In an update to the district, Santa Fe R-10 Superintendent Derek Lark praised students, parents, faculty and staff for their efforts to get through the first semester without a closure despite COVID-19.
Lark says, “I am incredibly grateful for this fact and am confident that our students have been the benefactors educationally, emotionally and socially; and I hope that our community and families have benefited from this as well by maintaining as much normalcy as possible.”
As for COVID updates, Lark reported the district presently has only two students quarantined (on Thursday, December 17), both as a result of contact outside of school, with zero positive cases. For the month of December, Santa Fe High School has averaged 95.15 percent attendance, and the elementary has averaged 93.10 percent.
Lark says, “These attendance stats are encouraging as we poise for the second half of our school year. On behalf of the Santa Fe staff, we would like to thank our parents and patrons for your support in educating the youth of Santa Fe.”
Academically, Lark says the state board of education recently approved the State Department of Education’s (DESE) plan for state assessments in the spring. There was much discussion about this in the education world as the validity of this data to be used as comparable to prior/future years was compromised by school closures. The plan approved by the state board is that the assessments will be given to provide analytic data, but that the results will not be used in accountability measures for school districts.
Lark says, “One must say that it will be interesting to see the impact that school closures, distance learning and hybrid/part time schedules have had on the academic gains of K-12 students. At Santa Fe, we use a ‘bench marking’ program called Evaluate to measure our K-8 students’ academic progress throughout the year in Math and English/Language Arts, enabling our staff to monitor and respond to either mastery of selected standards or opportunities for growth. Overall, I am very satisfied with the academic progress being made this year.”