By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
The St. Joseph Board of Education is looking forward to the future of the school district after being presented the plan from the Vision Forward committee.
The board approved the plan brought forward from the committee during last week's monthly school board meeting.
Superintendent Gabe Edgar says the plan brought forward from the committee aligned right along with his goals for the school district.
"It did a very good job of focusing on what my goals are on the academic side, it talked a lot about improving academics pre-K through 12, it talked a lot about expansion of early learning, it talked a lot about discipline, which are three of my goals," Edgar tells KFEQ Hotline host Barry Birr. "And so, it has easy to tie into that."
Edgar says the committee did a very good job of navigating topics with the community and gearing the plan towards St. Joseph.
The School Board is composed of many different committees aimed at school improvement. Edgar says the Vision Forward plan added a need for two new committees
"There were two things that came out of Vision Forward that were not part of the committee structure and so right after we approved the plan, then we approved an implementation plan to put in two more committees, one of those wrapping around school culture and the other one wrapping around recruiting and retaining quality staff," Edgar says.
Edgar says normally committees will meet every month; however, he says the committee focused on teacher recruitment will meet at designated periods when needed.
Along with the passage of Vision Forward, was the passage of the Pathway to Teaching program. Edgar says this is similar to the build your own program
"Right now, we have a grow your own program for high school kids but this will be for internal people, and actually maybe even external people it probably needs to grow to that," Edgar explains. "We have to do more of that type of stuff thinking outside the box in order to recruit quality staff."
The program aims to recruit people in St. Joseph with a teaching degree to come teach at St. Joseph schools. Edgar says the goal currently is to hire 10 new teachers.
"So, we're going to start out with 10 and I think that will probably grow, we identified 16 or 17 staff members that we have now, and they don't all want to become teachers, but some of them do," Edgar says.
Edgar says currently the program is only aimed internally, but in thinking outside the box it could eventually go external to recruit teachers from other jobs.