GRANBY — With the 2024 school year on the horizon, interim Superintendent Mary Jane Rickson, along with members of leadership teams across the Granby school district, came together to implement a plan for growth at the Aug. 13 School Committee meeting.
Jennifer Bartosz, chair of the School Committee, opened with the goals of the meeting being the district’s hopes for the 2024-25 school year. Including, but not limited to, updated school handbooks to reflect the updates in the Title IX policy, changes in upcoming curriculum as well as additional support for their before and after school programs.
Rickson shared recent changes that have been made to the Title IX policy effective Aug. 1. In light of this, the council voted a unanimous “yes” to update the student handbooks across the district to better inform teachers and students alike on the recent changes to Title IX. This includes updating what kind of discrimination falls under the policy as well as changing the definition from the term “sexual harassment” to “sex-based harassment.”
Rickson also shared in her report that she and the administration team had a summer retreat from July 31 to Aug. 1 to discuss the plan for the upcoming school year in regard to changes in curriculum.
“Our focus continues to work on the Strategic Plan as it relates to teaching and learning. Our focus will be high-quality instruction supporting teachers and using data that they have to effectively target instruction. We established a shared understanding of what instructional strategies allow for rigorous engaging and powerful learning experiences and set appropriate grade level or content area learning targets that consistently monitor progress,” said Rickson.
Another update Rickson reported was the district’s recent opportunity to expand on their before and after-school programs, thanks to grants they received.
“We’re excited to announce that we received the 21st after-school grant in the amount of $210,000 to support our after-school programs. We worked with the Collaborative for CES for Educational Services to provide before-school care from 7:15 to 8:15 [a.m.] and then after-school care from 2:45 to 5:30 [p.m.] every day,” said Rickson.
Director of Finance and Operations Todd Dorman shared how the financial and operational side of the district is currently overcoming the adversity of a lack of resources.
“Other good news that I would say is even though we have been short-staffed with our maintenance and custodial team; they’ve done a great job in preparing our buildings. The elementary school is just about ready to go for final touch-ups. The high school has a couple of rooms and hallways to finish up, but they got us ready to go they did a great job. Congratulations to them,” said Dorman.
