The Londonderry School Board was briefed on priorities for the upcoming school year during its most recent meeting.
Superintendent Dan Black explained that he wanted to highlight “a few tentative areas that the school district and individual schools intend to focus on in the upcoming year.”
“In June, after we digest how each building did with their goals for the year, a finalized list will emerge from each school by the start of next year,” Black explained.
For districtwide tentative priorities, one of the areas Black pointed to was attendance.
“We have done a lot of work behind the scenes this year to study updating our current strategies and procedures around increasing attendance rates and addressing chronic absenteeism and truancy,” Black explained.
He said they have a tentative multiyear plan where they will “focus on our messaging and how we work with students and families next year, then incorporate absentee issues better into our MTSS frameworks the following year.”
Another major area they will be looking at is where they want to be for academic achievement, and how to celebrate it.
“What we will do differently next year is clearly articulate where we want grade levels and departments to be in terms of their outputs in the next few years,” Black explained.
He said many of their schools, grade level teams, and departments have “already reached or nearly reached being ‘leaders in the state,’ and we want to focus everyone on that level of success and get them to that place in the next year or two.”
“We have done great work raising our public numbers over the last few years, now we need to make sure everyone understands where we want to be long term, so that we can start to transition to a new phase of important academic and culture work as a school system,” Black explained.
School Board Chair Bob Slater noted that they showcase students who are making strides, suggesting, for example, that they could have students speak to different classes.
Black also noted that they will have specific goals for the different schools.
“The upcoming work of all our schools are the ‘inputs’ we will be working on to continue to achieve the ‘outputs’ we want to see in our publicfacing numbers as well as internal products and benchmarks we want to reach,” Black explained.
For the High School, Black pointed to the following:
- LHS has all the staff engaged in great MTSS work by committees. They will be working on their next steps in all these areas and will generate products that inform major updates to how the school functions.
- Implement the shift to a Three House Model.
- Implement the next phase of Lancer Academy and complete a Strategic Plan by the Spring (with additional Career Connected Learning opportunities in the 2027-28 budget).
- Schoolwide Writing Committee.
For the Middle School, Black pointed to implementing the first updates to the Master Schedule and planning out potential future updates to the Master Schedule in 2027-28.
Other things he pointed to include:
- Pilot CKLA (Amplify) in 6th and 7th grade ELA and Reading classrooms.
- Continue to update Math curriculum to move toward a larger percentage of students taking PreAlgebra in 7th grade and Algebra 1 in 8th grade.
- Continue to update Science curriculum to be phenomenabased, now in the 8th grade classrooms.