On Tuesday, the Park City School Board discussed\u00a0class sizes of\u00a0Park City Schools. \u00a0Before this discussion, Superintendent Conley spoke about a vision for where the schools were going and how that impacts class size. We found the honesty, focus, insight, and willingness to address hard topics refreshing. Not everyone will like what she has\u00a0to say, but the path our school system is on is\u00a0unsustainable. The status quo is not an option.<\/p>\n
Here are Dr Conley’s\u00a0comments:<\/strong><\/p>\n [stag_divider style=”dotted”]<\/p>\n “I think we are taking the focus away from\u00a0what we need to\u00a0be focused on which is what careers\u00a0and college expectations do we need to prepare our students for. \u00a0Take class sizes out of it. We are looking at our specific courses. Just because we’ve always done it, doesn’t mean we are\u00a0going to continue doing it the same way next year. I’m just going to throwing [an example] out. Just because we’ve offered\u00a0weight training, 3 sections, does not mean we are going to continue that. We also have a growing demand for computer science, programming, coding. So, I think rather than getting hyper focused on class sizes. We have the information. \u00a0It goes to what is the absolute requirement that we have to have our students be prepared for and have the opportunity to learn in our schools.”<\/p>\n A school board member then says that the items they hear\u00a0about all\u00a0the time from\u00a0citizens and teachers is about class size. He says “so we’ve got a little bit of a disconnect.” Dr. Conley responds:<\/em><\/p>\n “See, I think they are completely connected. As we go through this refinement, this is going to be a difficult time and I’m preparing you because there is going to be some disappointment and there is going to be some shifts in what we’ve always done to be able to \u00a0prepare for the future. And\u00a0so there is going to be shifts in staffing. There’s going to be shifts in what we’ve always offered. And those\u00a0are going to be some very hard conversations because it does affect staffing. This is where you have to say, If I free up staffing in this area that really is very fluffy or not needed to prepare our students for that\u00a0data we just saw, we have more staffing\u00a0to be able to put in to class sizes that are high … \u00a0and that is the whole conversation [we’ve been having].”<\/p>\n [stag_divider style=”dotted”]<\/p>\n It’s really hard to argue with what Dr Conley said above. The overall goal of school is to prepare students for the future and the more focused everyone stays on that issue, the better the outcomes for our students. It would be a nice luxury if our students could spend all day\u00a0in Plato’s Academy, discussing topics like what is good<\/em> and shadows on the wall<\/em>, but that’s not tomorrow’s world. Tomorrow’s world poses\u00a0a myriad of challenges and we owe it to our students to prepare them as best we can. We give them the most\u00a0opportunity\u00a0by offering those courses that prepare them the best, even if that does upset parents, teachers, and students at times.<\/p>\n We wish Dr Conley and her administrators luck. We’re sure it’s not going to be easy, but we think\u00a0you may be on the right path.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Tuesday, the Park City School Board discussed\u00a0class sizes of\u00a0Park City Schools. \u00a0Before this discussion, Superintendent Conley spoke about a vision for where the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2329"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}