커뮤니티 업데이트, 2025년 2월 26일

매주 웬디 다우 교육감은 프로보시 커뮤니티와 동영상 업데이트를 공유하며 프로보시 교육구에 대한 중요한 뉴스와 인사이트를 제공합니다. 매주 교육감의 최신 동영상 업데이트를 통해 학교의 모든 주요 이벤트와 발전 상황에 대한 최신 정보를 확인하세요.

Hello, Provo City. I’m Superintendent Dau from the Provo City School District. Today is Wednesday, February 26th. I apologize that this video cast is coming a little bit late. I want to start off today by congratulating our Provo High School girls basketball team. They did lose in overtime last week, but just a lot of heart.

I don’t know if you realize this or not, but I think almost every member on the varsity team is a freshman, or most of them are, which is pretty impressive. Our Timpview girls did lose by five last night, but man, they were fighting hard. It was really awesome to just see the great seasons that they have.

And the Timvpiew boys will be playing in the quarterfinals, excuse me, the semifinals tonight against Olympus at nine o’clock p.m. So if you can stay awake, you can watch it. It does stream live. So just really appreciate our coaches, our parents, all of the effort that goes in. We have athletic directors.

We have assistant principals who ride buses. I think Tom Fell, assistant principal at Timpview High School, will be on one of the buses for the students. There’s just a lot of people that come together to make these activities so awesome for our students. This week we want to acknowledge our Provo Way Award winner, Justin Golightly.

He’s a teacher at Shoreline Middle School. He cares deeply about his students. He works with students who struggle with English. He helps them feel successful and valued and we are just lucky to have so many outstanding educators in Provo City School District. We are so grateful for our Foundation.

Our Foundation donates money to what are called teacher mini grants to allow teachers to apply for additional funds to do really creative things in their classrooms. An example of this is we have Lisa Garner. She’s a first grade teacher at Edgemont Elementary that wanted some nonfiction readers for her first graders.

So she submitted a grant, the foundation awarded it, and it really helps students recognize that they have the reading skills to be able to read nonfiction, and they’re also learning some really cool things. And so they can do both. They can read and learn really great things. And they have the skill set to do that.

So lots of projects like that. If you’re interested in donating to the Foundation you can link their page off of our webpage and there is a way for you to donate using a QR code there.

We know that many schools were informed about administrative changes that took place. We have four schools that have principal changes.

We want you to know that we do not take these principal changes lightly. We pour over these decisions every single year. It is not something that is done haphazardly. We consult with our school board members. We consult with our district leadership team. We’re looking at data. We’re looking at the needs of the school.

We’re looking at what what supports our teachers need. What does the community need? All of those different pieces are taken into account. And we’re also looking to further develop the skill set of our principals. Our principals and our assistant principals grow when they get new challenges.

And if they’re stuck kind of in the same thing year after year after year after year, then that also inhibits their growth in the same way if we just had a kid stay in third grade forever. It can certainly do that. We have fantastic administrators in Provo City School District. I am so glad to say that because we really do and they are able to go into any school community.

They know how to look at the data. They know how to support. They know how to build relationships with the communities. I hope that you will give a warm welcome to your new principals. They’re going to be out. Over the next few months, meeting with SCCs, meeting with PTAs trying to be at different events so that they can build those relationships with each of you and really hoping that you give them a chance because they’re phenomenal educators and they care deeply about our kids, no matter what school they’re at, we all care about Provo City School District’s students, and so I’m excited about the changes. I hope you are too. I hope you take the opportunity to get to know these individuals and let them hear what you have concerns about and what you’re excited about and what’s going well at your school. They want to hear all of those things. You’re going to want to make sure that you communicate that to them because they certainly don’t want to come in and just disrupt things that are going well, but they also wanna hear what are some things that could be improved.

So I encourage you to build those relationships. These are fantastic human beings. We have some of the finest educators. Last night we had our board meeting our municipal building authority as well as our board of education authorized the release of $70 million in lease revenue bonds. That will go towards the final construction of all of the phases of Timpview High School so that we can finish that building and bring it up so that it’s safe for students. It also includes a portion that will be paid, that we will use to pay for the designing of the Dixon site. And so just really appreciate individuals that ask questions.

We had individuals that came in and met with our business administrator. Our business administrator, Devyn Daley, did a fantastic job of really explaining the impact on taxes, what our overall debt looks like why we have to use lease revenue bonds for construction of buildings, what that looks like.

Really appreciated everyone that came to the community meetings and that were respectful that asked questions. They may not always agree, but just were very kind and professional and civil in those questions and then came and sometimes met with our business administrator afterwards to gain a greater understanding.

So we have great community members and appreciate the support that we had in moving that forward. We also had our middle of the year data shared with us by our research and assessment director. This data is used by our principals. To start looking at what are some things that we can even tweak in the last few months of school to help our students be more successful to ensure that they really are making at least a grade level’s worth of growth, if not more.

And so that, that becomes really powerful. We did have to make a few tweaks to the 2025/2026 calendar, which the board approved last night. School will now start on a Wednesday, August 13th, so we bumped that back a day. We’re still ending before Memorial Day. We also tried to even out. first semester versus second semester, because that can sometimes be frustrating to our middle school and high school teachers.

Information will be sent out to you with all of those specifics so that you have that and you can plan and prepare. That will come in the next week, so you can look for that. We also did a first reading of a policy on extracurricular activities. This is a new policy to just talk about. Eligibility for extracurricular activities, particularly for like private school students, homeschool students.

What does that look like? What our expectations of coaches are. And then we also added a procedure into that policy so that if there is a complaint or a concern, what is the process for our community members to go through and what does that look like? And who are the key people that they’ll want to be talking to and communicating with?

And so we wanted to really line that out. A lot of the feedback that I’ve received from both the Provo and Timpview communities is they did not feel like that that was really clear, and we wanted to make sure that we were addressing that. And so, when that policy gets passed, then we will send out really clear communication to our community about what that looks like, so you know where to find the policy , what that process looks like because I think it’s really important. We can’t fix problems if we don’t know that they’re happening and we want to be partners with you in that.

Last Friday’s podcast was about Shannon Kwan, who is a CTE teacher. She’s a robotics and computer science teacher at Provo High School.

I don’t know that people realize this, but you can actually graduate from high school with a drone pilot’s license. There are some pretty great skills that our students are leaving high school with that maybe people don’t even realize.

And this week I interviewed a, a bus driver. Her name is Dusty. She does the bus runs for Provo High as well as Edgemont Elementary. Just really kind of seeing a day in the life of a bus driver, and seeing some of the challenges and things that they have to worry about. We are so grateful for the employees that we have and I just want to shed light on all of the great work that’s happening in Provo City School District.

With that, I hope all of you have a fantastic week.