The Panther Valley School District is planning on an EPIC school year as classes begin Monday.

EPIC stands for Every Panther is Connected, and it’s the theme for the school year, as well as an initiative to improve student attendance, growth and success as part of each school’s improvement plan.

“If students feel connected to their school, they’re more likely to attend and be successful,” Robert Palazzo, director of curriculum, told school board members Wednesday night.

The district will also be working on “explicit instruction,” which is a back-to-basics approach to instruction that gets kids off their computers and focusing on practicing skills such as reading and math, he said.

The district set an annual target of six months of growth in reading and math in each building, which Palazzo called an “ambitious goal.”

“We’d like to see a year’s growth on average, but we’ll start with six months of growth, and that’ll be reported every quarter,” he said.

Students will spend 10 minutes every Wednesday doing an online assessment in reading and math, which will allow teachers and administrators to track growth, Palazzo said.

The district also worked with Janet Fisher, its tech coordinator, to ensure accurate student population numbers on a daily basis, automatically adding or dropping students within a day of enrolling or leaving, Palazzo said.

“It is real-time data that we can look at any time to see how our students are doing,” Palazzo said.

Absenteeism

Board member Renee DeMelfi asked specifically about chronic absenteeism, which is a problem in many school districts, not just Panther Valley.

“What do you have in place that you’re going to try to use to get the kids in school?” she asked.

Patricia Ebbert, junior/senior high school principal, said it goes back to the EPIC theme, and kids feeling connected.

One of the things they learned in their safety training was that kids who committed school shootings wrote that they never felt connected to someone within the school, Ebbert said.

“We took it upon ourselves to make that connection this year,” she said.

Students at the junior/senior high school will be asked to complete surveys, asking them if there is a teacher or staff member that they feel connected to within the building, or someone outside the school they have a connection with.

“Those outliers, those kids that say, ‘I have nobody,’ are the kids we need to target right away,” Ebbert said. “We need to build those connections with those kids.”

The district is also going to focus on positive reinforcement, rather than being negative or punitive.

“We’re rewarding kids,” Ebbert said. “If they’re two or three weeks with perfect attendance, they’ll get the opportunity to go into a raffle for possibly a free ticket to the football game or the volleyball game, or a free homework pass.”

They’ll be focusing on things that build connections and build on their desire to be in school, Ebbert said.

“They’re going to come if they feel like they’re connected,” she said. “So, we’ve got to try and make that connection.”

Lisa Mace, intermediate school principal, said that the district won’t be doing surveys with the younger kids, but talking to them about what their interests are and connecting them to other students to build socialization skills.

“Our kids really struggle with that,” she said.

Through recent training, the district also learned about an early warning system available in Sapphire, the community portal that the district uses, and acquired that component, Mace said.

“What we’ve done is set up parameters (districtwide) that look at our students, grades, attendance and discipline, and weighted the discipline, so like chewing gum is a little bit less than maybe vaping,” she said.

All three principals will run those reports every Monday and identify students who are at low, moderate or high risk for those factors, and see trends and target support services that students may need, she said.

DeMelfi asked about the reasons for the chronic absenteeism in the previous school year. That is an area where the district’s assessment scores were low compared with other districts.

The reasons are varied, including: a post-pandemic mindset to keep kids home; students not doing online assignments; less value placed on school and attendance; and other extenuating circumstances.

Palazzo said that both legal and illegal absences count against the district.

“If you’re in the hospital for 15 days, you’re chronically absent,” he told the board about the reporting.

The district had 158 students miss 19 or more days of school last year, and 69 of those, or 44%, were legal absences.

Palazzo said: “44% of those parents did what they were supposed to do. But that counts against us, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

Following the discussion, the board individually approved the Additional Targeted Support and Improvement plans for each of the district’s three schools.