As we start off the 2024 year, I want to personally thank all of the parents and families of our students who every day navigate all of the obstacles in life while supporting their school-aged children. We strive to create a welcoming environment and love seeing your students every day! I am grateful for your belief and trust in our staff. All of our staff work hard to ensure that our students, your children, are safe, loved and cared for, respected and experience success every day.

Finances are critical and necessary to ensure that students, staff and families have the resources necessary to be successful. As you may know, we are in Binding Conditions with the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) because our finances have been tight; however, Dave Cram, deputy director of finance-human resources-operations, has led us to an ending fund balance in 2022-23 of about $25,500. By board of directors policy, we should be at a number closer to 10% of our revenue, roughly $1.2 million. We have budgeted a 2023-24 ending fund balance of roughly $600,000, which puts us about halfway to $1.2 million. We will continue to be conservative going into our budgeting for the 2024-25 school year.

Despite financial strain, there is fantastic work happening in our district. Our five focus areas continue to be priorities: Equity; Social-Emotional Learning/Multi-Tiered Systems of Support; Universal Design for Learning; Mastery-Based Learning; and Professional Learning Communities.

This year we kicked off the Advisory Council for Education (ACE) Committee, a volunteer team of community members and educators, who meet monthly. One of this group’s projects for this year is to draft an Equity Procedure to go along with our Equity Policy that was Board-adopted in December 2021. Once we have the final draft, we will then share it with all of our stakeholders to gain additional input before adopting.

Next, let’s talk about Professional Learning Communities, especially in the context of equity. Our work establishing and implementing PLCs continues. It is during PLC team meetings that educators will look at individual student success to determine what interventions, if any, are needed to support each student. Our educators consider benchmark assessments, such as i-Ready diagnostics, DIBELs assessments, etc. to determine what academic support each student needs. This allows us to ensure that we are equitably prioritizing our resources so all students experience success.

Speaking of student success, we’ve been working on social and emotional learning through multi-tiered systems of support. We have a universal screener in place now, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Students in grades 3-12 self-report through this screener about how they are managing socially and emotionally. We give this screener two times a year, in the fall and spring. This gives us insight into the students who need more social and emotional support. When students are dysregulated, they will have a harder time learning. We have also contracted with two vendors to provide professional development to our teachers, paraeducators and Swinomish partners on supporting student behaviors with care and compassion.

And finally, our 21st Century Grant has enabled us to expand our services through the Braves’ Hub offering engaging learning activities after school and on late start Wednesdays for free.

Call us with questions:

360-466-3171.

Gratefully.

Will Nelson became La Conner Schools superintendent July 1, 2021.