Week 10: People Before Programs

Happy Friday! Thank you for a strong start to the second quarter as we work toward our performance targets. Last week, we took an honest look at our first-quarter attendance and behavior numbers, and this week our work turned toward the people behind those numbers. Our elementary teachers spent time face to face with families, our classrooms continue with expectations, and our buildings began the second quarter with a clear sense of where to focus. This week, I want to share something our district leadership team has been reading and thinking about together. It concerns one of the most common tools in every classroom, and it asks us to be thoughtful about how and when we use it. Screens, Learning, and Purpose This fall, the district leadership team is reading The Digital Delusion by neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath. The book argues that the heavy use of laptops, tablets, and classroom software is weakening the way children learn and develop. Several of its concerns are worth sharing with every member of our staff. * Engagement is not the same as learning. Fast, flashy digital tools can hold a student’s attention without building lasting understanding. A student who is busy on a screen is not always a student who is learning. * Devices invite drift. According to the research the book reviews, students using classroom devices can be off task for as much as 38 minutes of every hour. * Paper and pencil still matter. Students understand what they read better on paper than on a screen, and handwritten notes produce better recall than typed notes. * More screen time tracks with lower scores. On international assessments, students who use computers more than six hours a day score far below students who do not use them at all, a gap of roughly two letter grades. The book is not a call to get rid of technology. Learning to type, building a spreadsheet, or practicing a skill that truly belongs on a computer are good uses of a screen. The question is whether a device is the best tool for the learning in front of us or simply the most convenient one. We began reducing screen time as a district before we ever opened this book. Bell to Bell, No Cell took personal phones out of the school day. We have been doing this for more than two years now, and we have encouraged everyone to reduce screen time for students and increase the amount of handwriting they do. The reading confirms that we are on the right path, but it also reminds us that this work is decided in each classroom, not in a policy. Please monitor how much time students spend on devices. Use devices on purpose, when they are the best tool for the task, and do not let them become the default for every learning activity. Reading from a printed page, writing by hand, working a problem on paper, and talking through an idea with a classmate and a teacher remain some of the most powerful learning experiences we can offer. A Different View Than a Decade Ago This is a real change in thinking for our profession. In 2008, it was widely predicted that half of all high school courses would be delivered online by 2019, and a decade ago many educators believed that prediction was on track. Online learning was expected to become the primary way students learned, and many of us assumed more technology would naturally mean more learning. The results did not support that belief. Even before the pandemic, a national study found that students in full-time online schools gained the equivalent of 180 fewer days of learning in math and 72 fewer days in reading each year than similar students in traditional schools. The pandemic made the cost impossible to ignore. A study of more than two million students in 49 states found that students who spent more of the 2020–2021 school year in remote instruction grew far less than students in earlier years, and the losses were steepest in high-poverty communities. Where schools returned to in-person learning sooner, the losses were smaller. Recovery from those years is still part of our work today. The lesson is not that technology is bad. The lesson is that learning is a human activity. It grows through relationships, focus, conversation, and effort. When we put people before programs, our devices become what they should be: tools that serve our teachers and students rather than replace them. I say all of this as someone who once held the opposite view. When I was in the classroom, I was a technology enthusiast and an early adopter. I was often the first to try a new tool, and I believed, as many educators did, that online learning would one day be the most common way students learned. My enthusiasm cooled well before I opened this book, however, because I have watched the results from online and screen-heavy learning across our state and nation, and I have experienced online learning firsthand as a student myself. Those experiences taught me that a course delivered through a screen is not the same as learning alongside a teacher and classmates who know you. I still believe in the right tools used for the right purposes, but I no longer believe that technology can take the place of a great teacher. Roster Verification Is Now Open On a related note about using technology, the Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education has opened the 2027 Roster Verification System (RVS). RVS connects each teacher to the students he or she taught, so each teacher’s state growth score reflects the growth of those students on the spring state assessments. Accurate rosters matter because state growth scores are one route to eligibility under our Merit Pay Pathway, and state growth scores for last year are expected on November 5. What to do now: Log in to LEA Insights with your APSCN ID and password, and select Master Schedule, then Roster Verification System. Review your roster, your potential contributor list, and your course assignments. If you need help with your password, contact the district Active Directory Manager, Nathan Stone. How corrections work: Corrections are not made inside RVS. If something is wrong, let your building principal know so it can be corrected in eSchool or eFinance. RVS updates each night with the previous day’s changes, so you can confirm the correction the next day. Key dates: * October 12, 2026, through April 25, 2027: Review rosters and request corrections. * April 26 through June 1, 2027: Teachers verify their rosters, principals approve all rosters in their buildings, and the superintendent approves all schools in the district. The state’s Roster Verification webpage includes short videos and slide decks for teachers of record and potential contributors, along with the verifiable and excluded course lists, contributor job codes, and a list of frequently asked questions. Please take a few minutes this month to check your roster while your schedule is fresh, rather than waiting for the spring window. Closing Celebrations Thank you to our elementary teachers and staff at Louise Durham Elementary and Holly Harshman Elementary for yesterday’s parent-teacher conferences. Conferences work best as one more step in a conversation that is already happening, and the calls, messages, and progress updates you have shared with families since August made this week’s meetings more productive and more personal. Thank you to every member of our staff, in every building, for the effort you put into keeping families informed. When families and teachers work as partners, students are the ones who benefit most. Thank you to our child nutrition staff, especially the ladies at Holly Harshman, who celebrated National School Lunch Week with this year’s Cafeteria Circus theme. The National School Lunch Program has supported students for 80 years, and our cafeteria teams on each campus show every day that a healthy meal is part of a successful school day. We were happy to host Fields of Faith on Wednesday evening. Thank you to everyone who organized the event, and a special thank-you to those who moved it to the Union Bank Center at the last minute when rain threatened. Their quick work made sure the evening could go on for our students. Our student musicians had a strong week. The beginning choir opened its season Tuesday night with Disney Movie Magic in the Mena High School Performing Arts Center. Congratulations also to our Mena Middle School choir students who auditioned for All-Region. Eight of them earned places in All-Region choirs, and two more were named alternates. It was another strong week for our Bearcats and Ladycats. Volleyball swept Waldron at home on Tuesday, and then on Thursday the seventh-grade, junior, and senior Ladycats all won at Dardanelle without dropping a set. The junior Ladycats host the 4A-2 District Tournament at the Union Bank Center on Saturday and open against Dardanelle at 10:30 a.m. Although school is closed on Monday, our high school campus will be busy as Mena begins hosting the 4A North Regional Tournament. Please come out and support our Ladycats and welcome our visiting teams. Our seventh-grade Bearcats also beat Pottsville in football last night. Mena Esports kept rolling, too, with a 31–1 Rocket League win and several Fortnite victories. The Senior Bearcats are on the road to take on Pottsville tonight at 7 pm. We hope you can make the trip to cheer them on to another victory. This week in Mena Morphology Matters, our students studied log, meaning word, reason, or study. Next week begins the second-quarter theme of Movement and Action with the root port, meaning to carry. Our youngest students will meet it through carry and transport, our third through fifth graders in transport, our middle school students in portable, and our high school students in importation, with import, export, report, porter, and portfolio available across every grade band. The Bearcat Word Detective Challenge asks students to find another word that contains port. It is a fitting root for a week when we asked what our classroom tools should carry and what our teachers should still carry. It was a good week of putting people first at Mena Public Schools. At Mena Public Schools, our students are prepared, our staff is supported, and our community is confident. Keep Leveling-Up, and have a great long weekend! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bearcatwrap.substack.com