Hot Springs school board fight poor performance

HOT SPRINGS – During the December meeting of the Hot Springs school board, the trustees heard how the school is fighting poor performance and the activities of the student council.

The board heard a presentation from Principal Kelly Moore about the Response to Intervention Program; this is an academic program to help students get the help they need in a subject.

“We got together, both the high school and elementary, and set some goals,” he said. “What really jumped out was our reading … we’re going to focus on that this year.”

They looked at the results of the Fall exams and determined what percent of students needed help. Then, during a workshop, the teachers considered where they want students to be in May, 2016. They have since built a plan of improvement benchmarks for where they want test scores to be throughout the rest of the year.

The staff will have monthly meetings to see where students are and whether the interventions are working.

However, Moore noted there was an issue of some student’s motivation to improve. He recalled talking to some of the kids on the at-risk list and explaining the situation; some of the high school students said they did not try on the test and skipped some of the answers.

To help with this, Moore proposed offering something to motivate them to do well on the exams. One possibility he suggested was offering the students with the highest combined score a day off from school.

“If I was a student and had that offered to me, I would be working my tail off trying to do the best I could on the test,” he said.

The board also heard an update the activities of the student council. Chris Rosler, vice president of the council, said their main goals for the year was to get students using water bottles more; he noted drinking from water bottles is more efficient than having students leave class to get a drink from a fountain.

To promote this, the council hopes to bring in water bottle refill stations. These are wall-mounted units where people can put their bottle under a sensor to be refilled.

“It takes a lot less time to fill [a bottle] in the canister spot as opposed to a standard drinking fountain,” Rosler said.

One possible complication with the project is it may require rewiring and plumbing in the school’s building, making it a complicated endeavor. According to Superintendent Mike Perry, they are looking into where the units could be placed with the hope of limiting the retrofits to the building.

The student council will be holding fundraisers, later this year, to begin raising money for the project.

During the athletics director’s report, Perry recounted the school’s petition to the Montana High School Association wanting to move Hot Springs up to 8-man teams rather than 6-man. According to Perry, the rules state if a school has 65 students enrolled, they should be having eight players on a team. The problem with this is that, despite the number of enrollment, there are not always enough students going to tryouts to fill bigger teams.

When he spoke to the board handling the appeals, the athletics director noted how skewed their projected rosters were. There are currently 35 seventh and eighth graders, only approximately 10 of whom are boys; as a result, the potential new players next year are limited.

“When you look at our projected rosters, they’re actually pretty small,” said Perry. “This year we had 14 on the roster, we’re projected to have 12 next year and 10 the following year.”

Between this, and Hot Springs being very close to the enrollment requirement, the appeal was granted. The school’s teams will remain 6-man for the time being.

Perry also gave an update on the No Child Left Behind Act. He noted it had not been renewed in eight years and was actually getting replaced. President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act last week, officially ending No Child Left Behind’s activity in the nation’s schools.

According to Perry, one of the biggest changes took a lot of the oversight of schools out of the federal government’s hands and gave it to the state government. The new act also reduced the number of tests required by schools, among other changes.

“Now, if a school is struggling, it’s gonna be the state that determines the data, rather than from the federal level,” he said.