LM Nov-Dec 2022

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A S ! Dr. PJ Caposey Superintendent, Meridian CUSD#223 T I O N

operating with our vision and mission in mind. We deployed resources and created a department for college and career preparedness and established a coordinator position, who has done a ton of outreach for us. Our students headed to the workforce now have many more experiences getting hands on opportunities, exploring factories, the trades and other capacities because of our outreach in that area. What aresomeof the

The thing I’m most proud of is we offer our own mini institute over the summer. We believe our teachers have a great amount of expertise, so we created a Meridian University over the summer in which we pay teachers to prepare, to deliver and attend in order to have voluntary professional development and drive us toward our goals over the summer.

What additional social- emotional supportshas Meridianprovided to students? As soon as we arrived on sound financial footing, one of the things that the Board and I agreed on was we need to do more to serve our traditionally under-served kids. When we looked at it, we had students struggling with SEL, and we had special education students being served adequately but not necessarily appropriately. We made

communitypartnerships your district has formed? The issue for us is less than 1 percent of our total EAV is through commercial, industry or business. There are no real partnerships to be had. We’ve had to be creative and strategic to reach outside of our district to form internships, externships and intra-ships to get students access to programs most kids

The fact that 85 percent of our graduates leave with some successful college credit course is an incredibly important stat to us.

an investment to bring in two new counselor positions into the district. We’ve also added special education positions throughout the district so caseloads could be smaller and kids get more individualized attention. In addition to that, we’ve become a Leader in Me district. We’ve been working through that for seven years. It was the teacher voice that made it clear that was the direction we needed to go. We use it as our character ed and social- emotional platform that we build everything off from. We’ve had outstanding quantitative and qualitative results from it.

in small, rural communities don’t have. As a result, we’ve had a number of kids go into somewhat niche professions and have been able to be really successful right out of high school. What professional development doesyour district offer for teachers? When I arrived, professional development was not allowed. Even if you paid for it yourself, you couldn’t leave. We’ve tried a couple of things. We try to ensure what we bring in is directly aligned to our data and directives. I think far too often districts get distracted. We’ve also wanted to allow people to explore what they are interested in as well. We have sent people all over the country to explore the things they want to.

7 LM Nov/Dec 2022