By Jeremy Weldon

A concerted effort by the trustees of the South Panola School District to provide teachers with better instructional resources and students with access to online classwork help has resulted in remarkable progress in student assessment scores and overall state Accountability Ratings, according to Superintendent Tim Wilder.

“In 2016 five out of our six schools were D’s,” Wilder told trustees at their regular meeting last week. “At that time we made a commitment to providing our teachers with the resources they needed to achieve these academic results.”

Wilder said the district office received preliminary scores from the state’s annual Accountability Rating for each of the state’s school districts last week. Because of embargo restrictions until after the state school board meets in September to review and approve the ratings, Wilder can not discuss the score that South Panola will be assigned, but did tell board members that he thinks they will be “very pleased” when the official grades are made public.

South Panola is currently a B plus school district, and administrators are anxious to see if efforts at all schools in the past year were enough to give the district an A score this year.  The credit for the district’s improvement can be attributed mostly, Wilder said, to the teachers and their dedication to boosting classroom instruction to a higher level.

“At this point, in year seven of my being at South Panola, I really believe we have some teachers who are the best in the state,” Wilder said. “As good as iReady is, it’s the teachers that make this work. The teachers are what drive this train, and it’s up to us as administrators and board members to give them the tools they need.”

The district has made an investment of almost $1 million dollars for Chromebook laptops for classrooms in recent years. Combined with the iReady program that is used in most of the district’s classrooms, that investment has continued to pay off with increased performance on the standardized tests the district administers for the Mississippi Department of Education.

School trustee Lygunnah Bean agreed with Wilder’s report. “I’ve been involved with the school board for over 20 years and I’ve seen it all, but I’ve never seen anything  as successful as iReady has been,” he said.

Wilder said every student in the district that scores in the bottom 25 percentile on tests, the most at-risk students for failure or dropout, now receives diagnostic testing and instructional intervention that sets a learning pathway individually tailored for each student.

The Accountability Rating system assigns schools grades A – F each year using a wide range of qualifiers, including ACT scores, number and type of accelerated courses offered, growth of pupils in the lower 25 percent of assessment scores, dual enrollment courses available, among other factors.

In other business, the school board heard an update on several construction projects, including the new multi-use indoor practice facility. Although the fieldhouse and facility are open and in use there are several “punch list” items that need to be completed before final paperwork can be completed on that project.

The indoor facility has minor roof issues, some trim work is still needed, and decorative murals of the five former South Panola Tigers football players who went to the NFL are not yet installed inside.

Over the summer break the district spend considerable funds remodeling bathrooms at both the Batesville Junior High School and Pope School. Additionally the original Pope School building walls and doors were repainted providing a much-needed facelift. Other bathroom work has been planned for the Intermediate School.

“We have been spending a significant amount of money on upgrades but it’s work that needed to be done and it’s worth the investment,” Wilder said. “When our students walk into their school they need to feed good, and when they go to the bathroom it needs to a nice restroom for them to use.”

Other infrastructure work recently completed includes new parking lot paving at the Intermediate School and Pope School, and air conditioning of the Jr. High gym. With that project completed, all of the gyms in the district are now air conditioned.

“We have a lot of rooms and buildings and if you don’t do some work on a very frequent basis you can get behind. It’s something  we always have an eye on,” Wilder said.

He said the high school track is ready for resurfacing, but that project will likely be put off until the next summer break because so many students use the football field and adjacent practice facility during the school year the logistics of completing the work would be difficult for contractors to manage