By Greg Denecker, Bluffton schools superintendent

Note: The winter school district newsletter was mailed earlier this week. Here is the lead column by Superintendent Denecker. The entire newsletter is avialable in an attachment at the bottom of this story.

I think we are all hoping for some warmer weather and looking forward to spring! Delays and cancellations have wreaked havoc on many families' schedules, so the hope is that better weather is right around the corner.

Current weather disruptions aside, the first semester went very well, and it is hard to believe that we are already into the last week of January. Our students and staff continue to work very hard to keep our district's perfomnance index on assessments in the top 6% of all schools in the state.

In order for our district to be prepared for the new assessments being rolled out in the 2014-2015 school year, we were granted a Race to the Top Grant four years ago. The
2013-2014 school year marks the last year for our district's implementation of the new standards and preparation for the new state assessments beginning 2014-2015.

Thanks to the Race to the Top Grant, we received $25,000 annually for four years, which helped with the purchase of student response systems ("clickers") at various grade levels.

These monies also helped absorb the cost of staff development for our Race to the Top Transformation Leadership Team. This team, made up of teachers and administrators, has done an outstanding job of creating and offering professional development opportunities for our staff in preparation for the new assessments.

In particular, this group has worked to emphasize formative instructional practices (FIP) in order to transition students to the state's new learning standards. Formative assessments
allow teachers to more specifically focus on students' leaming needs and to be able to implement remediation strategies that will aid students in being as successful as possible.

The new state assessments will be more challenging and will demand increased critical thinking skills among students. Our district will be a pilot school this spring for some of these new assessments; fortunately, this will give us some initial insight into these tests.

Also as part of the Race to the Top Grant, the 2013-2014 school year is the first for the new Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES). Our teachers and principals have been working hard at implementing this time-consuming and rigorous evaluation system. OTES is based on a combination of teacher performance standards and student growth measures.

The teacher performance standards consist of formal classroom observations and walk-throughs/informal observations, as well as a pre-conference, post-conference,
and complete perfomnance rubric.

The student growth measures include a variety of elements which seek to quantify student growth from one year to the next. Some of these growth measurements will be derived from the State Ohio Achievement Assessments that are given in Math and Language Arts in grades 3-8. Obtaining the growth measures for other academic areas is something that our district will be working on in order to obtain the complete student-growth measure per teacher. The system is not perfect, but we are working hard to make the system as effective as possible.

In other news, the district would like to thank Larry Eikenbary for his 15+ years of dedication to our district and Ned Niswander for his 35 years of service. Both of these
custodians made outstanding contributions to our district. They will be missed, and we wish them each a happy retirement.

In closing, thank you for being supportive of our school district, and as I have said many times, we have such great parents, students, staff, and community members that it is an honor to be a part of this school system.

Please contact me with any questions or concems about the district. Either stop in or call me at 419-358-5901.