One of the main goals for the Powell schools this year is to focus on informing the community about what’s going on inside the school district. 

“I think that when I met with my administrators yesterday, the resounding cry coming from me is that we just need to be shouting from the rooftops all that we’re doing,” Superintendent Jay Curtis said. “We need to communicate better, my office needs to communicate out more to our constituents.”

People are calling for more transparency from schools and Curtis said that while this has not necessarily been a frequent issue in Powell, the goal is to stay ahead of it.

“So communication is a huge goal for us this year, communication and transparency of what we’re doing and why we do it,” Curtis said.

In part to bolster this effort, PCSD1’s website will also be moving to a platform called Apogee. The platform partners with an app which will have a live news feed the school can update as needed while also sending these updates to its other social media accounts. 

Separately, PCSD1 will have increased special education support at Powell Middle School with the conversion of its DaVinci lab into a “Life Skills Lite” room. 

“The need for the life skills addition in the middle school is due to a pretty large influx [of special needs students] from the elementary schools,” Curtis said.

This year also has one of the largest amounts of open support staff positions available since his time in Powell Curtis said. But he noted that certified positions have been filled and that the school year will be able to proceed as normal while the regular hiring season begins within the first months of the school year. 

“We’re not behind schedule at all in filling [positions],” Curtis said. “In fact, I think the interviews are happening either later this week or early next week, two weeks before school starts, so we’re in good shape.”

Outside of school funded positions there will be an additional counselor added to the district thanks to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration grant.

“We’re gonna have a continued focus on providing great mental health support to our students. As a country and as a state and as a town, the mental health of our students has been on the decline since about 2013-2014,” Curtis said. “The rise in depression and anxiety has been really pretty staggering and so obviously, we have not been immune to that.”

The extra counselor was able to be added to the district’s mental health services due to SAMSHA funds left over after contracting the help of Heritage Health. This allows the number of students being served in the district to double. Curtis said that this additional counselor also puts Powell schools at or near the national recommendations for the level of counseling in schools. 

There will also be a “continued focus on Professional Learning Communities (PLC),” Curtis added. All Powell schools are PLC’s, which means schools put a focus on identifying core knowledge, measuring when students learn this core knowledge and responding to learning setbacks, according to an article from EducationWeek.

“It’s work that we are committed to, as an administrative team, as a board, most of our schools are high performing Professional Learning Community Schools and we’re just getting there little bit by little bit,” Curtis said. 

Information about PCSD1 and the district calendar can be found at pcsd1.org.