News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The Van Buren County Board of Education approved a one-time bonus of $900 for all staff members after receiving an improvement in the school district’s Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System score.
Director of Schools Jared Copeland said the school school district scored as a level five which is the highest level possible. Copeland said he believed it was a good idea to reward every staff member in the school system.
“I think all of our staff, teachers, admin, cafeteria workers, bus drivers and everybody that has a part in this puzzle here does a tremendous job,” Copeland said. “I think it’s a good little incentive and a good little way to tell them thank you for all the work that they have put in.”
Copeland said the school district has 138 staff members. Copeland said the board is able to afford the bonuses after the state accidentally misallocated funds.
“The state had, believe or not made a good mistake in our favor and that they carried over some wrong allocation into this budget year for ISM to the tune of $124,000,” Copeland said. “So we have $124,000 that we have already planned to spend on the CTE building but they misallocated it so we can use ISM money for that so essentially that is $124,000 in GP that’s saved and that’s the bulk of that if we choose to do that.”
Copeland said a big part of the higher score was the improvement plans that Spencer Elementary and Van Buren County High School have implemented. Both schools reported on the growth they have seen over the past year. Spencer Elementary Principal Amanda Binkley said the school saw a jump in student scores due to increased professional development among teachers.
“One of the big changes at the elementary schools as far as academic achievement was we took a page out of Mrs. Katina’s book we piggybacked off her good idea with her eagle encounters,” Binkley said. “We started eagle encounters monthly at the elementary school with our four lead teachers helping to lead the meetings in professional development.”
Both the elementary school and high school made it an initiative to lower absentees and excessive tardies. Binkley said she learned how to pull up the weekly report and stay on top of it from the state level. Binkley said attendance was at 17.3 percent and last year they were able to drop that to 10.6 percent.
Van Buren County High School Katina Simmons said she has put a focus on academic achievement. Simmons said the school has implemented a system called Master Connect.
“We’ve implemented that this year for our full first year and it’s a way to collect student assessment data for us,” Simmons said. “We monitor that really closely and it’s helped I believe greatly with our teachers to kind of drive their instruction and we have already seen progress from that.”
Binkley said the elementary school did need to improve in small groups with students who have disabilities. Copeland said the school system will have to work more one-on-one time to try and improve in that area.
