Friday more than 8,000 children in our community will be preparing for something few will embrace: the beginning of the 2014-15 school year.
Though most students are not eager to get started, nearly 1,500 staff members have been hard at work this week preparing classrooms, lesson plans and participating in professional development workshops.
For most of these teachers, this is not the first time they have been working this summer. Many have spent their “vacation” time preparing for the shift to the Common Core State Standards.
The standards — a framework designating what students should know at the end of a particular grade — are a dramatic departure from the Mississippi Frameworks.
This will certainly require patience from student, parent and teacher alike. Many teachers have spent decades working within a system completely different from the one they will use this year.
What can a concerned parent do?
Participate.
Each of the Vicksburg Warren School District’s 15 schools will have information available about the new standards.
Some are offering tutorial courses for concerned parents while other parent-teacher organizations have been distributing information.
While Common Core will affect students in every grade, lower-elementary children’s parents will have an additional statewide mandate to deal with.
The law, commonly referred to as the “third-grade literacy gate,” will only allow students reading at grade level by the third grade to advance to the fourth.
A study in 2013 showed that just 53 percent of Mississippi’s third-graders could read at grade level.
Regardless of how parents and guardians choose to approach the new standards or the third-grade literacy law, the key is to be involved. Any given teacher sees a student for less than 1 percent of the year.
The community’s children deserve the best opportunity for success. Our teachers are doing what they can. We owe it to our children and their educators to do the same.