Dear Transylvania County Schools Families and Stakeholders,

Every fall, the state publishes a School Report Card for every public school in North Carolina, and this year's results give us a lot to be proud of.

The report card is the state's snapshot of how each of our schools is doing. It covers how students performed on state tests, how much they grew over the year, graduation rates, class sizes, teacher experience, school safety, and how much is spent per student. You can look up any of our nine schools and see the same information the state sees.

I’d encourage you to spend a few minutes looking through it. But I’d also ask you to keep a couple of things in mind as you do.

Test scores tell you where students are. Growth tells you how far they came. Those are two different questions, and the second one is often the better measure of the work happening inside a school. A school can serve students who arrive well behind and still do extraordinary teaching. Growth is where that work shows up. This year, eight of our nine schools met or exceeded the growth the state expected of them, and Brevard Middle posted the strongest growth result of any school in our district by a wide margin.

One year is one year. These numbers are a photograph, not a movie. They're useful, and we take them seriously, but they don't capture everything that matters about a school. They don't measure the teacher who stayed late to help your child understand fractions, or the band director who helped a student find a place to belong, or the bus driver who knows every kid's name.

With that said, I'm proud of what this year's data shows.

Transylvania County Schools ranked 14th out of 115 school districts in North Carolina in student proficiency. Our high schools ranked ninth in the state. Our fourth graders ranked fourth. In NC Math 3, we ranked second in all of North Carolina.

But the numbers I’m proudest of are these: Among all 115 districts, we ranked second in the state for our students with disabilities and fourth for our students from economically disadvantaged families. Strong overall scores are important, but what matters even more is whether we are reaching every group of students we serve. These results show that our teachers are reaching students who often need the most support, and that is the heart of our work.

I'll be just as straight with you about where we're focused next. Our results in fifth and sixth grade sit closer to the middle of the state than the rest of our grades do, and we intend to understand why. We also have work to do in serving our multilingual learners and our students experiencing homelessness at the same level we’re serving other students. Those aren’t excuses or footnotes. They’re priorities for us this year.

If you have questions about your child's school, please start with your principal. They know their building and their students better than any spreadsheet does, and they'll welcome the conversation. If you have questions about the district, my door is open, and our Board of Education meetings are open to everyone.

Thank you for trusting us with your children. It is the best work there is, and we don't take a day of it for granted.

Sincerely,

Lisa A. Fletcher, Ed.D.

Superintendent