Gemeinschaftliche Aktualisierungen, April 8, 2025

Jede Woche teilt Superintendent Wendy Dau ein Video-Update mit der Provo-City-Gemeinde und gibt wichtige Neuigkeiten und Einblicke in den Provo City School District. Schalten Sie jede Woche ein, um über alle wichtigen Ereignisse und Entwicklungen in unseren Schulen informiert zu bleiben.

Hello, Provo City. I am Superintendent Dau from the Provo City School District. Today is Tuesday, April 8th. We hope all of you had a fantastic spring break, even though the weather did not cooperate nearly as much as we wanted it to. But we hope you enjoy time with friends and family and were able to relax.

We want to give a big shout out to Assistant Principal Des Olson. She is an assistant principal at Edgemont Elementary. She was awarded the assistant principal of the year for the State of Utah by the Utah Elementary Principals Association. She was honored yesterday at an assembly. And they recognize the great work that she’s doing, so we just want to give her a big shout out.

We also want to recognize this week’s Provo Way Award winner Debbie Burnside Dewey. She is a special ed coordinator and she is just a rockstar. She was nominated by principal Sean Edwards from Canyon Crest, and he really talks about her as being a great thought partner, a constant collaborator, and a true advocate for students.

We are so lucky to have these individuals in our buildings who, who support us. We had a great all day board meeting. I know that’s hard to believe that that would be a great meeting. But that was held on Friday, March 28th. I would encourage you to go back and identify specific topics that may be of interest to you and maybe listen to those discussions.

One of the discussions that was had during that board meeting was about our CAS program, which is our elementary gifted and talented magnet program that we currently have at Sunset View and Provo Peaks elementaries to start looking at how we can improve the services that we provide to our gifted and talented students and what that, what that might look like.

The board has asked that committee to start putting together two different options. One would be to continue a magnet program, but how are we going to actually make sure that we’re meeting the needs of our gifted and talented students or data show that we’re not sufficiently meeting the needs of these students, even in that magnet program.

And there’s more that can be done there. A lot of that is just we need to make sure that we’re providing the right supports to our teachers and making sure that people know what, what we want, what, what do we want the results to be of this particular program? And be really clear about what our goals are.

We haven’t done that so far, and so we need to be better with that. We’ve also talked about the option of providing gifted and talented services at every neighborhood, elementary school. What would that look like? What are the funding differences that that would mean? And so we’re gonna be looking at those two proposals, and so you can go through and look at that at board meeting if that interests you.

We also talked about Dual Language Immersion. Some of the different challenges that we have with dual language immersion and the stresses that it puts on different schools. We talked about some of the survey data that came out from our Dual Language Immersion parents and shared that with everyone.

We do want to also share a survey with our parents that are in our Dual language Immersion schools, whose students are not enrolled in the Dual Immersion program to look at what their experience overall has been. So we have more data to gather in this process and we’re gonna put together a subcommittee that’s gonna start examining this so that we can have a recommendation in place if, if we were to make any changes or whatever that might look like, to be more efficient with our resources, make sure the programming that we’re providing is high quality, and respond and responsive in terms of, you know, we’re spending tax dollars appropriately.

And so we wanna have that in place by December of 2025. We also had a very extensive discussion about our budget planning process for the 2025/2026 school year. We shared data from employees who indicated that salary is their most important priority. We also talked a lot about how much it costs to reduce class sizes by a significant amount, specifically at certain grade levels.

We will have further breakdowns of this data. We talked about are there differences in terms of the overall cost to educate a DLI student versus a non DLI student? But what are the other types of costs that come in? Like us we’re providing interventions, for example, for student that might be behind, or what does that look like?

So we’re really trying to examine all of these different pieces as we prioritize our budget and, and looking at really truly making Provo a destination district. And we know that we’re gonna do that by providing an excellent academic environment for our students, a safe environment for our students, a rigorous environment for our students where they’re growing.

Like our goal is I want every kid to be growing more than a grade level’s worth in a year, you know? And so what does that look like in, in the process? And how do we how do we ensure that? And how do we ensure that we have the best teachers in front of each classroom, that’s gonna be one of the things that we need to focus on in helping our teachers feel supported and effective, and valued.

So all of these things are things that we are taking into account. We’ll also have some comparisons at a later board meeting about our class sizes versus other school districts. And when our meeting minutes get posted, you’ll notice that this conversation took place in the last hour of board meeting.

We would encourage you to listen to it and that we have further discussions that are coming up. Our budget has to be in place by June, and so we can’t do everything that we want to do. But we do need to prioritize and, and determine what kinds of things that we need to make choices about so that we can be responsible with the funds that we have available, ensure that our employees are compensated appropriately, but also ensure high quality educational outcomes for all of our students.

We know that we have lots of great programs in Provo City School District, but those programs also come at a cost sometimes too. That means class sizes can be larger. What does that look like? So those conversations are happening during that particular discussion, and we would encourage you to also tune in to later board meetings for all of that as well.

I want to thank those of you that reached out to the State Board of Education that were concerned about a resolution that was considered and was going to be adopted or that was up for proposal to be adopted that may have impacted significantly programs like Latinos in Action or Peoples of the Pacific multicultural assemblies.

Anything that just values people’s differences we wanna make it very clear that we’re not trying to put one group of students above or below another group of students. We wanna create these points of access for every single student in our school, whether it’s because you’re in accelerated math or because you are in magical goals and you love music, or whether it’s because you wanna be part of our Latinos in Action program.

These points of connection are very important for our students. It helps our students stay in school and stay connected to a community, whatever that community is, whether it’s a musical community, a football community, whatever it is, those pieces are super important to our students and our families. And we wanna make sure that those opportunities are protected for all kids.

So we just, I appreciate those that speak out and say how important these particular opportunities are for their kids and, and what differences it makes in their child’s lives in terms of helping them connect with different groups within the schools. So these pieces become really important.

So just want to thank you to those of you who are willing to engage with our public officials and have those conversations that becomes really important. So with that, I think that’s all we have for this week. I hope you have a fantastic week. See you next time. Bye everyone.

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