Gwinnett County Public Schools began work on its next 10-year strategy document Tuesday with the first of five area board meetings.
The document, which will give the state’s largest school system direction for the 2020s, will replace a similar document formed in 2010. Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks said the older document set the stage for a successful decade, and he expects the same from the product that will replace it.
The system not only is the largest in the state, it is one of the most diverse, but it still competes nationally for honors. Those honors, including twice winning the Broad Prize for the nation’s best urban school district, came because the system followed its plan formulated a decade ago.
“The school district made progress educating all students, and I do mean all students,” he said.
Tuesday’s meeting at Discovery High School, the county’s newest high school, included students, parents and educators from the Berkmar and Meadowcreek clusters of schools as well. Those two clusters are among the most diverse in Gwinnett.
That wasn’t lost on Pam Buckland, a veteran middle school teacher in the Meadowcreek Cluster. Buckland began teaching there in the middle 1990s, when the schools had a solid white majority of students. Within a few years, the student population spoke many languages and came from a vast array of cultures.
“We were learning how to teach a different population,” she said. “They didn’t speak our language, and few of the adults at home had any education beyond middle school. “These students came to us without previous knowledge. That scenario plays out every week at each school in the Meadowcreek Cluster.”
Buckland called for the board to make recruiting and retaining quality teachers for those schools a priority in the next decade’s strategy. She was concerned about a new teacher pay plan designed to reward teachers who produce high-achieving students. Instead, she urged a plan that would reward students for the improvement in their students.
“Students come to us two or three or four years below grade level,” she said.
Wilbanks said measuring student progress will be one of the important parts of the next strategy document. “We want to make sure we are giving appropriate assessments,” he said. “We want to make sure students are learning at the expected level.”
The county system will continue to make sure its teachers are put in the best position to be effective.
“We believe in helping our people succeed,” he said. High expectations are the starting point for that success. “We also want our students to be critical thinkers,” he said. “We encourage our students to take more rigorous courses.”
He noted only about 2 percent of the system’s students face discipline beyond the classroom level. “We would like that to be zero, but I am not sure that in my lifetime that is going to happen,” he said.
The system will continue to collect information at four more area meetings this spring, then will review that information starting at the end of summer. It hopes to have a final strategy document in place by the end of the 2018-19 school year.
The other area meetings will be:
* Thursday at Peachtree Ridge High School
* April 11 at Collins Hill High School
* April 13 at South Gwinnett High School
* April 18 at Grayson High School
