ROBERT PIERCE

   • Leader & Times

Following the debriefing on the mid-February fires on March 2, the Seward County Commission hosted its regular meeting, and like many recent meetings, the board heard from several citizens during the citizen comments portion of the meeting.

Former Emergency Management Director Greg Standard took the podium first to talk about the recent controversy surrounding a video of a phone call between Commission Chair Steve Helm and former Fire Chief Andrew Barkley in which Helm asked Barkley to provide Administrator April Warden with a radio.

“There’s been a lot of talk for some reason, and I’d like to put a little clarity out there for people who are wondering what was going on,” Standard said. “In my experience over the last 26 years, the Seward County administrator has never been a weather spotter or ever acted as a weather spotter in any situation. Seward County has had a very small emergency management department and relies on support from other county agencies to support the emergency operations center (EOC).”

ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

Proficiency scales for schools throughout USD 480 could soon see some changes thanks to some action by the USD 480 school board at its most recent meeting Monday evening.

“Proficiency scales define the performance expected of students to reach a learning outcome. Often presented in the form of a rubric, these scales represent a progression of learning goals across levels of difficulty. They can be set for an institution as well as for individual programs depending on what’s needed,” Assistant Superintendent of Academics Dr. Maria Gomez-Rocque said. “Our Marzano consultant has been supporting the middle schools with the proficiency scales in ELA for three years. During professional development days this year, the consultant has been building knowledge about the use of proficiency scales for principals, instructional coaches, and the secondary math and ELA departments. These critical concepts are important for development, and they are for all K-12 students for the core content. If you’ll remember, we got some of this work started with the middle schools, and they started with the ELA proficiency scale. Our consultant has been helping us during our professional development days in the capacity of working with our administrators, our principals, our instructional coaches as they’ve taken on that additional work and so there’s that continuity from the middle schools to Liberal High School starting next year. The scales support the KESA Standards Alignment districtwide by focusing on the rigor of the assessed standard and brings clarity for teachers planning instruction. We’re very excited to be getting started with this work, and we’ve also brought in a little math as well. We have one more contracted development day with our consultant and if everything works well, we’ll have him work with the secondary ELA department and start analyzing and customizing the proficiency scales there. He’ll also work with the elementary schools so they have that knowledge about the proficiency scales.”

ROBERT PIERCE

   • Leader & Times

The Kansas Legal Service is in the process of helping community members with criminal convictions or arrests across the state who may qualify for legal assistance to clear their records and open the door to better employment and housing opportunities.

As part of KLS’s Workforce Development Initiative, the agency hosts Free Expungement and Driver’s License Clinics, including one recently in Liberal.

The clinic aims to remove barriers preventing Kansans from fully participating in the workforce. As part of the clinics, KLS Director of Pro Bono Services Joy Springfield said attorneys and legal staff are available to review cases, answer questions and guide participants through the legal process, with services offered at no cost to eligible participants.

ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

Schools throughout USD 480 continue to show progress through the High Reliability Schools (HRS) program, and Eisenhower Middle School has indeed been making great strides.

“We had a great response rate from the students at 92 percent, and we always have great numbers from the students since it’s mandatory for them. 78 percent of our staff participated in the survey, so that was also pretty strong engagement,” Principal Randi Jones said. “Our parent response was the lowest, we had only 25 percent of parents respond, which might indicate some concern about how this data would be used. I went back, and we’ve been doing a similar survey with our Leader In Me work for the past five years, and for our first year in 2022, we also saw a low response rate there, but as we’ve utilized that data and shared feedback with the parents about how we’re incorporating their voices, the response rate trickled up each year and now we have almost half of parents responding to the survey. As you all have seen with past presentations, there are eight indicators in Level One of the HRS framework, and we identified all the indicators that scored 3.5 or higher as a strength indicator, and for Eisenhower M.S., those were indicators 1.1 through 1.5 and then 1.8. We also identified a couple indicators we created some action plans for in order to make some improvements, and those were 1.6 and 1.7.”