TVEMS Principal Teresa Brusak makes a power point presentation for Tucker County BOE members during a meeting at TVEMS.
HAMBLETON – The Tucker County Board of Education completed its series of meetings in the county schools with a meeting held at Tucker Valley Elementary Middle School. TVEMS Principal Teresa Brusak said the focus is to improve education.
“We are focusing on our goals,” Brusak said. “This year, we are targeting in on our goals. Each grade is keying in on their two or three biggest problems with comprehension and keying in on those. That has made our goals more specific.”
Brusak said they are working to have students take ownership of their learning.
“With that, we are using data notebooks,” she said. “We want the kids to realize what is affecting their grades adversely. We are starting with baby steps. All of the data notebooks have two steps – what do the students want to do and what do they want to accomplish while they are in school? As they learn more about goals, we hope they will focus in on what they want to learn.”
Brusak said the students are marking down their benchmark goals and seeing if they achieved those goals and comparing them with others in the state.
“The teachers have the students looking at their goals to keep it in mind to see if they are achieving the goals and where they are going with it. Along with that, I have been writing the students letters. The first time it was with students who were in urgent intervention areas. I told them where they were and asked them to bump it up and see what they could do to help themselves do better,” she said.
This quarter, Brusak said she wrote letters to the kids who are right below mastery.
“I asked them what they could do to bump up their test scores,” Brusak said. “We want to open the lines of communications. Some of the students shared those with their parents and I received some calls from parents asking me to explain what the notes meant.”
Brusak shared benchmark scores for the students showing most of the grades had scored better on their benchmark scores in math and English language arts.
