MIDDLEBURG – Although his last “Listen and Learn Community Meeting” was held Tuesday night, Clay County School Superintendent Addison Davis said his plan to engage the community does not end there.

Davis and his staff are gathering input from multiple avenues – visits to classrooms, chats with administrators called ‘Dialogues with Davis’ and these community meetings – with the goal of creating and then presenting a new strategic plan for the school district on April 10.

“I’ve tried my best in this first 55 days to be out in front, so people know that I’m here – I’m not just someone that’s going to just sit in an office and work without being connected to the community, without being connected to our students, without being connected to our teachers and this is an opportunity for me to really capture key findings and observations and feedback that will allow me to develop a strategic plan to be most successful. I need to be connected to this community.

“They need to see that I’m fighting and creating the best opportunities for our kids to be most successful within Clay County, so they can be competitive when they leave [the district],” Davis said.

About 90 attendees packed into the media center at Middleburg High on Feb. 16 for the sixth of seven “Listen and Learn” meetings Davis set up shortly after being sworn into office in November. He and his cabinet are reviewing everything in the district ranging from class scheduling to teacher training to the social and emotional development of students.

Davis has also fielded a number of concerns – something he described as angst – about the wall-to-wall academies, which were established at the beginning of the 2014-15 school year. He said he has found that the wall-to-wall academies are not always a fit for the student or business partners involved in nurturing the academy.

“Staff worked hard but they were really trying to be very creative on the labels of academies and what pathways they actually put underneath the academies,” Davis said. “They were putting pathways that have no connectivity whatsoever, no rhyme nor reason, so they had advisory boards that really didn’t have the same direction, mindset and also field, so when they met, they really couldn’t talk about apples and apples.”

Davis said there is no truth to the rumor that has been circulating that the district’s academies – those academies that thrive under the district’s Career and Technical Education department – that have been in place for years are being shut down. He is looking at a plan that will bolster the pre-wall-to-wall academies by creating what he described as “anchor academies.”

“So, what we’re trying to do is create really intentional anchor academies, but continue every pathway that kids currently have. We are in no way shape or form going to eliminate the pathways. We think there is a great opportunity for kids to be industry-certified in a lot of areas and then also to continue our partnership with business partners to have internships and externships where they can be most successful.”

Davis said he envisions stronger academy advisory boards that become involved in the district’s hiring processes, are “very savvy” and who help the district’s students go on to their next step whether it be college, career or life.

The second issue that has emerged from the Listen and Learn meetings, Davis said, surrounds student scheduling. He had previously announced an aggressive plan to establish block scheduling at the district’s seven high schools beginning with the 2017-18 school year. However, after hearing from parents and teachers, Davis said, the plan is now pushed forward to the 2018-19 school year. He said that will allow the district time to explain the benefits of block scheduling and how it improves teaching and learning.

“What it does is allow us to develop the whole child. Right now, kids take six classes a day and they are in 50-minute classes,” Davis said.

“By the time a teacher introduces a concept or a new standard for the day, and the kids get to that productive grapple/struggle time – by the time they get into the meat of [the standard] – we have to say, ‘Guess what, time out. We’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll be able to finish it.’ So, why not have an opportunity where kids can take four classes a day, which means they take four classes one day, four different classes the next day and have 90-minute classes.”

He said block scheduling does not extend the length of the school day or modify the bus schedules, but what it does is create an environment for individualized teaching and learning. He said a 90-minute class, for example, can allow teachers to work for 20 minutes with a small group of students, while another set of students use computer-based blended learning to tackle the same lesson and another group of students works together to grapple with and solve the lesson they were assigned.

“Every 20 minutes they can rotate and then, after you do 60-minutes of that, you launch a lesson for 15 minutes or 20 minutes, you close it out, you have a lesson where kids are actively being engaged and are not only exposed to standards-based education, but they are also able to help them from remediation and also from an enrichment standpoint and they get to really dive in, to have conversations with one other learners, it allows them to be most successful,” Davis said.

Along with parents, teachers in the district have attended the community Listen and Learn meetings. From their feedback, Davis said he realizes the district has to improve the manner in which it provides teachers support.

“We’ve got to provide professional development for them, to show them how to use curriculum in order to be most successful, so they’re not starving for knowledge and starving for intel and reaching out to identify every supplemental material they can in order to better assist your child and students to not only be successful through standards, but also have skill remediation as well,” Davis said.

Davis also mentioned other initiatives that could be put in place to improve the environment for learning. He said he wants to develop a “Parent Academy” to teach parents how they can be their child’s ‘first teacher.’ He also wants to establish a homework hotline and a bullying hotline to handle that would allow students to report behavior problems without fear of further bullying from their peers.

“We’ve got to continue focusing on positive behavior supports where are focusing on the social and emotional side of every learner and every aspect and creating the right conditions where kids can be most successful. And then, we’ve got to do a better job of having continuity from all of our feeder patterns – from elementary, middle and high school – and engage in our caregivers and our support staff through family engagement opportunities,” Davis said.

When asked if he thought the Listen and Learn meetings were having a positive impact on the community, Davis said, he has received a tremendous amount of positive feedback.

“I say culture, we’ve already created a climate where people feel connected and eventually it will become a systematic culture and I think that people love to have an accessibility to me and they love that I’m being visible and they love that I’m being transparent and being open with them and honest with them and being able to be a think partner with them and I’m not disenfranchising any dimension or facet of this community,” he said.

In the coming weeks leading up to April 10, Davis said he wants to hold more town hall type meetings to educate the community about the budgeting process, however, no dates have been set for those meetings.