The Knox Community School Corporation is planning two years of intensive professional development to boost its academic performance.
The school board recently agreed to contract with the Northern Indiana Educational Services Center for an academic initiative. Dr. William Reichhart admitted that it’s one area he hasn’t really addressed in his four years as superintendent.
“Well, there was a lot of things that had to be changed, and I think we have gone through that change now,” he told board members. “You know, we’ve got the buildings and we’ve got the personnel and I think we have the right administrators, and I think we just need to go forward.”
Reichhart’s plan is for NIESC’s director of professional learning, Michelle Grewe, to make 10 to 15 visits to Knox at a cost of $700 per day. “She would come into our district and work with our teachers and work on improving methods of instruction, the content of that instruction, how we teach, and concentrate on reading, language arts, and math as our primary focus because I just feel like we need to be better. I know we need to get better academically,” Reichhart added.
He said the initiative would be funded by federal ESSER III money earmarked for learning loss and possibly some Title II money. School officials are still discussing how to schedule the professional development. Some options include getting substitute teachers for those days, having students do eLearning, scheduling half days, or paying teachers to come in next summer.
