RC Superintendent Tidbits
By: Mark Otten
A team of five teachers and administrators spent a day and a half reviewing what we are doing
at Rock County Public Schools and found that we have a lot of great things happening in our
district. Of course, we already believed we had great things going on but it was nice to get the
confirmation from people outside of the district. Here are the three overall commendations
from the external team:
1) There exists an overall welcoming culture of community and support demonstrated
throughout the district echoed by all stakeholders.
2) The district is to be commended in fostering effective communication in order to keep
stakeholders informed and engaged in the day-to-day operations of the school.
3) All stakeholders reinforced the school environment is safe for all students and the
facilities are maximized and well maintained conducive to successful learning.
As you can see, we have a lot to be proud of at Rock County. The external team also took a look
at our school improvement goal from five year ago and provided the following commendations
for our district:
1) It is clearly evident the CIP team has a solid foundation with appropriate buy in from the
leadership team and staff overall. This foundation makes it possible for the team to
recognize future goals.
2) The use of available resources (interventionists) and management of the schedule is
done in a manner to positively meet student needs and foster student learning.
3) The commitment to the goal is evidenced by the implementation of various strategies
and supports to create opportunities for success.
These commendations were specific to our reading goal of “All Rock County Public Schools
Students will improve their critical reading skills”. Again, the district has done some great work
in this area and the students are benefiting from the commitment by the staff and school board
to achieve the school improvement goal.
The external team also provided the district with a recommendation moving forward. This
recommendation is something they would like to see the district work on but they do not
mandate how this is done. The recommendation from the external team is:
1) Embrace the idea and concept of an overall approach that creates collaborative
coherence prek-12 for essential initiatives. For example, continue your work with MTSS
and/or PBiS where opportunities are deliberately created for all staff and stakeholders prek-
12.
Rock County Public Schools will continue to work on combining certain initiatives and working
collaboratively between buildings in order to provide this coherence prek-12 within the district.
The school improvement team has already been working on this through collaboration efforts
in planning staff develop days which involve all teachers and para-educators working together
for the common goal.
A special thank you goes out to all stakeholders who were interviewed as a part of this process.
There were groups of students, certificated staff, classified staff, leadership team, board
members, and a parent/community group interviewed by the external team. The external
team was very impressed with each group and commended the district for the people we have involved in our school community.