School Improvement and Recovery
In order to best serve the needs of students, school systems must engage in a process of regularly identifying student needs (using data), determining action steps to address those needs, and monitoring the impact of the actions taken. This process of continuous improvement planning can go by different names (action planning, strategic planning, etc.), and be focused at the school or district/Supervisory Union level. Both federal and state regulations speak to the need for this sort of ongoing planning. As part of a response to the recent pandemic, Vermont school districts were required to create a “Recovery Plan” that outlined how they would respond to the impacts of COVID. More recently, the Recovery Plan has been replaced by a required Continuous Improvement Plan (CIP) that covers a two year cycle of assessment, action, and monitoring impacts. The WSESU CIP (below) was submitted in April, 2022 and is due for the next revision in April, 2024. As the impacts of the pandemic are still being felt, the needs and action steps identified in the Recovery Plan are also present in the more recent Continuous Improvement Plan. In both cases, action steps center on academic learning recovery, student engagement, and social-emotional learning.
Associated with our Recovery Plan, is a federally-mandated ARP ESSER Spending Plan that outlines broad spending categories for the final round of federal stimulus spending and also identifies expenditures for prior grant rounds. One element of the Spending Plan is consultation with a variety of stakeholder groups – documented in the plan – and ongoing collection of feedback from the public (see below)
Additionally, as part of the federal ESSER grant funding process, schools were required to create and maintain a Safe Return to School Plan that outlines different response measures (like masking, sanitizing, distancing) that may need to be re-invoked should we experience a significant return of the pandemic.
All four plans are linked below:
ARP ESSER III Spending Plan (last update February 2023), and feedback form.
Safe Return to School Plan (last update 12/20/2022)