Theresa Axford, superintendent for the Monroe County School District, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the schools.
Summer school is starting.
Axford said, “We have seven students from our MOVE. MOVE is that Monroe Occupational Vocational Experiences and what we try to do is place students with businesses so they get first hand experience of what it’s like in the business, but we’re a business also, so these students are going to work as paraprofessionals this summer or teacher aid in summer school. They get paid $15 an hour. So this gives them an opportunity if they want to go into the field of education, they certainly are going to have some experience this summer, which will allow them to kind of help with that decision. So I’m really excited about it. It’ll be assisting the teacher with small group instruction. So usually in a classroom, a teacher divides the work into centers, which means that you go to a different center and you do a different kind of part of the lesson. So the teacher will work with her own small group, and then the student aid will go to those other centers and see if the children need additional help. Usually those centers are constructed so that they’re fairly easy for a child to understand what they’re supposed to do. But there’s always time where a student needs assistant, so that teacher aide is going to go and talk with them, but then there’ll be the other kinds of tasks of walking them to lunch and supervising them outside in the playground, and I’m sure tasks for the teacher, like getting those pencils sharpened and making sure that there are enough textbooks, there are enough materials for the students. So it’ll be a pretty big job, interesting job.”
A big congratulations is in order for all the graduates from the district.
Axford said, “I’m so glad the rain held off to this week, because we have had Key West High School graduates outside at Tommy Roberts Memorial Stadium and in years past, we were biting our fingernails hoping the rain was going to hold off for graduation. Now, Marathon graduated indoors in their gymnasium, and Coral Shores did as well, but we had a crowd of at least 3,000 on Friday night at Key West High School. It was an absolutely glorious night, and those stands were just full of people. So it was quite a beautiful evening and 344 graduates from Key West High School. There were 700 students total. But listen to these stats. The Take Stock children, there were 83, I think, graduates of Take Stock this year and $2,000,395 in scholarships. Then our community across the Keys came up with $2.1 million in scholarships. This community has so much confidence in and trust and love for our students. I mean, all those nautical flea markets, all those Rotary events, all those Chamber events that go towards scholarships. Just think of it, $2.1 million for our kids and then college scholarships offered, $6.2 million and the Bright Futures, which is a Florida scholarship that students who have a 3.5 or above GPA qualify for, is $2.3 million. So it’s a total of $13 million in scholarships to this class.”
About 80% of the students plan to continue their education after high school.
Axford said that “48% are going to a four year college, 10% are going into a vocational program, 12% are going into the workforce, and about 6% are going into the military. So it’s a nice span. We’ve been focusing on college and career, because we all know that we had about 1,600 industry certifications earned in our school district last year, and that’s a certificate that says you are skilled in a certain area. For instance, there’s all kinds of industry source in computer science, but there’s one they are also for safe food handling, so kids could go out into the world and go right to work for a restaurant, and they’ve got a value added certificate to show for their resume. Also, our fire college, our med tech areas, so all of our CTE, our Career and Technical Ed programs are really good to prepare students if they’re not going to college and if they are, because a lot of times, you get your bachelor’s degree, and then you go back to a community college to get some kind of skill. So it’s just a whole different thing going on today, in terms of maybe 10 or 15 years ago, it was only college prep, and now it’s really focusing on the workforce and college and career prep. So I think we do a great job with that.”
Axford will be in the district through July 31, but she will be retiring after that.
She said, “Our commissioner of education, whom I worked with very closely during my time as superintendent, has gone over to be the president of the West Florida College. That’s an interesting idea, but actually what I’m going to do is my sister lives in Germany, and so I’m going to spend some time with her over there and do some traveling. Once you’re over in Europe, the train system is so well developed that it’s easy to get to a lot of different locations. That’ll be fun. I’m going back to the Florida Keys Council of the Arts. I was chair of that organization for eight years, and I had to put it on hold with all these superintendent duties. So I can’t wait to get back, and it’s such a great organization Keys wide, to support the arts and artists. I can’t wait to start working with Liz Young once again.”
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