Jan 19, 2022

St. Joseph School District Vision Forward committee calling for community help

Posted Jan 19, 2022 5:52 PM
Photo provided by the St. Joseph School District
Photo provided by the St. Joseph School District

By MATT PIKE

St. Joseph Post

A St. Joseph School District committee is working hard with community members to solve problems within St. Joseph public schools.

The committee is called Vision Forward, and its purpose is to give the community a chance to give feedback on its biggest concerns for the school district.

Committee co-chair Teresa Simmons says through all the meetings with parents and community members, everything centers around one main goal.

"We're talking about directions that parents of students, what their concerns are with their students in the classrooms," Simmons tells Barry Birr on the KFEQ Hotline. "Everything that we do and all the suggestions that we come up with are supposed to be designed to improve the education of our students in the classroom."

Committee Co-Chair Bob Miller says, as a parent who has been a member of the district for years, he knows everyone has suggestions of what they would fix. His hope is that people coming to these meetings take the time to learn what is feasible.

"Folks will come, yes they might come with some passionate opinions about some different things, but I think as we take in more information that there would just be a greater sense of compassion maybe, and understanding of these are complex and complicated topics that are not easy to remedy," Miller says.

Miller says a growing problem has been the number of students in the classroom, with the number of students continually dropping.

"The fact is we're losing students. We've lost about 1,000 students over the last five or six years in our district," Miller explains. "And that creates some challenges. We have empty seats. We have buildings that are not fully to capacity."

The Vision Forward committee will hold a series of four community meetings over the spring semester, the first on Jan. 25 at Word of Life Church in St. Joseph.

Following the four sessions, the committee will bring all suggestions to a creative team that will then bring options back to Vision Forward to present to the district to be implemented during the new school year.

You can find out more information about the community engagement meetings HERE.