Federal Programs Coordinator Jaren Mercer returned on Feb. 12 to update the school board on the District Improvement Plan in quarter two during the Pilot Point School board’s monthly meeting.
Mercer walked through the district’s four goals, starting with goal one, which focuses on education standards.
“On goal number one, ‘the district will earn a net standard rating ‘B’ or higher with an 85% of students at approaches, meets or masters on STAAR and 95% of students CCMR ready,” Mercer said.
He then listed the progress he’s seen to that end, including district wide MAP Growth Assessment testing which he broke down into highlights and focuses.
“We also have some highlights and scenarios of focus,” Mercer said. “Those highlights are fourth grade ELAR and math, seventh grade math, eighth grade math, and ninth and 10th ELAR. Our areas of focus are third and fifth grade ELAR and math, bilingual ELAR and ninth grade algebra 1.”
Goal number two is 75% of exempt and non-exempt employees will be retained with the intent of returning to the 2025-26 school year.
“The progress we’ve made on that so far is a salary study initiated with TASB, continuing to offer campus level professional learning opportunities and gather feedback for the future,” Mercer said. “We’ve continued the Adopt a Bearcat initiative and continued our new teacher academy training and continued Bearcat Shoutouts that give our community the opportunity to shout out our teachers.”
Goal number three is for the district to enact a comprehensive plan that optimizes funding to enhance district facilities and educational quality while operating within the budget, which he split into four strategies.
“The progress we’ve made on that is strategy one specifically focuses on assessment of the current situation and the bond committee finished up, which voted for what to take to the board for a bond,” Mercer said. “For the strategic budget allocation of strategy three, we’ve received a clear audit for the 2023-24 school year and a quarterly review of the budget shows a surplus based on our attendance.”
He continued.
“For strategy four, … we are actively exploring grant opportunities to secure additional resources, and we’ve reallocated funding to align with regulations.”
Goal four is for the district to increase engagement and satisfaction levels among students, staff, parents and the community by 7% through the implementation of regular effective communication initiatives as measured by the district survey.
Increasing community engagement included action from the superintendent.
“We’ve continued the quarterly newsletter, disseminated the survey results through the dashboard and published results to the website, and continued to use Remind and social media to keep parents informed and the superintendent has attended meetings throughout the community including city council, Rotary Club, education foundation, etc,” Mercer said.
Director of Human Resources and Communications Valerie Wall later gave an update on the District Dashboard, which Mercer heavily referenced during his presentation on goal four.
“It’s a good tool for us to track our progress over time,” Wall said. “This is the beginning stages of our dashboard, but it’s tracking our progress and making sure we’re aligned with our goals and helping us realize what’s working and what’s not working.”
Wall shared the dashboard, built from scratch, which has taken some time and tweaking to get up and running.
“Our 2024 fall survey is just the baseline data,” Wall said. “It’s our starting point. We’re going to keep adding data from here. What it will end up being is a visualization of our scorecard. We’re still working as a cabinet to finalize and tweak that scorecard to represent the different data points.”
Executive Director Brand Perry updates the board on the 2021 Bond projects during Pilot Point’s Feb. 12 school board meeting. Basil Gist/The Post-Signal
