Director's Message5/13/03

     Parents, teachers, school administrators, and community members often work ndividually to contribute to the education of our children and improve and enrich their lives. In DoDDS Pacific, the school improvement process is designed to combine those individual efforts and collectively focus the entire school community on improving instruction, increasing learning for all students, and documenting improved student performance in order to meet Goals 1 Highest Student Achievement and 4 Network of Partnerships Promoting Achievement of the Community Strategic Plan.

     The School Improvement Team (SIT) leads the improvement process in each of our schools. SIT members include the principal, teachers, parents, a local military commander representative, and at high schools and many middle schools, a student representative. The responsibilities of the SIT are to provide leadership throughout the entire school improvement process, to maintain constant community focus on improving student learning, and to monitor progress and document change in student performance.

     Although leadership is provided by the SIT, responsibility for the development, implementation, and evaluation of a School Improvement Plan (SIP) rests with all teachers and all parents in the school. Parents and teachers serve on committees, such as technology and school-home-community partnership, that support school improvement.

     The community reviews and revises the existing school’s mission statement which is used to identify the essential knowledge that the school community believes is most important to develop within students. The school collects, organizes, and analyzes school data to identify student improvement goals. The data contains student performance indicators from system wide and local assessments; survey data from students, former students, parents, and teachers; as well as information about instructional practices in the school. The school develops and implements a SIP which includes student performance goal statements, indicators of success, assessment tools, staff development plans, a set of powerful interventions to be implemented during the five-year school improvement cycle, and a process for monitoring and documenting changes in student learning.

     School improvement in DoDDS Pacific focuses our schools and communities on improving instruction and increasing learning for all students. As a result of this and other system initiatives, we are able to provide a quality education that achieves the goals set forth in the Community Strategic Plan and leads to future success for all students. Those who work on the School Improvement Teams have earned our thanks, for they are the people who help us to keep the focus on what we are all about – improving education of our children.

Nancy C. Bresell
Director, DoDDS Pacific