Bearcat Wrap-up Podcast

Happy Friday! Thank you for your efforts this week! It was a good week - a short week - and although not quite as eventful as last week we still have much to reflect on. It began with our Ladycat Volleyball team in the state tournament, a very successful Louise Durham Fall Carvinval, Red Ribbon Week activities, and the Middle School Fall Dance, and ended with day number 50 of the school year. A bi...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all you have done this week to balance the celebratory events with our regular work to educate students. As far as I know, there has never been a week like this at Mena Public Schools when we have an international film crew doing a documentary and our Governor establishes her administration here to tour and operate. It has been quite a memorable week. Our performance ta...

Happy Friday! Thank you, again, for the hard work and effort in Week 9! As mentioned in the heading, our current state of progress is clearer and even though we have some data sets yet to be complete, our target dashboard is complete and useful for keeping track of our district’s overall progress. Our work is cut out for us as we strive to reach our performance targets. This week’s Wrap-up has no...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all you have done this week to help us reach our district targets and work toward your professional goals, as well. As we wrap up another exciting week of exploration and discovery, our journey through the world of data has been nothing short of enlightening. Week 8 and the weeks to follow will be all about peeling back the layers and looking beyond the surface to revea...

Happy Friday! As we wrap up Week 7 and our first 31 days of the school year, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for everyone's tireless efforts in fulfilling our district's mission . Teachers, staff, and administrators are going above and beyond to meet our district’s performance targets and create an effective learning environment. This week, we have reached a significant milestone with the...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all the effort put into Week 6! It has been a productive week here at Mena Public Schools as our District Targets are beginning to come to light and building plans are being implemented. Our Walkthrough data is becoming very informative to us as to the teaching that is happening throughout the district. This information is helpful to all of us because if we know where w...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all you have endured this week to accomplish the mission of our school district! We are already a month into this school year and our pace and rhythm are starting to set in. Across our school district, teachers, staff, and administrators are putting in tireless hours and immense effort to create a nurturing and effective learning environment for our students. Our commun...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all that you did this week to further establish a good tone and high expectations for the new school year. The back-to-school issues of the past do not seem to be as prominent this year, but I do not want to take anything for granted so, please, take a little time to give us some feedback on the start of school. We will be asking our community the same question in a dif...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all of your efforts this week. I hope that your routines are starting to be settled and that your students are getting back into the learning mode. We have had a good week at Mena Public Schools. Just as noted in last week’s Wrap-up, the district leadership PLC has met and is working toward establishing our district goals for the year. We are also planning this year’s b...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all you did this week to successfully complete the first full week of our new school year. Getting through the first full week is tough enough without the added heat wave but we have dealt with it patiently and will be getting some much-needed relief from the weather next week. In this week’s Wrap-up, I want to share some insights gained from Mrs. Buckley’s first LEARNS...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all of the hard work and effort in the days leading up to last Wednesday and our students’ first day of school for the 23-24 school year! These first three days have been rather smooth with only minor issues that were easily resolved or are being resolved. This speaks to the foresight each of you used to prepare to begin school with our students as your focus. This Wrap...

Happy Friday! This is the last Friday of the school year and the last Wrap-up, too. Tomorrow will be graduation day for the class of 2023 and our culminating event to put our product into the marketplaces of the world. Although much of the fanfare takes place at the high school, each one of you who taught these graduates from Pre-K to twelfth grade, had the academic and social influence that it to...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all you did this week! In case you missed it in our District Updates done by Ms. Albin’s journalism students, here is a message to teachers for Teacher Appreciation Week. Our Facebook has been full of posts about the appreciation shown to you all by our community partners and parents. It has been a really good week of appreciation, reflection, and planning to bring us t...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all you have done this week! All of the efforts we have put into our students have been recorded in the ACT Aspire testing portal. Testing our students satisfies what the state asks of us as far as our accountability to it, but we are still accountable to ourselves and this community for using our time and resources in the most effective ways to make sure our students (...

Happy Friday! Besides the ending of April and the last full month of the 2022-2023 school year, this week also brought us closer to the end of our ACT Aspire testing window. The hay is nearly in the barn, as they say, and we will see how much impact we made on our students this year sometime in late June or early July. Thank you for all of the work you did leading up to this testing time and pleas...

Happy Friday! This has been a very busy week for all of us with a lot of good news and results in all that has happened. Thank you for all of the progress you have made toward our district goals ! I was happy to report to the School Board on Tuesday that 73 percent of our students are ‘on-level’ according to our methods of determination. This is a great testament to the work being done in all of t...

Happy Friday! This is been a very busy week here at Mena Public Schools. Thank you all for all that you have done this week. Our goals are important, but to Wrap-up this week the primary thanks go out to everyone who is giving our students opportunities through numerous activities that took place. In this Wrap-up I will rehash information from the meetings that took place at each building this wee...

Happy Thursday! We have a short week and a long weekend due to Good Friday. I hope you have had a good week despite the sadness that came from the loss of one of our students. Amanda Tolbert’s funeral was today. Despite the somber mood, it was very good to see many of our school staff attending to offer support and condolences to the family. Many staff members have poured their time, energy, and e...

Happy Friday! I hope all of you had an enjoyable Spring Break. Whether you traveled or camped or just stayed at home to catch up on chores, I hope there was enough time to rejuvenate and prepare for the final stretch of this school year. Thank you for all you did in this returning week to help us reach our district goals . This data is not updated all the way to week 27 yet but it will be early ne...

Happy Friday! This week’s Wrap-up will be short so you are not left with a lot to think about as you start your Spring Break this afternoon. I will update you on our district goals and provide some other short pieces of information. * Thank you for all that you did this week to help us reach our district goals as we keep trending in the right direction. Even attendance inched up a little bit. Alth...

Before I get into the Wrap-up and the latest on LEARNS, I want to pay homage to one of our school district’s greatest supporters who has passed away, Buddy Bean. Mr. Bean was a Bearcat supporter for a long time and without him, our Ballfields at Union Bank Park would not exist. He assisted the district in other initiatives and improvements and has been honored by the Mena School Board for his bene...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all you have done in Week 25 to meet your own professional goals, your students’ goals, and our district's goals . Our efforts are gaining dividends for our students each week as we progress through the year, but these past two weeks have made working in education more interesting because of the things happening in Little Rock. It appears that SB294 will become the LEAR...

Happy Friday! Thank you for what you have been able to accomplish this week! Every week of this school year has resulted in positive results for our students demonstrated by our district goals data. I was very happy to report to the board Tuesday night that our on-grade-level reading percentage has reached 67 percent! This surpasses our goal of 60 and we still have several weeks of instruction to...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all you have done this week to help us reach our district goals . We should have an update on our on-level reading percentage by next Tuesday’s board meeting to accompany the other data we are tracking and I look forward to sharing that with everyone soon. As we learn more about the LEARNS plan, it is apparent that our grade-level reading will be a very important part o...

Happy Friday! Thank you for all you have done this week to help us accomplish our district goals ! Of course, with school being closed four days last week, not much changed. But, we are glad to have had another full week of school for the spring semester and take further steps toward a great outcome for the year. On the bright side of last week’s closure, our absenteeism went down another two-tent...