2013-14 Community Report for Central Spryfield Elementary School
The 2013-2014 school year, has been a year of growth at Central Spryfield Elementary.
The staff has been busy developing our Continuous School Improvement Plan (CSI
Pan). While developing our plan we wanted to answer three key questions: 1. How are
our students doing? 2. How do we know? 3. What do we need to do now? In an effort to
develop our plan we worked on a self-assessment which has helped us determine our
strengths and challenges. We used our challenges to help us choose a literacy and a
math goal. The surveys that you filled out, along with a variety of classroom
assessments, board level assessments and provincial assessments (like the ones
above), have helped us develop our new goals: 1. Students will demonstrate
improvement reading comprehension 2. Students will demonstrate improvement
in communication of their understanding of number sense.
Now that we have chosen our goals, the staff at Central Spryfield Elementary will
continue to work collaboratively with one another on a daily basis and through
Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) in an effort to establish common
assessment criteria and expectations for student success, to gather evidence of and
reflect on assessment information, and to plan next instructional steps and interventions
to plan for instruction to meet our students’ needs. We have also built relationships with
staff from neighbouring schools and a number of literacy and math coaches from Halifax
Regional School Board that will support us in improving our knowledge and skills
around instruction and assessment practices, with the goal of improving student
learning and achievement.
The assessment results above vary and demonstrate our strengths and challenges. The
grade 3 writing results are promising, as are the grade 4 provincial math results. Our
areas of challenge relate directly to the goals we have chosen for our school. We
recognize that a percentage of our students continue to struggle to meet expectations
on some of the provincial assessments, particularly at the upper elementary levels in
literacy and math and we see this as important information to guide our teaching. When
we looked deeper into the assessments above, combined with what we see on a daily
basis in our classrooms, we believe that our math goal and literacy goal and the plan we
have developed in both areas, will help our students improve. It is important to note that
our classroom assessments provide the most relevant information about our student’s
strengths and challenges. This information guides our daily plans for instructions. Our
ongoing classroom assessments indicate that our learners are having increasing
success in literacy and math.
At Central Spryfield Elementary we are committed to improving student learning for all
students and we are excited to work together on our common school goals. As we focus
on our new CSI Plan, we are confident that our students will continue to learn and
improve in all subject areas.