevin Coppock is bringing back volunteers to the school by re-implementing Project MORE (Mentoring in Ohio for Reading Excellence). Project MORE is a program that brings in volunteers and parents to work with students on organized reading assignments provided by the school.
Broadway Elementary School Principal Tina Smith presented her goals. Similar to the goals of Gingerich. Smith’s main goal is to also implement systems of support at Broadway Elementary and one way they are working towards this goal is with a new gifted intervention specialist who is in the school two and a half days a week meeting with all of the second and third grade students, not just those identified as gifted. Every other week the specialist is doing enrichment activities with all of the students. Another system that has been put into place is the phonics program in the second and third grades.
Smith’s climate and culture goal includes the re-implementation of Project MORE and stated that Broadway Elementary already has 20 volunteers for the program this year. She is also restarting parent lunch week to allow parents in the building to see their students, meet the teacher’s again and see what their students are learning. Through these programs Smith aims to increase community and parent engagement after the pandemic.
The final presentation of 2022-2023 school year goals came from LT Ball Intermediate School Principal Mike Vagedes.
Vagedes’ goals for LT Ball include better meeting academic and behavior needs of individual students with multi-tiered systems of support to help students be successful. Similar to the elementary school principals, Vagedes hopes to reinstate parent/community involvement opportunities and has formed hope squads with student representatives to help spread positivity and kindness through the school.
