In Laconia Schools: A focus on grading, attendance and timeliness

Hoping everyone in Sachem Nation is enjoying this beautiful New Hampshire summer. It is my goal to make sure our community is as informed as possible about "whats going on" at Laconia High School as we prepare to crank up another year of teaching and learning.

Two areas of education that were impacted, altered and affected over the past two-plus years were how we measured student attendance and how we implemented grading. As you probably remember, schools closed down in March 2020, teachers had to suddenly retool what teaching and learning looked like, figure out a way to ensure effective connectivity for all learners to a learning platform and then come up with an online instructional format that would engage as many students as possible ... all while finding and fixing technological issues, online behavioral issues and searching for the students who were not online. This hastily-developed programming was the practice for the remainder of the 2019-2020 school year. That it worked at all was somewhat of a miracle. That learning loss occurred was assured. The nation learned that online learning was not the panacea that some ascribed it to be. However, student engagement in multiple online social media platforms exploded. How students were identifying "who they are," the primary task of adolescence, became more connected to the social interactions that were happening online and the isolation they were experiencing when not online. Schools and teachers bent over backwards to help students participate in online classes, access learning to get a passing grade ... and that has proven problematic.

The 2020-2021 school year was a hodgepodge of learning platforms, dependent on family choice and pandemic data that was being presented daily throughout the year. Schools went from online-only to hybrid formats, with half the students one day and half the next, with remote in between. Some families preferred to go remote and not participate in hybrid. Again, nationally, the learning losses were real and measurable. Students continued to experience a high level of isolation and online "living" continued to be normalized. Adolescents' developing personas became more intricately connected to their online lives. Schools continued to try to connect with students in the ways that help build futures, but with the personal connections highly limited, this was difficult. Schools did what they could but again the limited contact and the lack of access to healthy relationships with teachers and peers negatively impacted many students. It was another year of pushing, pulling and going beyond the reasonable to get a growing number of students to complete required coursework, let alone figuring out how to make sure students got up to go to online classes that had fixed times each day.

At the beginning of 2021, Laconia returned to normalized "full in" school. The differences in student social behavior, motivation, aspirations and hope appear to have been impacted by the years described above. Certainly the increased levels of both depression and anxiety, consistent across the nation, are connected to the reality of living in social isolation (other than online) and not having structure and explicit purpose to each day, something schools help provide five days a week throughout most of the year ... and structure is essential to the success of just about everyone. With that in mind, I offer these plans for the upcoming 2022-2023 school year.

In terms of grading, we have been following a very loose interpretation of competency-based learning which enables a student to remediate work that failed to demonstrate proficiency. This year, students will have the opportunity to remediate any work up until the summative assessment is taken. Any work not completed or remediated after that point will not be accessible as the class moves forward. If there are extenuating circumstances, administration will meet with parents and students to determine any additional opportunity. Life has "deadlines" and we should be part of the instruction in that reality. To be sure, if the teacher has not kept with regularly grading and returning work, which would harm remediation opportunities, the student will not be penalized.

Attendance and timeliness are imperatives to success in anything. Our job in school is to prepare students to succeed after they leave us. To that end, school must teach the Portrait of a Graduate skills that ensure college and career readiness, pure academic content that ensures a strong foundation to access new information, while also exposing students to post secondary fields and opportunities that open the world up to them and help them define the path they will engage in after their high school days are over. That requires time and commitment on the part of the student, the family and the school. Getting to school on time daily is the only way to succeed, which is no different than success anywhere else. As a community, we need to effectively work together to ensure all students get to school and class on time as this is about as basic as it gets. As a school, we will be committed to denying students access to all extra-curricular programming on any day they arrive late unexcused to school. No job I am aware of lets you show up when you feel like it or miss as many days as you desire. Life has structure and structure is the foundation for success in all systems.

These clear, expectations simply offer clarity and refinement of expectations that are school-wide. The better we describe and define our expectations, and the more aligned they are to the reality of opportunity in this nation, the better we will offer a better future to our students. Grading students within a logical timeframe and having students show up on time every day are two very clear expectations that reflect the Portrait of a Graduate at its most fundamental level and help prepare students for a life that has increased opportunity. We must not fail in that endeavor.

I look forward to offering more information on the changes to the Laconia High School daily schedule and the "issue of phones" next time.

As always, Go Sachems!

Jim McCollum, principal, Laconia High School