Roseburg High School, Roseburg OR
Attend the Innovative Schools Summit in Nashville and the 34th Annual National Dropout Prevention Conference in New Orleans to acquire general dropout prevention strategies and specific interventions for working with at-risk students and support the school’s goal of increasing the 9th grade on-track rate and overall graduation rate.
Having this opportunity to go to the conferences provided me with knowledge and skills that will benefit my future students. Without the grant I wouldn't have had the opportunity for these learning experiences. Teachers don't get experiences like this normally. I've been able to grow & learn as an educator and I'm bringing back data proven ideas to implement at my school. Some key aspects I'm bringing back are volunteering for our at-risk students, mentoring, and connecting with families more.
I learned that there are many other Graduation Coaches across the nation that work in this role & I've been able to find ways to connect with them to learn from what they are doing. I also learned that I am braver than I thought I was because I usually wouldn't just go and travel to new places & try new things. Normally, I'm a creature of habit. I think this shows my students that adults can be lifelong learners and can do things that push them outside of their comfort zone & try new things.
I can say for sure that the information about how Artificial Intelligence is shaping our world & how our education system needs to shape around it. This was a very unexpected result of these conferences. The sessions opened my eyes to how AI can be used in so many beneficial ways in education. A presenter shared startling statistics about how our quickly jobs are changing due to technology and AI & fast our schools need to prepare students for careers that will actually exist in the future.
I will share the dropout prevention strategies with the teachers that I work with so that we can implement school-wide dropout prevention strategies. If school-wide strategies aren't possible, my coworker & I will develop a volunteering program/opportunity for our own students. We have started brainstorming ways to start something that gets our students involved with our community, offering service to areas & people in need, & learning employability skills. We also want to get mentors involved.
As mentioned before, we want to have our students do service for others. Service is one of the best ways to raise your own self-worth, gives a sense of pride, develops responsibility and leadership, develops empathy, and can keep kids connected to school. We envision volunteering at an animal shelter, a senior rehabilitation center, an elementary school, and cleaning our city pathways. We plan to have them serve at one type of service weekly for a month, then rotate to another type of service.
We would like to have community members who would be willing to come share about their education journeys talk about how they completed school & what their education journey looked like. We want to have presenters come once or twice a month & share about how their education led them to where they are today & how their career path changed over the years. We aren’t going to focus on exposure to jobs necessarily, but on the different ways and paths people take towards post high school success.
