Bolden: Student performance in Solon City Schools remains at high level

SOLON, Ohio – With few exceptions, data that reflects student performance across grade levels in the Solon City Schools this academic year is closely aligned with the district’s data from 2019-20.

“That is really great news, because what that’s saying to us is by and large, our kids have been successful in learning (during the coronavirus pandemic),” Superintendent Fred Bolden told the Solon Board of Education Monday (April 12).

Bolden said that information was shared as part of the district’s extended learning plan, which each Ohio school district was required to submit to the Ohio Department of Education by April 1.

Gov. Mike DeWine called on school districts to create these plans to assess the impact on students caused by pandemic-related disruptions.

The entire Solon Schools’ plan is available on the district’s website, solonschools.org.

The Solon Schools consistently have ranked among Ohio’s top school districts. In 2019, the district earned the state’s No. 1 school report card for student achievement for the fifth consecutive year.

“One of the things that I think is the hallmark of our district, at least in this year, was that we never stopped live instruction that was adjusted based on student performance data,” Bolden said.

“We looked to see how the students were doing, we made adjustments to our instruction, and from the beginning of the school year until now, those students have been working with live teachers. Either in person or virtually, they always got live instruction.”

Bolden noted live instruction has several benefits over models that other school districts may have used that are more asynchronous, in which the students are learning on their own.

“It enables our teachers to give direct, focused instruction to students when they need it, either virtually or in person,” he said. “It enables us to adjust in real time what our instructional delivery models are.

“As a district, we’ve continued to assess our kids and hold them accountable for the work that they are doing.”

State testing began last week for students, so the district will be getting “externally valid measures” to see how students have done, Bolden said.

“The other thing that we do in our district is we intervene with kids in real time when we see that they aren’t being successful,” he said.

“Our goal as a district with our extended learning plan is to use those tools that we have in place to adjust the instruction to help those kids catch up where they need to in real time, so that they don’t necessarily have to have a special program to have that catch-up because it’s going to happen directly embedded with the instruction.”

Families have made it clear to the district that this has been a very stressful year for students, Bolden said.

“So our plan is to just use our traditional summer programs that we already have in reading and math that we normally have for our kids that need them,” he said.

“Our goal is when we start next year, we will have been able to analyze all of our student data that we’ve gotten from internal tests, as well as our external measures, so that we will be able to adjust the curriculum so that everybody gets where they need to be.”

Bolden said Assistant Superintendent Debbie Siegel and her team worked “incredibly hard” on the extended learning plan.

“Debbie’s plan is, as usual, incredibly thorough, and we really think it’s going to meet the needs of all our kids,” he said. “I think it’s a solid plan, and I think it reflects the hard work that everybody has been doing and will continue to do.”

Board Vice President Leanne Moses said she saw the plan and noted it was “quite extensive.”

“I think the fact that we have been able to maintain our standards throughout this incredibly difficult year is a testament to Mrs. Siegel and the entire staff, as well as to our community and our families who have all worked so hard every day making the best decisions for our students,” Moses said.

Siegel thanked Tammy Strom, the district’s communications director, for helping the district put together the plan.

“I also really want to thank our principals and teachers because it’s their flexibility, their real-time learning and their real-time intervening for us as adults that really helped this become possible,” she said.

“They’ve made lots of changes continually this year to meet our students where they are and to help all of our students, whether they were in person or virtual. So I really want to recognize all of them for all of their efforts.”

Bolden said the district does not anticipate any feedback from the Ohio Department of Education on the plan.

“They asked us to share a link to our plan with the state, and on the (Ohio Department of Education) website there is a directory of every district’s extended learning plan so that people can go to the website, click on it and see what the plan is,” he said. “It’s really more of the governor’s call to make sure that we’re communicating to our families how we are addressing their kids and going through it.

“If you go online to look, the plans run the gamut from something like ours to a single sheet that basically says, ‘Here are the things that we are doing.’”

‘The vaccines are working’

Bolden said the district has had a successful return from the spring and Easter weekend breaks in terms of COVID-19 cases.

“Although we are experiencing a slight uptick in cases, our case data is still well below what it was earlier in the year following other school breaks,” he said.

Since April 2, seven students in the district have tested positive for COVID-19, Bolden said.

“This week we had one case of a virtual student but still no staff cases (since the return from spring break),” he said. “The vaccines clearly are working and doing their job, so that we can stay staffed and keep kids in school.”

Bolden said more than one-third of Solon High School students who are eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine are in the process of doing so, and the “vast majority” of the rest are anxious to get vaccinated. That refers to students in grades 10-12 who are 16 or older, he said.

“So we’re having more kids getting vaccinated, and things are opening up more,” he said. “It’s very exciting.”

Retirements approved

In other action, the board approved the retirement of Susan Armentrout, third-grade teacher at Parkside Elementary School, effective Aug. 1. Armentrout has worked in the district 33 years.

“Sue Armentrout is an absolutely fabulous educator, and she will be sorely missed,” Bolden said.

The board also approved the retirements of Thomas Pinizzotto, a bus driver for Solon City Schools for 12 years, and Eileen Siebert, a secretary at Lewis Elementary School who has worked in the district 26 years. Both are effective July 1.

The board’s next meeting will be at 6 p.m. April 26.