Brownstown announces new mission, vision statements for school corporation

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BROWNSTOWN

Survey results and several discussions helped Brownstown Central Community School Corp. leaders establish new mission and vision statements.

To kick off the activity to sustain a strong corporation culture, Superintendent Greg Walker had the board of trustees approve both statements.

The corporation’s mission “is to provide a safe, technologically advanced learning environment where highly qualified educators empower and inspire students of all abilities to realize their utmost potential as productive, lifelong learners in an ever-changing world.”

The vision statement goes off of the corporation’s BCCSC abbreviation: “Building college- and career-successful citizens.”

In the spring, Walker set up an online survey for students, parents, community members, teachers, administrators and board of trustees members to voice their opinions on the direction that the corporation should take heading into the future.

Then during multiple work sessions, Walker, business manager Jade Peters and the seven trustees disseminated the data and set goals for the corporation.

Six areas labeled pillars of success were identified as areas of focus: Safety, security and environment; staffing; academics; technology; growth; and financial.

During the November board of trustees meeting, the three school principals shared areas they plan to address this school year under the first three pillars.

“We are on the ground floor and early stages of this process and are excited to see where this leads us,” Walker said.

Elementary Principal Chrystal Street said her school’s first areas of focus are wellness, professional development and ISTEP+ remediation.

Principal Doug McClure said the middle school already has addressed some of the pillars with what’s in place.

“Our challenge now is to not only perpetuate what we feel like we have started, but it’s to expand that,” he said.

The school’s safety, environment and culture committee recently met and discussed some ideas, including replacing some classroom doors and “upping their game” with response time to specific school threats that could occur.

“We’ve done some of those things, but we want to go farther,” McClure said.

With staffing, he said the school will continue to do trimester student convocations to keep students involved in goal-setting, school themes and enrichment learning clubs. Staff members are involved in all of those initiatives.

The middle school also is focusing on parent relations by maintaining a school blog and a Twitter account and offering period aid extension at the end of the school day so students and parents are aware of assignments.

And with academics, McClure pointed to the enrichment learning clubs, eighth-grade Washington, D.C., trip, restructured resource study halls to provide students with more direct support instruction and ISTEP+ test scores.

“We’re doubling down on the Pivot effort this year,” McClure said of the standardized assessment that benchmarks student growth in English and math. “I know Mrs. Street at the elementary had great success in using Pivot last year, so we’re trying to take kind of what they learned and apply, and hopefully, we’ll see results, as well.”

Principal Joe Sheffer said he recently met with his discussion group at the high school to briefly touch on the first three pillars. He said a lot of them tie into the school’s current improvement plan.

For safety, security and environment, he said they likely will look at the drug and alcohol testing. The random testing was rolled out in the 2015-16 school year.

With staffing, he said there are several things the school already has in place.

”We’re going to gather some more teacher input and see what we want to focus on right now … and start seeing which direction we need to go,” Sheffer said.

Academically, he said they are going to look at the school’s dual credit program and going into an alternative school.

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