The successes have been increased student involvement and smaller learning communities. There’s a real sense of identity among Thunder Mountain students.  Similarly, as JDHS has grown smaller, it has improved the ability of staff to interact with students as individuals. Doubling teams and activities has increased the opportunities for children to participate.
The greatest challenge I have seen to date is that we appear to have not provided sufficient resources to provide a diverse curriculum for students, especially for our college-bound or potentially college-bound students. Science and foreign language classes have been cut, giving students fewer opportunities. This must change. We must have high expectations and can only do so when we provide all of our students with a wide variety of challenging classes that prepare them for college or career-tech programs.

We can identify children who will have long-term difficulties with school early on, and certainly by first grade.  If we do not help them overcome the learning gap between themselves and other students at that age there is a very high likelihood they will never catch up. They will fail without appropriate intervention.
I believe that when those children are identified, we must take strong, proactive steps to immediately provide them with an enhanced curriculum to help them catch up. It’s the best use of our resources and will make the greatest difference for these children.

I will advocate that we adopt as a board an expectation that all of our schools will make AYP.  It is not that hard. It does require focused effort in order to do so. By creating those expectations and holding the administration and schools accountable, I believe we can meet AYP in short order.
The more difficult issue is how to really make a difference for underachieving students. The first key component is to develop systems that recognize that every student is valuable and send the message to them that their welfare and progress are vitally important. High expectations with good support from our schools are the first step in connecting with underachieving students. Also, we need to adopt and implement District-wide standards and practices to improve literacy and our math and science.

The Board has strong policies in place on all of these issues, but I don’t believe we have consistent practices which deal with them practically. Our students regularly report that our school climate is very poor and that they feel unsupported. Racism, sexual harassment and bullying occur too frequently despite the best “policies.”
We must proactively work to change our school climate, to build a sense of trust and community among our students, which encourages them to care for one another.  This will reduce all of these negative actions and I believe will also assist students in saying “no” to drug use.

The Board is currently working on adopting a comprehensive plan which will involve education, mandatory drug testing for athletes, voluntary drug testing for others and development of community resources for treatment of addiction. This is a true crisis and there’s no simple solution.
I believe that any solution must be targeted on treating the addiction, not simply driving students away from the resources they need to change their behaviors and have success. I’m in favor of in-school suspensions and believe that students who have been disciplined by not being allowed to play sports should be required to do community service or other forms of positive social contributions in order to earn their way back to participating in those sports.