Sue Woltanski, Monroe County School Board member, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the schools.
The end of the first semesters is just four days away.
Woltanski said, “The older kids are in finals, and the younger kids are in chaos of probably being excited about the holidays.”
This is a busy time for students.
Woltanski said, “Testing as well is going on. That’s a busy time for all of our students as we see the end of the first semester, but also the first semester fully for our new superintendent, Ed Tierney, and all reports are seemingly positive as a result of him spending a lot of time listening, gathering information, and then starting to put some plans into action as we continue to pursue excellence district wide. He submitted, I think he called it a 90 day report. It was more like 100 and something days, and talked about his focus. He’s exceptionally good at pointing out what’s working well, which is really appreciated, I think, by everyone and the staff, because there’s so much working well in our school district. And then he’s looking at things that we can improve upon. And a lot of that includes taking some of the kids who struggle the most and figuring out ways to make them more successful. So really excited to hear what kind of programs he’ll put into place in that regard.”
One goal is to make Monroe County the top ranked school district in the state.
Woltanski said, “I’d like us to be the top district in the state for every child getting what they need. I think we need to be able to offer the rigor and enough electives to spark every kid’s interest, and we’re doing so much better in doing that, over the last five or so years. It takes a lot of listening to find out what the kids are interested in doing. We don’t really use a rigid, scripted curriculum in each classroom, so it also takes great training of the teachers and flexibility for them to be able to go in the directions that their classes are interested in, while also reaching the standards and that sort of thing. But if you have a class that gets really excited about a novel that you read, well, you might want to do some history stuff about the surrounding areas of that novel. We need to make sure that the teachers have the freedom or the resources, really, to be able to follow student interests. I know my own kids had their interests piqued by teachers, and it doesn’t take a massive overhaul of a school system. It just takes teachers, which we have, that listens to kids and encourages them to pursue their interests. We have really good teachers.”
Monroe County School District now has no bus driver vacancies.
Woltanski said, “Pretty impressive. Across the state, that is something people are still concerned about. So a lot of work has been done in that regard as well. We just received our audit from the state, the comprehensive financial audit, and for the 11th year in a row, we had no audit findings, which is spectacular. Specifically, the superintendent was able to direct the state to concerns that had been going around in the community about our food service financials. So the Auditor General specifically, they sent all the information about what concerns in the community had been and we came back with a clean audit for the food service as well. So people may have heard, maybe a month ago, there was a lot of talk in some alternative news outlets that there were problems with the finances. There was fraud in the school food service, and this audit, people can find it on the last meeting minutes. This audit specifically looked at that and found no findings. So it was a relief, but it was also good timing that we could tag on to the auditor general’s report and have an outside look at what was going on in our food service.”
For more information on the district, click here: https://www.keysschools.com/