Van Buren Students, Staff, and Community, I would like to thank you for the outstanding start of the 24-25 school year. Staff and students are becoming acclimated to their routines, and we are ready to spend the next nine months achieving the district’s mission of Building Thinkers, Building Connections, and Building Experiences.
There are a wide variety of initiatives being implemented throughout the district. Building thinkers requires us to challenge students to reach their full potential and prepare for whatever post-high school options they choose to pursue, so the high school is offering in-house Advanced Placement (AP), College Credit Plus (CCP), and English as a Second Language (ESL) classes this year.
AP classes offer college-level courses and exams that students can take while in high school. Depending on the scores students earn on the exams in the spring and the colleges they choose to attend, the colleges can accept those scores for college credit, saving the students time and money. AP Calculus, AP Chemistry II, and AP Art IV will be offered this year.
CCP classes offer students the opportunity to earn college credits both at Van Buren and at local colleges through both online and in-person offerings. Composition I and II classes will be offered through Van Buren’s English department, and Government will be offered through the social studies department.
The final addition to our offerings in the high school this year is ESL classes for English credit with our ESL coordinator, Mackenzie Leonard. Van Buren’s English learners will now participate in a class for English credit focused on developing both their mastery of the Ohio English Language Arts Standards and their language proficiency. In addition to this new class, Mrs. Leonard will continue to serve our 51 English learners in grades PreK-12 who speak close to 20 native languages from every continent except Australia and Antarctica.
Helping students build connections with their future employers can never begin too early, and that’s why seventh and eighth grade students will be using the YouScience platform to begin exploring career options this year. Eighth graders will then go a step farther and participate in Raise the Bar-Hancock County’s Career Connections Day at Owens Community College in October. Using their YouScience results, eighth graders will identify their top three career clusters based on their aptitudes and interests and then identify what businesses from those industries will be at the event so they can be sure to visit them to learn about future career opportunities.
Building connections is also the motivation behind creating an additional resource room for grades 3-6 to meet the diverse learning needs of our students. The creation of this additional room did not require hiring additional staff; the district has seven K-12 intervention specialists whose services were reallocated to support students with exceptionalities at all grade levels. A similar cross-categorical classroom was successfully implemented in grades 7-12 during the 23-24 school year, which provided proof of concept for this new resource room. We are excited to offer these services to our students and their families.
Because thinking and connecting are only two pieces of the Van Buren mission, building experiences is something elementary students will be able to do in a variety of ways this year. When they want to be moving, they will be able to play in physical education classes with the indoor Gaga Ball pit purchased with financial assistance from the PTO. When they need to settle down with a good book, they’ll be able to do that with books of their own “purchased” from the book vending machine principal Mike Newcomer was able to secure through a HancockREADS grant from The Findlay-Hancock County Community Foundation. Students who are respectful, responsible, and resilient will be able to earn tokens to purchase the books through the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) program. The PTO is also providing financial assistance to the district to purchase books to stock the vending machine.
All of the instances of Building Thinkers, Building Connections, and Building Experiences during the 23-24 school year led to Van Buren Schools earning 4.5 stars out of 5 on the Ohio School Report Card released in mid-September. I applaud the hard work students and staff dedicated to reaching this level of achievement, and we will analyze the report card evidence to identify ways we can continue to improve the educational outcomes for all students.
With all of the progress being made to develop our students in all grades, we need to continue to improve our facilities where those experiences take place. We are making progress toward turning the 209 S. Main St. property adjacent to the middle school building into practice space that will be available for use in the fall of 2025. All buildings have been removed, and eventually curbs will be installed, multiple power poles will be moved, and the area will be graded and seeded.
Finally, this November we will have a renewal levy (not a new tax) on the ballot for the 1% income tax passed by district voters in 2020. The money received from the levy accounts for over 20% of the district’s total revenue and will be used to maintain current levels of day-to-day operations for transportation, maintenance and repairs, utilities, staff salaries, and supplies.
I am so proud of the work everyone is doing to make Van Buren Schools a place where everyone can be proud to be a Black Knight!
Sincerely,
Jason Inkrott, Superintendent