BUTLER TWP — Three Butler Area School District schools will implement improvement plans after the state identified areas of need in each.

Julie Hopp, director of curriculum and instruction in the district, gave a presentation to the school board Monday evening, Sept. 11, explaining the areas of need at Butler Senior High, Northwest Elementary and Center Township Elementary schools.

According to Hopp, attendance is an area that needs improvement at Northwest Elementary, while career readiness and English language arts are areas of need at the high school.

“There was a combination of students not completing the career-readiness activities, but also maybe us not documenting opportunities because they weren’t within a certain system,” Hopp said. “We’re working on connecting both of those things and making sure that if students are doing eligible activities that they are counted as such.”

A goal set for Center Township Elementary is to increase co-teaching and collaborative planning among staff, which will involve more planning for collaborative time and scheduling between teachers at the school.

While members of the school board voiced issues with the state’s system of identifying needs, Hopp said developing improvement plans helps a school focus on programs that may need review. Hopp added that the data the state is working with is a little behind — it is from the 2021-22 school year — but the areas identified could still be in need of improvement.

“There’s a lot of people doing a lot of things to support kids, but it’s not necessarily a system of support,” Hopp said. “What we want to do is create that system so that system is helping us.

“These are things we want to have on our radar, things we want to make sure we’re thinking about.”

Brian White, district superintendent, said that because the data is from the 2021 school year, when there were still COVID-19 mitigation policies in place, the attendance data could be slightly skewed.

“Seven hundred, 800 of our kids were on cyberschool,” White said. “The ones who were in school ... if you sneeze, you’re supposed to stay home for 10 days. Now we have an attendance issue; I wonder why.”

Brian Slamecka, the district’s assistant superintendent, read the school board policy updates that he said have to be updated this school year. The board approved first readings on updates for home education and graduation requirements, and a second reading to an update to the district’s suicide awareness and prevention policy.

The update to the home education policy required the school district to allow students being home-schooled to be involved in more school-sanctioned activities.

“Really what the state is saying right now is the updates with it indicate that more opportunity needs to be provided as far as kids being able to take advantage of opportunities within the district,” Slamecka said, “extending not only activities but co-curricular activities, like band, JROTC, those type of courses.”