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Rockdale County outlines school-improvement summit, sets five priorities for the year
Summary
District leaders presented a new continuous improvement process after a first annual school-improvement summit that aligned principal and central-office goals around five priorities: attendance, behavior, content mastery, job-embedded professional learning and stakeholder engagement.
Lashara McLean, representing the Division of Leadership and Learning, told the Rockdale County Board of Education that the district convened a first annual continuous improvement summit this summer to align school and central-office goals and to support school-based leadership teams.
The summit, McLean said, required principals to complete pre-work collecting and analyzing academic, attendance and behavior data; they then worked with building leadership teams to develop school-improvement plans that align to district priorities. “This year, school-based teams and central-office leaders came together in a shared space to reflect, collaborate, and align school improvement plans with district priorities,” McLean said.
Dr. Richardson, who spoke after McLean, said the district used a common protocol to analyze summative-assessment data and emphasized that while some district assessment data remained embargoed, staff used available information to identify needs and to set actions for teaching and learning. Assistant superintendent Miss Hunter and other curriculum coordinators provided content-level reviews and action steps during the summit.
Superintendent Chesser and staff described five district-level priorities the summit emphasized: A — attendance (reducing students with 10% or greater absences), B — behavior (reducing out-of-school suspensions by a stated target), C — content mastery (increasing the weighted achievement score), D — job-embedded professional learning for staff, and E — stakeholder engagement (improving family and community engagement measures). McLean said schools retain autonomy to design school-based goals from their local data while aligning those goals with district expectations.
Staff outlined monitoring and next steps: routine visits to professional learning communities (PLCs) for collaborative instructional planning, coaching partnerships with school-based instructional coaches, targeted classroom “focus walks,” cross-divisional observations, data briefings by district leaders and ongoing progress monitoring at the school level. The district also plans to strengthen family and community partnerships to support student learning and to use principal PLCs to share best practices across levels.
Board members heard that the summit’s intent is to build shared ownership and a common language around improvement and that the work will continue through coaching, monitoring and reflection across divisions.
