One year ago, a team of 18 people met with Less Loomis, a retired superintendent, looking for ideas on how to improve our school. The Rensselaerville Institute offered the program, called Get to Great, that aparked Mr. Chirco’s interest. "The institute has a long history of using a results-based approach to improvement" Mr. Chirco states. The idea is that teachers and other staff members should focus on improving the students’ achievement. The teachers set targets for their students and then did whatever was necessary to reach those targets. Their desired result was that "students would learn more and, thus, achieve more," states Mr. Chirco.

An example of this idea was that last year, a first grade teacher at the Valley school, Mrs. Amy Zimmerman, set a target for herself at the end of the year. The goal was that she would get 12 of the 14 students she had to get to a point where they were reading at grade level. Once she set the target, she became more focused on reaching that goal. "It helps that the target number are whole numbers instead of percentages," Mr. Chirco states. Mrs. Zimmerman tried many things to try and push her students to get to that reading level. She turned to co-workers looking for ideas of how she could improve students reading. Mr. Chirco explained her final outcome saying, "At the end of the year, she had 11 out of 14 students reading at grade level, but she improved the reading of all the students in her class."

An example of this program in the high school level is when Mrs. Melissa Butler, in the English department, set a target of getting 19 of her 22 at risk students to pass English 11. She focused on the individuals in her class who were struggling and put forth effort to get them to complete their assignments. She changed the reading packets for the novels and the plays that her class read to make them more interesting and engaging for her students. In the end, she hit her target!

This is the second year of this program and about 60 people came in for the meeting about it in August (teachers, counselors, etc…). They met again on Friday, October 8^th, to discuss and create prototypes. Tuesday, October 12^th, Less Loomis worked with the teachers to help them reach their goals.

"The idea is that the people who are going to improve are the teachers. They need to be given the opportunity to set their own targets for student achievement," Chirco states. This year, entire grade levels of teachers are all working toward the same target. This program is proving to be very effective and will become more effective in years to come.