Published: August 25, 2009 11:55 pm      

PENDLETON: Starpoint wants to help motivate students

PENDLETON — In an effort to improve its students’ academic achievement, Starpoint High School is starting a new instructional plan to target students who are just getting by.

Principal Gil Licata unveiled the school’s new approach at a Board of Education meeting Monday. Licata showed the members a series of signs that will go up in the school that read, “Mastery equals Starpoint students.” And below that phrase, the signs ask, “What did you do to reach your goals?” He said the goal will be to simply help students do their very best in school.

“Our focus is going to be on student performance,” Licata said. “It’s going to be a teaching tool and it’s going to be reflected in every office. That’s going to be our goal.”

Licata said he will meet with every teacher to discuss individual goals for their classes, followed by a meeting with each of the school’s departments. During the summer, Licata met with all of the content-area specialists, teachers who act as leaders in each subject. Sean Croft, Starpoint’s director of instruction, assessment and staff development, said the group visited some schools in Clarence during one of those meetings. They met afterward to talk about ideas.

“All of the ideas were generated by the teachers, it wasn’t Gil and I saying we need to do this,” Croft said.

Licata said he would meet weekly with student social services, which includes school counselors, a social worker and a psychologist. In those meetings, the goal is to develop monthly and annual plans on how to motivate students to improve.

Part of the high school’s new approach is the academic referral system. Licata said it wasn’t discipline, but rather a way for teachers to find the cause of why a student might may not be doing as well as they can in a class.

“This form goes right to me,” Licata said. “It is then my job to meet with the student, contact a parent or guardian, work with the counselor, do whatever it takes to get this child in the right.”

He added the referral form would also go to the student’s coach or extracurricular activity adviser. Getting them involved could help, because students look up to some of them, Croft said. Croft said students who receive a referral may be scoring in the 80s, for example, but are capable of a 95 average.

High school exams will be aligned with state Regents while mid-term exams will increase in number and look more like Regents exams, Licata said. This will help by allowing the district to find out which students are having difficulty earlier in the year, Croft added.

“We’re going to spend a lot of time this year developing these,” he said. “We’re not just going to make a 500-question, multiple-choice exam. We want to be testing and assessing the skills that they’re going to see at the end of the year.

Quarterly grades of classes will go to all faculty members. Faculty meetings, themselves, will change, involving more discussion on those results, Licata said.

“It’s almost going to be a staff development meeting,” he said.

Licata added the school will eliminate course drops, unless the drop is recommended by a counselor. If kids who are placed in a course that is too challenging, the school will move the student, Licata said. The goal is to help the student who isn’t living up to his or her potential, he said.

“We’ve got to make high expectations,” Licata said.

Contact reporter Joe Olenick at 439-9222, ext. 6241.