École Luke Mettaweskum School

Luke Mettaweskum School’s vision is that alone it is difficult, together it is possible. With Teamwork, Respect and Integrity success is inevitable.

This year, our school community focused on creating a strong foundation where teachers work in collaboration in order to provide the best possible opportunities for our students. It was our objective to increase attendance rates in our school and to foster a love for learning within our students. Teachers revised their practice towards achieving their literacy goals while helping students recognize their own strengths and values as learners and community members.

School Governance and Shared Leadership

Our Leadership Team (LT) put great emphasis on school improvement through literacy and student wellness. The Leadership Team began the PLC training process through Solution Tree in January, which helped the school’s professional community rally around our three core values (Teamwork, Respect, Integrity) and establish a new common vision and mission for the school. The LT team was dedicated to supporting teachers with the GVC, ensuring academic rigor across all cycles. The School Committee (SC) dedicated significant time to ensuring quality teachers were hired for the next school year. The SC made strong efforts to be involved and supportive members of the school community. The teachers have made great efforts to improve student performance in language and mathematics. The collaboration amongst staff has been outstanding with each individual committed to school improvement and the success of our students. The team of teachers met once every 2 weeks in Professional Learning Community (PLC) groups in order to review data such as CASI, PM Bench Marks, CAT Tests and Student Work. Some of our improvement strategies this year were: Encourage students to focus on improving their writing skills, continue to implement Cree School Board GVC and research-based instructional strategies to all levels.

Our Leadership Team supported new teachers by helping them to implement the GVC into our classrooms and continued to support returning teachers. During walkthroughs, we observed an increase in teachers posting objectives and creating dynamic lessons, which were based on the GVC. Throughout the year, teachers met regularly with GVC consultants, in order to gain more insights and stronger understanding of the curriculum and expectations.

Professional Learning Communities

Collectively, teacher’s practice was led by the Professional Learning Community guiding questions: What do we want each student to learn? How will we know each student has learned it? How will we respond when a student experiences difficulties? Our Elementary teachers focused on student literacy groups based on reading level rather than age, which had one period each day dedicated to our literacy LSIP goals. Classes were set-up as clusters for 3 Jimmy Jam lessons per cycle, and 3 D.E.A.R. lessons specifically dedicated to reading. Teachers focused their PLC meetings on sharing student work samples, re-grouping students based on their development, and discussing best practices to help struggling students meet their literacy goals. This coming year, elementary and secondary teachers will work more closely together under the RTI training.

Student Attendance

Attendance was at the forefront of the Leadership Team’s priorities this year. Elementary teachers focused on more regular parental communication, while all teachers collected attendance data and compiled information three times throughout the school year to determine the school’s progress as a whole. As a result, there was a rise in overall student attendance, allowing the school to surpass their LSIP goal by achieving 78% attendance from September to May. The whole school saw a 10% decrease in overall absenteeism from September to May. That being said, the data collected in the High School along with results of the school board survey showed a need for further information gathering surrounding students’ perception of their safety in school. Members of the Leadership Team created a survey which will be completed by all students at the start of the upcoming school year. Strategies will then be implemented based on the results.

Student Engagement

Elephant Thoughts and Youth Fusion, along with our teacher driven extra-curricular activities aimed to improve student engagement by providing numerous extra-curricular activities and lunch time programs for students. Healthy cooking, student council, photography club, snow shoe outings, basketball teams, board game club, French club, Art club, Sports club, Skating club, Fitness club, and Extra Help were among the list of activities offered to Elementary and High School students throughout the year. High school students participated in a local and regional public speaking competition, while both High School and Elementary saw students head to regional Science Fairs. The students’ greatest success can be highlighted by the School board Art Exhibition, where their submissions came home as category winners in 3 out of 5 categories.