Tonight at the first ANCS PTCA meeting of the year I’ll be giving my annual “state of the school” update. You can read the main points I’ll be highlighting below…but you should still come on out to the meeting to ask questions, hear discussion, and also to attend some of the great breakout sessions planned by our faculty and parents.
ANCS “State of the School” Update – September 2016
A little over a month ago, we welcomed 643 students and their families to ANCS to start the 2016-17 school year, the 15th year of operation of our school. We have come a long way since August 2002 when 105 students started in our school’s very first year. As the second-oldest charter school in a city that has seen four charter schools close in the past five years, we are fortunate to be in a period of relative stability with strong educational, financial, and organizational performance. We know this from the areas we track each year in an internal “performance dashboard” monitored by our school’s leadership team and board. While our charter contract with Atlanta Public Schools and the Georgia Department of Education establishes some basic goals mainly based on standardized test scores, as a board, we’ve identified additional goals and measures that reflect more holistically what we value as a school.
At this link you’ll find an overview of this dashboard last school year. Note that the various measures are broken into six main domains we track:
- Educational Program Outcomes
- School Climate & Culture
- Stakeholder Satisfaction
- High School Readiness
- Leadership & Organizational Performance
- Financial Management & Resource Development
The dashboard shows that as a school we met or exceeded nearly all of the goals we set for ourselves. While we fell just a bit outside of our internal goal to be in the top 10% of all schools in Atlanta in the percentage of students passing last year’s ELA and Math Milestones tests, as was noted in the Atlanta Journal Constitution last week, the percentage of our students showing typical/high growth in state tests is the third highest in all of Atlanta’s schools over the past three years. And though we missed our overall annual campaign fundraising goal by about $20,000, the $240,000 we raised is one of our highest levels ever and we have seen a steady increase in the percentage of families contributing to the campaign.
There is much to be proud of in the success our school experienced last school year. But in order to continue to provide our students with an exceptional education that is true to our mission, we cannot be complacent—we are always striving to improve. For just this reason, in 2014 our school adopted a three-year strategic plan designed to help focus the use of our time and resources on a few strategic areas. Reading from left to right on the image below, you can see ANCS’s mission and vision guiding our three-year priority goals in seven strategic domains and what we have accomplished in those domains since the strategic plan was put into place in October 2014:
Listed as succinctly as bullet points, it’s hard to capture the fact that none of these accomplishments would have been possible without lots and lots of thoughtful work and dedication from our teachers, staff, students, board, and families. One of our guiding principles is that “we celebrate our individual and collective successes” and each one of these accomplishments is the result of collective effort that should be celebrated!
Soon our board will come to agreement on the initiatives that will be our focus this school year to keep us moving towards our strategic plan goals. We will be continuing our enrollment outreach and utilizing a weighted enrollment lottery to create a more economically diverse (and educationally rich) school for our students. We will work towards becoming an IB Middle Years Programme “World School”. We will continue to plan for and implement facilities improvements that make our school more energy-efficient and a better place for learning. We will do all of this and more as we continue to make ANCS the best school it can be for our school family, current and future.