Lexington Public Schools School Improvement Plan
Position Statement
May 17, 2005  

The Lexington Public Schools School Improvement Team has decided on the following district goal for the current 5-year School Improvement cycle:

All Students will increase literacy skills across the curriculum.

*Each building can write a goal that includes which areas are most applicable to their building.  (Choose one, two, three, or all four areas as a building sub-goal through targeting writing, vocabulary, comprehension, and gender)

The process and rationale behind choosing this goal for school improvement is as follows:
The school improvement profile is comprised of 5 strand areas (Follow-up on Former Students, Unique Local Insights, Existing Data: Students, Existing Data: Community, Existing Data: Instruction) designed to evaluate the current status of the school.  The School Improvement committee requested all staff members to serve on a strand committee in one of these five areas.  Each committee altered an existing survey or created a new survey to gather data within that focus area.  (The only exception being Existing Data: Students, in which case data was gathered from test scores and demographic statistics.)

Once the surveys were chosen and implemented district-wide, the staff members serving on each strand reviewed the collected data and made generalizations in areas of need within each building.  That data was then presented in a district group meeting to find a common area of need throughout the district. 

The findings of this process revealed that each school has similar needs in varying degrees.  The five areas most commonly sited by each building (and in most strands) were the following:  Writing, vocabulary, comprehension, character education, and gender gaps in scores.  The district communicated a plan already in place to address character education and it is the position of the team that this area will be addressed in each building individually as needed.  One or more of the remaining four areas were found to be common in all schools with the rank order varying from school to school. 

In order to accommodate the variances from school to school, yet recognize the commonalities within the district that are based on data collected and reviewed by our staff, the goal "All students will increase literacy skills across the curriculum" has been selected by the team.  Each school will now be required to write a sub-goal that indicates which of the four areas of need will be the focus topics in that location based on its unique building data.