Strategic Leadership
One of the most important skills that I can bring to the school board is strategic leadership. The goal is to support the current staff to be successful because we are all on one team and we win and lose together. I believe we already have the right vision and mission. The VCS vision is “All students will graduate college and career ready” and the mission is to “Maximize the success and potential of each student.” Most people can easily agree on these. The next step is where it get’s hard. We need to align on how to measure success. Below I’ve broken this down into 5 key categories that I would use to further align on our goals and measure our success towards this vision.
I’ve always felt like my own kids at all 3 levels are safe and the staff works hard to keep it this way, but we don’t know what we don’t know and some additional transparency around safety incidents and what the school is doing to proactively reduce the occurrences would be beneficial. I was thrilled to see the new vestibules on the most recent bond for safer entrances to our elementary schools, an updated handbook this year, and a focus on staff awareness and training for safety related topics, so improvements are coming. I believe to make improvements in these areas, we also have to find a way to get better involvement and alignment with parents and be on the same page to help reduce incidents. It takes a village.
Safe and Supportive School
According to U.S. News and World Reports, Vicksburg High Schools ranks.
1st in the Kalamazoo Area
80th in Michigan
Overall score of 86/100
We can be proud of these results, but we can still do better and should always strive to do so. Some areas to improve our academic excellence would be to target specific improvements in M-STEP, SAT, and AP success rates. To continue to climb, I also believe we need to embrace AI but find the right way to use it in the school.
Academic Excellence
Preparing our students for careers independent of what path they take is ultimately the most important and ties directly with the vision and mission of the school. Currently, I believe the high school is doing excellent in this category. We have a large number of AP classes for those students who want a 4 year degree in the future. While most schools in our area waited for the KRESA campus to open, Vicksburg saw this as an opportunity and expanded their CTE programs with Robotics, Home Economics and other programs that are not offered at KRESA. I do believe we could continue to improve in some areas here in the elementary schools and middle school by giving earlier exposure to different fields and to always make sure that we emphasize that all different paths of education can lead to a successful career.
Future Readiness
I believe the most successful students in the classroom and in their career fields are the ones that find and explore their passions. This could be in athletics, music, art, robotics, student council, etc. VCS knows this too and really tries to get all students interested and engaged. One area of improvement that I believe we can work on here is the communication. So many different channels of communication are used and it’s nearly impossible to keep up. The risk of finding out late or not at all is that a student misses the early opportunity to try something new and then never comes back to it.
Engagement and Belonging
Sunset Lake Elementary puts it best with their “Leader in Me” curriculum by asking “How do we find the win-win?” In this case, I am looking for a win-win between the community and the school district. A well functioning school board does this. A group of individuals with different strengths and weaknesses consistently listening and aligning with the public to get what we can all agree we want: successful student outcomes.
