The Fairbanks Board of Education met to discuss student intervention approaches at Wednesday night’s meeting.
The board met at Tolles Career and Technical Center and held a tour of the facility. Afterward, the board conducted its meeting with a presentation from curriculum director Teresa Goins.
In her presentation, Goins highlighted how this year, with the implementation of the new graduation criteria, she noticed there is a significant number of students who haven’t earned enough end exam credits to graduate.
“We still have way too many kids struggling,” Goins said. “We have to have a process in place, and it has to be consistent and it has to monitor and it has to communicate to teachers, parents and kids.”
Goins said, throughout each grading period, there were 95 Fairbanks High School (FHS) students who received Ds or Fs. By the end of the first quarter, that number dropped to 83, then to 66 at the end of the first semester and then to 82 students at the third quarter.
She recommended putting in place a student support team within FHS, which will investigate and identify what is causing children to receive bad grades.
“Progress is monitored by the person staffing this intervention center on a weekly basis, reported back to the team, the classroom teacher and, most importantly, back to the parent and the students,” Goins said.
She said it would start with optional conferencing with students if the support team notices a student getting a bad grade at the end of a grading period. She said, if the student is at risk of not graduating, the team would recommend the student take tutoring instead of an elective they don’t need.
However, if a student continues to receive bad grades by the next interim mark, “your study hall is going to be spent in the intervention center.”
She said the program would be flexible for students and would assess how many days out of the week the students would go to intervention conferencing.
“What this plan is, it’s moving from all kids can learn to all kids will learn,” she said. “We’re going to take the opportunity to fail off of them.”
She said the program would need to elect someone to the intervention leader position, who would “be the communication between the school, home, and intervention center teacher.”
FHS principal Tom Montgomery said there is already an intervention program in place at the school, but “we’re just at a smaller scale with it.”
“We’re going to have two ends of the spectrum to deal with,” Montgomery said. “We can help them graduate better and we can help them pass their classes better. Eventually, we can hopefully grow it into an enhancement program as well.”
He said this would be helpful at targeting at-risk students in the fall so they can be better prepared for testing in December. However, he said the timing for when students receive scores now is in June, which is hard for them to convince at-risk students to do voluntary intensive intervention in July.
“With this way, as (Goins said), we’re going to force kids into this,” he said. “We’re going to invite the parents in, we’ll have a conversation with them and then we’re going to schedule it for them. If that means dropping an elective they don’t need because they’re just taking it, that’ll become their class. I think we’ll have a lot of good luck on that.”
Also at the meeting, the board discussed the possibility of switching over its emergency levy to a substitute levy. Treasurer Aaron Johnson said the substitute levy would allow the district’s levy to take new home values and new construction into account.
Johnson said the advantages of this would include taking into account the growth of new construction in the district, which the current levy doesn’t do. He said the disadvantage of this would include the existing tax base wouldn’t see that reduction as quickly when there’s new construction in the district.
Afterward, the board approved of its window installation deal with Gate Brothers Glass in relation to the media center conversion project.
Superintendent Bob Humble said construction has already started and will continue into next week, when students aren’t in the building.
Also, the board approved of new board policies that relate to tobacco consumption.
Humble said the policies are geared toward changing the language to prohibit vaping, as “we know that’s going to be a problem in the future.” He said, once medical marijuana becomes legal, it will be easier to consume via vaping.
“It doesn’t have to be vaped… but vaping is one way,” Humble said.
Humble said there will be “more policy changes to come” if doctors eventually prescribe medical marijuana to students.
The policies also cover nurses being able to administer epinephrine injections without having to carry an ODE license.
Finally, the board approved of two resolutions. According to one of the resolutions, the board of education “imploring” the president, governor and the Ohio General Assembly to prioritize funding for “enhanced mental health services,” “increased access to school safety measures,” training for school employees to “ensure appropriate responses to incidents of violence in schools” and “preserving the balance between the right to own firearms” and the protection of students and staff “from any act of violence.”
The other resolution opposes House Bill 512, which would have the Ohio House of Representatives consider legislation that would combine various departments into one new state agency called the Department of Learning and Achievement.