Bearcat Wrap-up Podcast

Happy Final Friday! Welcome to this week's Bearcat Wrap-up! With only three school days remaining, we conclude another productive week at Mena Public Schools. I extend my deepest appreciation for everyone's hard work and commitment. This week, we celebrate the outstanding achievements of our students in the final days of the school year and recognize the unwavering support of our parents and commu...

Happy Friday! Welcome to this week's Bearcat Wrap-up! With only eight school days remaining, we conclude another productive week at Mena Public Schools, I extend my deepest appreciation for everyone's hard work and commitment. This week, we celebrate the remarkable achievements of our senior class and the dedication of our educators during Teacher Appreciation Week. Each milestone reached this wee...

Happy Friday! Welcome to this week's Bearcat Wrap-up! As we conclude another productive week at Mena Public Schools, I extend my deepest appreciation for everyone's hard work and commitment. This week, we celebrate our diligent Child Nutrition department on School Lunch Hero Day, reflect on the enriching experiences provided by early career exposure activities, and commend the strong finishes of o...

Happy Friday! As we wrap up another productive week, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to each of you for your dedication and hard work. Your efforts continue to make a significant impact on our school’s performance targets and fulfill our mission and vision to impact our community. In this week's update, we delve into several key areas that are essential to our collective success. We will dis...

Happy Friday! Welcome to the Week 32 Wrap-up! As we near the end of another enriching school year, our community continues to thrive, filled with vibrant events and significant achievements. Thank you for all you did this week! This week, we celebrated the arrival of our future Kindergartners with a big registration event, cheered on our students at the Special Olympics, and watched more of our st...

Happy Friday! To the entire Bearcat Family, thank you for your dedication and hard work this week as we push forward to meet our performance targets and fulfill our mission and vision . With just 27 days left in the school year, it is crucial that we maintain our momentum and uphold our high standards to maximize the positive impact on our students. As scholarship season is upon us, this week we t...

Happy Friday! To the entire Bearcat Family, thank you for your efforts this week to draw us closer to our performance targets and accomplish our mission and vision ! There are only 31 days left in the school year for us to do our greatest amount of good for our students so it is ever important that we continue our pace and keep expectations high. This week, we are casting a well-deserved spotlight...

Happy Friday! I hope you all had a wonderful Spring Break! This first week of the last quarter started very well with our professional development at the Ouachita Center on Monday. I want to start by extending my deepest gratitude to all staff members at Mena Public Schools for your unwavering dedication and hard work. Your commitment is the backbone of our progress toward our performance targets...

Happy Friday! As we approach the eagerly anticipated Spring Break at Mena Public Schools, I want to express my heartfelt appreciation to every one of our staff members for their unwavering dedication and effort. Your hard work is vital in helping us advance toward our performance targets , mission , and vision . The rest and renewal we embrace this break is not just a pause but a preparation to ma...

Happy Friday! As we close another week at Mena Public Schools, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to all our dedicated staff members for the incredible work done throughout the week to reach our performance targets , mission , and vision . Your commitment to fostering a supportive and enriching environment for our students did not go unnoticed, especially the Read Across America activity. This...

Happy Friday! As we reflect on the strides we have made in Week 26 and look forward to the remaining fifty instructional days, it is clear that our collective efforts are bearing fruit, bringing us closer to our performance targets , mission , and vision . We have fallen below the 93.5 percent target for attendance and I have shared in previous Wrap-ups why our discipline numbers will be higher th...

Happy Friday! As we wrap up Week 25 of our academic year, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our dedicated staff at Mena Public Schools. Your continuing commitment and tireless efforts have been instrumental in steering our students toward our district performance targets . As we continue to foster a culture of excellence and learning, this week we turn our focus to a cornerstone of educati...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all you have done this week! Week 24 encapsulates a week filled with remarkable achievements across our school community, from the collective pride in our Special Olympics heroes and the recognition of our innovative Alternative Education program to the joyous celebration of a dedicated volunteer's 90th birthday and the steadfast journey of our bus drivers ensuring ever...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all you did this week for our students and each other! I am sorry to inform you that our data system, COGNOS, is still down so updates to our performance are not completely available and we still await some assessment results for the academic portions of our performance targets . Nevertheless, our resolve to increase learning and attendance while decreasing discipline i...

Happy Friday! I want to express my deepest appreciation for all of your hard work and dedication this week. COGNOS, the state data reporting system, has been down since last Friday and there are still academic assessments to finish, so there are no updates but your efforts to reach our performance targets have not gone unnoticed. We are still collecting walkthrough observation data of our own and...

Before getting the the Wrap-up, it is with a heavy heart and profound sadness that we share the news of the unexpected passing of Sonja Stueart, our esteemed School Resource Officer at Holly Harshman Elementary. Sonja was not just a guardian of safety; she was a cherished member of our school family, beloved by staff and students alike. Her dedication to our school went beyond her role, touching m...

Happy Friday! This week at Mena Public Schools, we have experienced a whirlwind of events, quite literally! Our week was as brief as a snowflake's journey, starting and ending on Friday due to a picturesque yet pesky blanket of ice and snow that chilled our town from Sunday through Thursday. It is not every week that our calendar looks like a sandwich with the bread missing, but we made the most o...

Happy First Friday of 2024! Welcome back! I hope you all had a festive yet restful Christmas Break and are ready to continue our progress for this school year. The Spring Semester is an intense time bringing a heightened sense of intensity compared to the fall. This period is marked by a rapid acceleration in academic rigor, as students delve deeper into their curricula, building upon the foundati...

Happy Wednesday! I am proud to congratulate each of you for the academic achievements our students have gained this semester. Your dedication, expertise, and unwavering commitment to our students' education have yielded exceptional academic results, as detailed in our latest update. In our K-5 grades, the growth in reading skills has been phenomenal. Every student showed progress, with an average...

Happy Friday! It is the last Friday of the fall semester and it has come upon us very quickly! Thank you for all you have done this week as we approach the end. I know that these closing days leading up to a break are busier as we wrap things up and I appreciate all of the effort that has been put forth to make learning happen. Our performance targets have been updated but the academic data is not...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all you have done this week to reach our performance targets for the year. Our trends in discipline and attendance continue on the same trajectories but we will have some academic updates by next week to see if our other efforts are paying off. There is not much to write about this week; so, this Wrap-up will be all about the instructional data that has been collected i...

Happy Friday! Thanks for all you did this week to model for our students the concept of lifelong learning! Working with Bailey Group, Solution Tree, and DESE consultants has caused much professional conversation about how to hone our abilities to make sure our students are getting what they need to be prepared and successful. It is a never-ending cycle of planning, doing, checking, and reflecting....

Happy Friday! Fridays before long breaks are even better Fridays and I hope yours has been good. Thank you for all you have done this week. Our academic updates for our performance targets will be done next month but our other trends continue on the same trajectory, which is good for attendance but bad for discipline. The district PLC team has started looking deeper into the discipline data for in...

Happy Friday! Thank you for another week of teaching and learning! Our performance targets are continuing with the same trends as last week for attendance and behavior. Our academic reports’ hard data should be updated in December and January. That is the data that is gathered from across all students at all grade levels. Not all of the data is in yet but early indicators show that we are seeing g...

Happy Friday! Thank you for a successful Week 12! We are on day number 55 with 115 remaining. Our performance targets have been updated for the week and show that we are staying on track in attendance, but our discipline referrals were up again by 11 percent. In this week’s Wrap-up, I want to focus on all of us being reflective practitioners who use data to guide instruction by comparing what we d...