Gemeinschaftliche Aktualisierungen, Mai 7, 2025

Mai 7th, 2025 /
Alexander Glaves /
Nachrichten, Superintendent, Updates/Bekanntmachungen

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’m Superintendent Dau from the Provo City School District. Today is Wednesday, May 7th. We hope you’re having a fantastic week. We know that school is going to be out in just two weeks from today, so we have a lot going on as we finish out the school year.

This week is teacher appreciation week. We hope that all of you’ll take the opportunity to reach out to if you have children or grandchildren that have awesome teachers, to just reach out to them and let them know how much you appreciate all of the work that they do to help our students. Also want to give a big shout out to all of our arts teachers across the district.

We had a fantastic, this is US Creative Arts Gala last Monday at Shoreline Middle School, and just highlighted just visual arts and 3D art. Performing arts. It’s one of the highlights of Provo City School District and all the work that goes into that. I hope all of you were able to pay attention to our study session at our board meeting last Tuesday.

We had an interesting discussion about our wall at Wasatch. We have now hired a third party entity to go in and investigate. We’re still getting reports from that. And working with our contractor to find a long-term solution and to ensure that everything is well and good at Wasatch Elementary. We have been assured that our building is safe, our students are safe but we do have some issues with water that we wanna make sure that we get fixed and that we’re actually problem solving in the most effective way possible and not just going through a really quick solution, but really trying to figure out what we need to do to ensure that this problem does not reoccur.

So conversations are continuing with that. We’ll continue to have updates and to update our Wasatch community and provide that information for you on our website. For those of you that have questions or if you’re hearing neighbors talk about it, you can direct them there.

And we will continue to update you as we have more information and as we collaborate with our contractor on Wasatch Elementary.

We also have a great podcast from last week that really highlights our teachers and just the great things that are happening across the district in our classrooms.

So I’m hoping that you’ll tune in and listen to all of that. This week we’re going to finish up our podcast with our brand new teachers that we’ve been tracking this entire first year. And we will also in the coming weeks be highlighting some of our graduating seniors at our high school. So we’re pretty excited about all of those opportunities.

I also just wanna give a huge shout out to our PTAs. In particular. I had the opportunity to go up to Timpview High School where we had two students that won the National Reflections contest. And just looking at all of the efforts that our PTA puts forth to really highlight our teachers and our students and just the great work that they’re doing.

I know there’s a lot of misinformation that goes out about PTAs, they don’t get to keep their money because it goes to a national organization, and that’s just simply not true. PTAs do have membership dues that are paid. You’re not required to pay those to be a part of the PTA and to volunteer.

If you wanna hold an office, then yes, you do have to pay a membership due, but it is a very small portion of that membership due that goes to the state, national PTA organizations. Everything else in terms of all of the fundraising that takes place, stays at the school level. So, if a PTA raises $10,000 because they host a fund, run that $10,000 stays at the school, there is none of that that’s being shaved off to go anywhere else. And I think there’s been some miscommunication and some misinformation about that.

So I’m just really grateful for our relationship with our parents and it was just really fun to see the excitement of the students that received that honor and how much effort our PTA put forward to help those kids be recognized at a spirit assembly.

We had a great joint meeting with our city council last week, just kind of talking about our budget priorities. We are in the process of putting all of those things together and we’ll have our first budget overview at our board meeting next Tuesday. We’ve been working with our business administrator to provide little financial updates and shorts to understand more about how school districts are financed and how we utilize the resources that we have, so that we are being very responsive and responsible with taxpayer dollars as we, as we move forward in that.

We also want to just let you know about some things that we’re working on as a school district. We know that we’ve had parents and teachers reach out to us about concerns about how much time we spend assessing students. And so we’re putting together our teaching and learning and our continuous school improvement department.

And our research and assessment department has put together a great presentation for our board meeting next Tuesday to just talk about some of the realities of what this means for a student. The type of data that we get from this ways that we can, you know, help mitigate stress that might come on our teachers as a result of that.

And why these assessments are very important as we inform our instruction and track our progress. We want to be accountable to our public and we often do that through the data that we gather in that process. So we’ll have a great discussion about that at next week’s board meeting. We’re also going to be talking about some research that our research and assessment director has done on our dual language immersion programs and just some different factors that impact student performance and why students and families choose to be in dual immersion, what our attrition rates are.

Those pieces will will be worked on and talked about in an ongoing discussion about dual language immersion. We also have a behavior subcommittee that is forming, that’s going to put together some proposals for how we’re training teachers more effectively and how to respond to behavior, how we’re collaborating with parents in that process.

And really how we can create a continuum of services and supports for both our students, our families, and our teachers in that process. We really want to make Provost City School District a great place for students to attend school, for our employees to work. And we’re just working on that through an employee satisfaction survey, an engagement survey that’s been developed to really assess what we’re doing well and what we need to continue to work on as a school district.

And then we’re working with all of our teachers and employees as we figure out salaries for next year and how to use the funding that we have appropriately so that our employees are feeling compensated appropriately and feel appreciated for the work that they do.

We’re also we also have to revamp some things with graduation and credit requirements. There have been some additions that have been made as a result of the state legislature. We want to ensure that we have equitable access for things like credit recovery.

Also there is new legislation that allows a student to take the GED before they graduate and they can apply that towards a high school diploma. And so we have to develop policies to ensure that we’re complying with that, how we can help support students with earning competency based credit and what that might look like. And so we just have a lot of things that we’re working on as we move forward into the following year.

Our school board is still working through the proposals of our boundary and feasibility study, and we’ll be taking the entire next year to make some decisions and to really examine and look at some recommendations with that.

So we have a lot on our plate, a lot that we’re working on and we’re trying not to overwhelm anyone with too much at one time. But we also wanna be responsive to our resources and things that we need to do to ensure that our students have the very best opportunities that they can. So those are just some things that we’re working on.

This week I wanna celebrate. Our Provo Way award winner is Independence High School Special Education teacher Carmen Williams.

She is the kind of teacher that is devoted beyond all measure. One of her former students was even struggling after graduation, and Carmen went above and beyond. She personally supervised him during volunteer shifts at the Provo Library just to really allow this student to take on that particular job.

And so just really Carmen really embodies what the Provo Way award means, which is just educators that are going above and beyond to really make a difference in the lives of our students and in our education system. And with that, I want to wish all of you a happy Mother’s Day this weekend.

And have a great week everyone. Bye now.