Baldrige shining through

Dr. Tod Kline, Superintendent, Waynesboro Area School District submitted the following. Comments or questions should be emailed to Dr. Kline at [email protected]

The Waynesboro Area School District (WASD) hasn’t faced the challenges of our health care providers, but the road could have been much tougher and bumpier without our focus on performance excellence.

Our vision is to be First Choice in education for our parents, community, and staff. The vision is also that learners will realize their First Choice in a career or next step following graduation. We have processes and measurements in place to better understand our stakeholders’ needs in order to help achieve First Choice. This pandemic situation is helping us to become better at cyber learning and customizing education for each learner. That is the purpose of our Baldrige Journey.

At the beginning of the school closure, we took the first two weeks and remotely trained our teachers and paraprofessionals (teacher aides and student assistants) to navigate several learning and teaching models used to provide distance learning for students. During those two weeks, we followed our vision and leadership model devise a plan (approach-ADLI) to do online learning. Unfortunately, WASD was not a device-per-learner district, but was a device-per-learner in from grades 6-10. The district officials did a phone survey to determine how many students had a device at home and what mode of instruction (packets or electronic) families could maneuver. Weeks three and four of the closure WASD provided an Enrichment Approach for our Continuity of Education Plan. We provided laptops to secondary students during strategically planned pick-up times (deployment) and with our food service times to save families trips from home (integration). We also provided a Planned Instruction Approach that provides actual learning and teacher connected opportunities. We are using the data to track learner engagement (learning), which is slightly better than 50%. We believe the governor’s announcement that students would automatically advance to the next grade level is a contributing factor. Nevertheless, we continue to monitor and work with parents to improve learning for all students.

Send examples of how your Baldrige is shining through to Bob Bitner at [email protected]