Philomath High School is launching a school improvement plan designed to strengthen faculty and staff recruitment and retention, improve communication with stakeholders and increase student engagement and safety.
Principal Mark Henderson outlined the plan for Philomath School Board members at the board’s Monday meeting.
Henderson said the three-year plan comes in the wake of needs assessments by both the school’s administrative team and its faculty and work involving the school’s leadership team.
He said those efforts identified “the big three areas” that required the most work:
- Strengthening recruitment and retention and improving the process to onboard new teachers. “Right now, we have a very veteran staff,” Henderson said. “We don’t have a problem with retention. But we are going to see some significant retirements over the next two to five years. And right now we don’t have a good onboarding program at the high school.” A survey of faculty and staff planned for next spring will help start that work.
- Improving communication with stakeholders. For example, he said he’d like to find ways to better advertise opportunities such as his regular “Chat with the Principal” sessions: “At a previous school district, we did ‘Chat with the Principal’ and it was very successful. I’m finding it hard to get it off the ground here and I’m not sure exactly why.”
- Ensuring that students feel safe and supported and are engaged at the school. The goal, he said, is to have 80% of students reporting in an annual survey that they feel safe, that they feel they belong and are engaged with the school and its activities.
The school has work to do to meet those goals, Henderson said. For example, in last year’s survey, 73% of the respondents said they felt safe at school, 62% said they felt engaged and 47% said they felt they belonged.
One key metric that could drive engagement, Henderson said, is the percentage of students who participate in sports, clubs or other extracurricular activities. The school is aiming to get 75% of its students involved in some way in those activities.
“It’s a big reach,” he told the board.
In fact, he said, if you add all the students participating in winter sports and add the students in clubs and activities, the percentage of students involved hits 59%, and that’s probably high, because it assumes there’s no crossover between athletics and other activities, which is unlikely.
Henderson also outlined a program intended to encourage regular attendance at the school. Under the program, students who miss one day of school or less each month earn a Warrior Attendance Award card which can be redeemed for a variety of rewards — items such as food, water bottles or Warrior gear.
A particularly popular reward, Henderson said, is the ability to take “extended lunches” at the school. The school’s schedule has a 25-minute “advisory period” between third period and lunchtime, in which students can get help from teachers in classes where they may be struggling. Students with a 3.0 GPA can skip the advisory period and add that to their lunch time — and students with one attendance award card can claim a week of extended lunches.
Early signs are promising, Henderson said: The percentage of students who attended more than 90% of school days during this school year’s first trimester was 76.3%, up from the 70% mark the school had in the 2023-24 school year.
Also at the meeting:
• The board voted 3-2 in a paper ballot against an Oregon School Boards Association resolution to create a caucus devoted to the needs to LGBTQIA+ students, staff and board members. The proposal could yet pass, since it must be voted on by every OSBA member school board. The Oregon School Board Members Pride Caucus, if approved, would join two other OSBA caucuses — one is devoted to the needs of rural school districts and the other focuses on issues regarding students, staff and board members of color. The board did vote for another association resolution to increase association dues by 15% per year for five years and then tie dues to the Consumer Price Index every year thereafter. If that dues resolution is approved statewide, it would boost Philomath’s OSBA dues next school year to $2,878 from $2,503.
• Superintendent Susan Halliday said Gov. Tina Kotek’s recommended budget for the 2025-27 budget cycle calls for spending $11.4 billion on public schools, an increase that covers some of the additional expenses from the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System that school districts will have to pay. Kotek’s budget is just the first word — legislators will start crafting their own budget when they convene for the 2025 session in January — but “we kind of got a win” in Kotek’s budget, Halliday said.
