SMS focuses on four goals

SANDPOINT — There are four main goal for Sandpoint Middle School this year, with creating a positive culture at the top of the list.

“The very first four days of school, we’ve re-prioritized to really focus on the connections, relationships and school-wide expectations for behavior, for academics, for everything,” said Kari Granier, SMS assistant principal, adding that all of the students in both seventh- and eighth-grade go through a variety of different team building opportunities. “The goal is to get them to connect — to find adult mentors as well as other students that they might not have met before, and to try to build those connections with common interests.”

Throughout the 2018-2019 school year, Lake Pend Oreille School District’s former superintendent Shawn Woodward invited each school to present at a board meeting, also recognizing outstanding students for their achievements. Now, with a new superintendent and a new school year, the recognition is once again underway as Granier and SMS Principal Casey McLaughlin outlined the four SMS goals during the Oct. 8 meeting.

In addition to creating a positive culture, the other three goals include excellent teaching and learning, focusing on four critical questions, and working toward standards-based grading in professional learning communities.

In regards to the latter, working toward standards-based grading, McLaughlin said they have partially adopted it this year in elective classes, with a full implementation slated for next year throughout the core curriculum.

“The idea of standards-based grading is that you are giving students more feedback than you necessarily would with percentage-based grading,” McLaughlin said, adding that they use a four-point scale. “So we take a specific standard and if the student is performing that standard at an extremely high level ... they can earn a four. A three is really at grade-level, a two would be you are almost there, and a one would be you are not there yet.”

While that is the basic idea of standards-based grading, McLaughlin said it is a “big” subject.

The four critical questions are part of PLCs and are something McLaughlin said is something the school “really” focuses on. The questions are: What is it we want our students to learn? How will we know if each student has learned it? How will we respond when some students do not learn it? How can we extend and enrich the learning for students who have demonstrated proficiency?

McLaughlin highlighted question three, because the school has built in a third period each day that gives the students a half hour to get the help they need. Around 100 students a day participate in the program, he said.

“We set a yearly goal to make sure that 98 percent of the students get to the spot where they are supposed to be,” McLaughlin said.

There is also a program called ZAP, where the students come in at lunchtime to get some help and get their work done. It is required if the student has a zero, McLaughlin said, but once they turn in their assignment they are free to go. Some of the other things that have been implemented as they work on the four main goal include a weekly vlog by McLaughlin and Granier that is posted to the school’s Facebook page to increase communication, the implementation of “incentive days” where students are rewarded with fun activities, and behavior grades that are sent to parents to show on a scale of one through four where their child is at and what they need to work on before the quarterly report cards come out.

“It’s creating a lot of really good dialogue,” Granier said of the behavior grades. “So we are just trying to make the kids a little bit more accountable and also increase communication with families.”

SMS students who were recognized by the board for their academic achievement during the meeting are Antonio Medina-Lopez, Bettilynn Travers, Calie Bailey, Casey Higgins, Destiny Gardner, Emmett Lowman, Fiona Macdonald, Grace Moore, Haiely Fisher, Hunter Garcia, Ivy Smith, Jaden Peratos, Jett Longanecker, John Pranaitis, Larissa Lippert, Leonardo Stotts, Megan Howerton, Nevaeh Hines, Noah Darrin, Sara Hogue, Sarah Mendum, Threnody Hammond and Via Vachon. The 23 students were chosen for the recognition by SMS officials as they were the school’s students of the month for September for academic honors.

“Each one of these students has done an incredible job with really coming in and getting right to work,” McLaughlin said. “... In my fifth year at the middle school, we are definitely off to the best start that we’ve ever had. We have an incredibly strong group of students who are very dedicated to doing the right thing, and we are really excited to have them all.”

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.