Haines Students returned to their classrooms earlier this month to continue the first school year since the end of the pandemic. Haines school district Superintendent Roy Getchell is feeling positive about the state of the district in 2023.
The Haines 2022-2023 school year resumed on January 4th. Being the first semester in two years with normalized travel and lifted COVID precautions, Superintendent Roy Getchell shared his impression was of the first semester.
“It was fast, you know, when I say that as a superintendent, but as a father of a senior. So I look at these years, and they go so fast that I look back. And I realized that I live life in nine month year. And I have to say that it felt really normal. And for once, that is really a good thing. So we had a great start to the year we’ve had normal ups, normal downs and normal planning. And so that’s really what we’ve been working really hard on as we work at the school.”
Getchell expressed his excitement for the success of the Haines basketball teams this year and stressed the added value of the additional programs available through the school.
“When you think of the whole plethora of things that we do in elementary, so we picked up elementary activities a few years ago, during the pandemic, middle school activities, and then high school activities, we just feel that that is such an important part of a student’s life. And that adds value to our school and our students and our school district that I’m super proud when I look at the numbers that we have. So a lot of the state is seeing lower participation. But um, I can tell you ours is way up. I mean, our wrestling program and middle school, we’ve got like 15 Students wrestling. It everything seems to be humming along that way. And I just really think that that’s important as we look at the things that, like I say, add value to a rural Alaskan community as we prepare our kids to go out into a greater world.”
Getchell continued, “We have band and choir we have DDF we have a very active art club. We have student government, which we brought back online this year, and we’ve traveled with this year. We have you know all of our high school activities in this last year we added swimming to that. We picked up middle school sports so we’ve made that an official part of our student activities…You’ve got basketball and tumbling, we’ve got archery, you name it, we added NYO, Native Youth Olympics last year, and we’ll be looking to pick that up a little bit later this spring…We had honor fest. So we’ve hosted multiple big events here. So we had the DDF tournament. We had music with honor Fest in October, we had a big wrestling tournament. So we have actually hosted it, as hard as it is to get up here sometimes. But Southeast Alaska loves to come to Haines and they love to see our community. So they make the effort to be here. So yeah, I’m really proud of all of our programs that we have.”
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress report released last October, there has been a decline in reading and math scores following the extensive lockdowns and mask mandates in schools across the nation. I asked Getchell about the current state of academics in Haines.
“I know that there’s a lot of focus on the Alaska READS Act, or maybe some of your listeners have heard about that. That’s the statewide legislation that requires that students are at grade level by third grade, where they’re going there’s a plan that goes into effect. And there’s lots of requirements and assessments and meetings that go with that. Well, we’ve, we’ve known that was going to happen. And so that’s been part of our strategic plan. And fortunately, we chose the right assessment and the right tool to be able to measure our students, it’s the one that the state is actually going to use. And we, the first year of measuring, we met our goal. So our board set the bar at 80% of our students in third grade would be at or above grade level or achieve a year’s growth and our first year measuring that we were we were well above that. So I was really happy about that.”
Despite success with the Alaska READS Act, Getchell admitted that the school did not do as well with The Alaska System of Academic Readiness (AK STAR) assessment implemented by Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development.
“So the AK STAR, the new state assessment? You know, I’ve been doing this a long time. And I’ve probably implemented this is my sixth or seventh state assessment that we’ve that I’ve adjusted to. And it’s funny because every time there’s a new one, I always take a deep breath thinking, Oh, my goodness, I have so much hope the new one is going to be better than the last one. It’s kind of funny, because then I find myself wishing for the old one sometimes. But you know, I guess what I would say is that typically you see an implementation drop, you know, the standards didn’t change, the measuring sticks did. So we did see a reduction in our scores. But when you look at our overall kind of like, comparison, whenever you look at how we compared to other districts around the state, we fell right in about the same area of two to three and most of those areas. Some areas were four. So we’re still, you know, among the best performing in the state of Alaska. But you know, if I’m an individual parent, and I’m worried about my individual students, so I think that that’s really important that we’re working, not just to have a high score, I guess you could say, for as a school district, but to make sure that each individual student is progressing at a level that we think that they should be.” Said Getchell.
The Haines school board will be holding a Legislative Strategies & Priorities workshop on Tuesday, January 31st at 6:30 pm. Getchell emphasized the need to increase funding in order to compete for the best teachers and staff possible.
