11/4/2022
I apologize for not getting a letter out to all of you last month. To say October was crazy was an understatement. The first full week of October was our Homecoming week. This week was very well planned out. Several groups contributed to the success of this week, including The Crew, Student Council, Prairie Pride, several teachers, and student volunteers. We ended the week with a huge Pep Rally. It was amazing to see all of our students cheering and laughing with each other. I am pretty sure I have a couple extra grey hairs after the homecoming games. Those were great games! So proud of all of our athletes for their contributions to their team.
I was honored to be one of the judges for the FFA speaking night. We have so many talented students, public speaking isn't easy even though they made it look effortless. Several of these students went on to compete at a higher level and were awarded medals.
Along with all of the activities I have been working on preparing data for our UIP. That stands for Unified Improvement Plan. This is due to our District's framework rating from the state. When I was hired I was told that Prairie was a school of distinction. This is not the case. After our framework was released by the state earlier this year, I contacted them to learn about our rating as I felt it was an error due to the information I had been told. Our rating is not an error. We are rated as Not Enough Data, which automatically puts us on an Improvement Plan. Prairie has not been rated as a school of distinction since 2019.
The information I was given was that Prairie has been on an Improvement Plan since 2020. The School Board was unaware of this as were the teachers. This rating is due to the lack of participation on CMAS tests. The students who did test for the previous years performed at grade level expectations. This however has no bearing on our rating if too many families opt their children out. We have to hit a minimum participation level percentage for our student's scores to be relevant in our framework.
I worked in October on collecting as much data on our student's performance as I could. This will enable me to prove to the state that "we" are doing our job at the school to educate your children. The data desegregating process takes time and I along with a couple other teachers are working on pulling apart this data and entering it into the state's system.
Once we have completed all of this, we will present it to our District's Accountability Committee as well as the School Board. After this, it will be publicly posted on the state's website. In the meantime if you have any questions on this process please feel free to contact me at the school. I am more than happy to take time to discuss this with you.
We are Mustangs! We are Prairie!
Yours in Education,
Ms. Dana Jo Unruh