Lincoln County board hears curriculum team plan for makeup days, dyslexia training and new teacher resources

At its May 6 meeting, the Lincoln County Board of Education heard a presentation from the district’s instruction leadership on how makeup days and professional-development time will be used to prepare teachers and students for changes required under House Bill 3035.

The presentation said the district’s waiver to the Department of Education required a professional-development plan for makeup days. "Based on the waiver that we submitted to the Department of Ed, one of the criterias was that we had to have professional development plan for the days that they weigh for our students," Ms. Shortridge said, summarizing the rationale for scheduling and content.

The district told the board the professional-development schedule will include a two-hour faculty-senate component and a Monday session focused on intervention and on training required by House Bill 3035. The Monday training will include dyslexia instruction for all pre-K through fifth-grade classroom teachers, and time to prepare notification letters related to possible retention under the new law. Ms. Shortridge said each school has a dyslexia team that will train other staff, and that training will include ECATS (related-services staff), special-education aides and other support personnel.

District staff also described CPI training (a restraint/de-escalation protocol) for special-education aides, co-teaching and scaffolding training, SREB and CTE offerings, and cross-curricular planning time for related-arts, science and social-studies teachers.

On intervention, the curriculum team said Tuesday sessions will be used to analyze student data and set intervention groups so teachers know incoming students and can begin targeted instruction immediately. To support math instruction, the district has built K–12 resource folders in OneDrive with grade-level materials, including more than 100 items pulled from the Cambium test-authoring site (starting at third grade), an 80-page fact-fluency packet, scaffolded lesson-support guides and roughly 40 "tools for instruction" activities per grade level. Ms. Shortridge said interim assessments have been added for pre/post checks in small-group interventions and that the district runs diagnostic assessments three times a year; third grade and above receive the GSA diagnostic.

Superintendent Barnett praised the work. "Her team has worked tirelessly on that," Barnett said, noting that the material aims to let teachers spend more time teaching and less time researching materials.

The packet also includes a summer academy plan and summer-enrichment staffing. The district told the board it will run four sites and expects about three teacher positions per site (approximately 12 summer-enrichment teacher slots), with site coordinators named for Hamlin Elementary and other locations. The district proposed raising daily K–5 math instruction from about 60 minutes to 80 minutes.

Board members asked for additional data. One member asked whether the district could provide counts by school of students who may be subject to retention under the new law; Ms. Shortridge said she could provide that information and explained that state reporting is pulled directly by the Department of Education but that she previously submitted grade-band spreadsheets.

Discussion versus decisions: the board received the report and asked follow-up questions; no formal vote was taken on the PD schedule, the OneDrive resources, the summer academy or the proposed increase in math minutes during the public portion of the meeting.

The presentation and the board’s request for school-level retention counts are the primary outcomes from the discussion; staff said they will supply the requested counts to board members ahead of future meetings.