New School Year Starts in Franklin County With New Education System

By M.J. Kneiser
The first day of school for students in Franklin County was Thursday and in addition to a new school year, it’s also the start of a new school system.
This week the Franklin County School Board signed the paper work for the school system to become a Strategic Waiver School system.
School Superintendent Dr. Ruth O’Dell said the change will give the school system more flexibility in return for more accountability.
“This is all part of a law that is requiring districts to declare themselves as either a Charter school system, a Strategic Waiver System, or the status quo system,” Dr. O’Dell explained. “And because our board felt like the way our smaller county is, and we’re working as a unit rather than different schools having their own unit, we felt this plan would work better for us for flexibility.”
O’Dell said under the Strategic Waiver System, Franklin County promises to work towards increasing its test scores and its graduation rate over the next five years. O’Dell says that means teachers will be focusing on two main areas in the classroom.
The first is better literacy and reading comprehension.
“About 86% of our kids graduate from high school,” O’Dell said. “Our next mountain to climb is to have more of them go on to some kind of post-graduate training and education. About half of our kids, as far as we can tell at least initially, go nowhere.”
Dr. O’Dell said she believes the problem lies with a student’s inability to read and interpret the material at that level or the fear of not being able to so.
“We feel underlying that is the confidence they feel about handling academic subjects,” she said. “We think at the bottom of that is more in literacy than it is in the particular subject or its difficulty. So we’re going to push a lot more literacy in all of our classes.”
Second, Dr. O’Dell said is a complicated cultural mindset among parents that is keeping students from either from doing their best or from being challenged to improve.
That, she said starts with changing the mindset of the teachers in the classroom as well as the parents.
“There’s always opportunities to do better; to recover from setbacks,” O’Dell said. “We don’t want to create a system where you get something for no effort just because we don’t want to upset you or your parents; no, no, no. That isn’t going to be good for a student in the long run. So, I have to communicate that I’m not giving up on you and I’m not going to allow you to give up on yourself.”
O’Dell said that will mean some changes in the classroom.
“We’re going to have to give feedback to kids in different ways and there is going to be more homework,” she said.
O’Dell said parents must be willing to want something better for their students in life than what they had and be willing to encourage them to work hard to achieve their dreams or be willing to motivate their high-achieving students to continually challenge themselves to improve and move forward.