The Warren County Board of Education held the first of four interviews for its director of schools position on Friday. Taking the spotlight first was Dr. Roger Alsup.
“The state department has deemed you ‘satisfactory’ which is below advancing and exemplary,” said Alsup to School Board members Tanya Bess, chair, Teddy Jones, Sue Anderson, Helen Martin and Bill Zechman. “Well, I’m just going to tell you. If I’m your director of schools, satisfactory is unsatisfactory to me.”
Prompting that response was a question by Jones.
“With you looking from the outside in at our district, what do you feel are some of the strengths and weaknesses we have and how would you improve each of those?”
Strengths
“To start with some of the good, I think your sixth grade math scores have been fairly consistent,” said Alsup. “Science and social studies are good. Your CTE concentrator is 56 percent which is above the state average. I noticed that the chronic absentee rate is 12.1 percent which is also better than the state average.”
Weaknesses
“There are things that you need to work on,” said Alsup. “You have two elementary schools that have been identified by the state department as improvement schools. I think your fourth through eighth grade math and English schools … some made slight improvement but they are still struggling in those areas. I think a lot of your areas are still below the state average, even though you are showing some improvement. The Algebra II scores are struggling. English I and II, the scores are probably not where they need to be. Integrated math scores are not every good.”
Solutions
“What do we do to fix the problems?” said Alsup. “I’m going to tell you that I don’t think it’s your teachers. I think there are some other systemic problems that we need to take a look at. One of the first things that I would do is to make sure that my teachers are being heard. We need to empower our teachers and that is really a growing level leadership issue. I want to hear from the teachers. Teachers know how to teach. They know how to improve achievement. I want to hear their thoughts and suggestions on what we need to be doing. That’s first and foremost.”
Alsup is principal of Franklin County High School. His career spans 23 years as an assistant superintendent, high school principal, middle school principal, high school assistant principal, and middle school assistant principal.
“In every position I’ve been in as an administrator, we have had growth in our academic achievement,” said Alsup. “When I was a middle school principal in Missouri, my school was recognized as one of the top 10 schools in the state of Missouri and warranted a Gold Star Award by the state education department.”
A hard look at curriculum can be beneficial to improving academic achievement, said Alsup.
“One of the things that we did at the Gold Star school, that I found very beneficial, was we did vertical team and we took a very hard look at the curriculum. When we did that, we found that there were gaps and overlaps. There were some areas that nobody realized that we weren’t event teaching. There were some other areas that we were teaching too much of. After we started working through the curriculum, our scores reflected that.”
The interview was held at Warren County High School’s auditorium. Alsup was interviewed Friday at 5 p.m.
On Saturday, Autumn Turner, Courtney Bennett and Grant Swallows were scheduled for interviews.
The Standard didn’t have time to compile a report from those interviews by press time.
