Raising test scores key goal this year

DORCHESTER DISTRICT 4

ST. GEORGE — Raising test scores in the rural schools of Dorchester County is District 4 Superintendent Jerry Montjoy's major goal this year.

His action plan is simple: Make sure teachers are focusing on the essentials and engaging students. He also wants to get parents involved, including letting them look at their children's grades online.

Montjoy outlined his goals in a recent interview with The Post and Courier.

Melissa Haneline
The Post and Courier

Montjoy

Q: What's the district's biggest challenge going into the new school year?

A: Improving test scores.

We've pretty well decided to take a simple approach to it. I think in the past we've tried to do too much. This year we're going to specifically work on presentation of instruction, to do a better job of presenting it, making sure that the students understand the objective (of the lesson), that the students understand what the teacher is teaching, that the teacher actually stresses the key elements of what makes that specific standard important, and they have good questioning technique to involve students, and they do a closure summary after each lesson to make sure that they can evaluate if that lesson was successful.

The other part will be the positive interaction between the teacher and the students.

When we look at our test data, we want to make that we have actually taught the standards that relate to the data. Are we completely covering our standards? Do our teachers actually understand what some of the standards are? Before we can improve, we've got to do a better job of presenting information to our students. We've got to make sure we present all the information that is necessary for them to understand. Then we can evaluate where our programs are a little better.

Q: How will you communicate this to the teachers?

A: Presentation of instruction is nothing new. We've just kind of gotten away from that. The director of instruction will be doing workshops with the principals. We want the principals to do model lessons with the teachers. We want our teachers to do model lessons for other teachers. It will all be done in small groups (before school starts).

Q: What's another major goal this year?

A: Another area that we found that we really need to work on is parent involvement. When we got back our state surveys that go out to parents, parents often felt they were not involved as much as they should be, or informed.

Q: How will you get parents involved more?

A: The big thing is parents always want to know what their kids' grades are (the kids don't always bring home the reports, and parents want more frequent updates). Our parents will be able to access their child's grades online through a coding system (password). We will try to implement that starting in September. They will be able to access the grades for their child, and their child only, from the teacher's computer. They can't change it, but they can look at what the grades are. And each principal has been asked to develop a set of goals for parent involvement at their school.

Q: Any other major goals this year?

A: I think if we pay attention to what we're supposed to be teaching and teach it in a proper way, I think that will be a major improvement. I think if you have too many goals, you don't get any of them accomplished.

Reach Dave Munday at 745-5862 or dmunday@postandcourier.com.