ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
The USD 480 school board heard some important updates and items at its most recent meeting Monday evening.
One of the reports to begin the meeting concerned the Needs Assessment.
“As the board is aware, the Needs Assessment is a template provided by the Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE), and the building principals filled that out based on their individual needs,” Assistant Superintendent of Academics Dr. Maria Gomez-Rocque said. “They completed this in the spring before the end of the school year. As we did an analysis of the common themes, one of the top ones was staffing, and that’s something that’s come up year after year – every building identified some staffing challenges. Another theme was the need for stronger behavioral social-emotional support, and that’s something that was again mentioned by every building. Professional learning was another common theme that keeps coming up every year, and the schools consistently noted requests for deeper implementation support. Also mentioned was a need to close achievement gaps – across all building levels, leadership reported at-risk populations as the district’s highest instructional priority. Also mentioned was the need to support new teachers and interim teachers – six buildings mentioned continued investments in these supports. A final theme was parent participation – while we have strong communication with families, we are facing a challenge in having the parents participate in different events.”
With these themes identified, Gomez-Rocque said there is work to do to make changes.
“For staffing, we are addressing that by continuing to recruit certified staff and strengthening our Grow Your Own pathway for teaching,” Gomez-Rocque said. “With the stronger behavioral support, we have continued district-wide focus on ensuring all buildings are implementing tiered behavior supports, and then we’re continuing to build social-emotional capacity through the district and building staffs. For professional learning, we’ll continue building leadership capacity with curriculum for deeper implementation support through the transition from outside consultants. We’re really working on building capacity from within as we start weaning off the consultants coming in district-wide. When it comes to closing achievement gaps, we’ve been talking about that for a while, and we have a strong focus on Tier 1 instruction. It’s important we’re following our core instruction and making sure we’re providing tiered interventions to help close those achievement gaps. When it comes to support for new and interim teachers, we want to really focus on supporting lesson plan alignment to the state standards and implementing leader training for instructional coaching cycles. In increasing parent participation, we’ll continue our parent-teacher conferences and family engagement initiatives. We also want to train parent educators on parent-family engagement – this year, at Liberal High School, we are piloting a Parenting Partners program that provides a lot of workshops that are already created so we can determine, if it’s successful, whether it can be implemented in other buildings.”
Title Coordinator Kendra Haskell went into more detail about the parent engagement.
“We did purchase that program, and it provides weekly trainings for parents, and there are four different programs it comes with,” Haskell said. “One is about creating mealtime at home and it teaches how to have family mealtimes together, nutritional meals families can make, and how to really make those home connections some of our families might have lost touch with. There are courses that are pre-made for the parent coordinators so they’re not trying to find too many things or create their own, and they invite targeted parents in for these workshops. There’s another program on parenting skills that talks about how to help students with homework and how to set routines, and there’s another package for social-emotional needs at home to help students who may have anxiety or other struggles with mental health. Parenting Partners is great because the programs are provided in English and Spanish, and it gives the parent coordinators the materials and everything else they need to provide these services to USD 480 parents. This is getting started at LHS, we’re going to see how it goes, and if it’s successful, it could be in other buildings in the future.”
The evening’s new business moved relatively quickly, with the board ultimately approving purchasing services from KASB for $13,000, updates to Policies GAN and IIBGC and the 2026-27 Handbook. The board also approved the software renewal for Navigate Emergency Management Suite in the amount of $14,459.44 and the purchase of the Gold Package from Hudl for the upcoming athletic seasons. The board also approved the Student Accident Insurance Policy for $79,000 and a partnership between Prairie View Elementary School and Kansas State University for an amount up to $60,000 to help strengthen the Dual Language program. To conclude the meeting, the board also approved SEED agreements, ESOL plans of study and bonus agreements for multiple teachers in the district.
