Supt. Nancy Golden's 2007 Letter to the Community (as printed in the Sept. 20 The Register-Guard) :

Dear Springfield Community,

Change is certainly in the air—the weather is already cooler, and our kids are back in their classrooms. We see new faces, new hairstyles, new technology. We embrace these changes and look forward to the joys, the small miracles, and the challenges that the new school year will bring.

We’re excited about all the great things that are happening in our community. The energy of Springfield’s changing face provides a wonderful backdrop for the important work that we do in the schools. We wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate our successes and share some of our exciting ideas for the coming year.

The Springfield Quality Education Model that was created with the community’s help four years ago remains a backbone for our goals for continuous improvement. We made a plan, and we’ve been in action ever since. The list of our accomplishments grows with each school year. From new approaches, new programs, and new textbooks, to new and improved buildings, we continue to grow and change just as our students do. In many ways, our work has just begun.

One thing that will not change is our commitment to our students’ success.

With the community’s help, we are continuing on a path to make all of our schools the best they can be. Thanks to the efforts of our state legislators to increase state funding for education, we have been able to add an additional 22 teachers, to bring the total to a record 71 new teachers this year. This will go a long way to helping us reach our goal of sustainable class size reduction throughout the district. Last fall’s successful bond measure, demonstrating the community’s faith in the district, has allowed for new boilers, new roofs, new tracks, and new schools, bringing us closer to our stated goal of creating “schools as places of learning.” Our unique partnerships with our community partners have brought us another successful year of the Gift of Literacy project, and another year of after-school programming to care for our children’s bodies as well as their minds. We will continue to work on strategies to preserve the long-term sustainability of the after-school programs.

I often speak of literacy as “the gateway skill,” and we’re proud of our efforts to promote literacy for all students. The K–12 Literacy Initiative we began two years ago is taking hold, yielding continued gains in reading and writing scores, and now we move to the next phase of implementation. Through intervention strategies like READ 180, Reading Apprenticeship, literacy coaches, and incentive programs like Battle of the Books and the “Got Book?” campaign, we hope to infuse each student in our district with the joy of reading.

Teachers in our district are working together in new and exciting ways. The collaboration time we initiated last year allows teachers time each month to train and plan as school teams to best meet their students' needs. Professional learning communities gather teachers in the same subject areas from across the district to review and implement best practices to improve student achievement. Last year’s impressive gains in tenth-grade math and fourth-grade writing scores are wonderful examples of the kinds of success we can achieve through educator collaboration.

I like to say that all kids can learn—though maybe not on the same day, and not in the same way—and we have a responsibility to teach them all. We will continue to work on techniques to differentiate instruction and allow for students’ different learning rates and styles. For example, this year we begin to implement an extremely flexible new Language Arts program that can meet any student’s needs, on either end of the spectrum. We are also using technology to differentiate instruction and help students learn at their own pace. 

There is an energy and enthusiasm in our community that can’t help but transfer to our schools. Our district will continue to feed on this energy and grow and adapt to the changing needs of our students. No shame, no blame, no excuses—our work won’t stop until all students are getting the support they need to achieve their fullest potential.

We are looking forward to another great school year!

Sincerely,

Click below to learn more
about the

Springfield Quality Education Model

or

Read the 2006 "How Are the Children" report