The regular meeting of Park County School District 1 Board of Trustees was markedly different from most others recently. There was an audience.

“It is nice to have some people here,” said board of trustees chairman Trace Paul. “It’s been almost a year,” he said to approximately 15 members of the public and school administrators who had previously stayed away from public meetings because of COVID-19 protocols.

The trustees got right down to business passing the consent agenda, with one item usually included in the consent items pulled for discussion. That item was the offer of contracts to the certified school staff members. 

Trustee Greg Borcher said he had asked for the more than 160 contracts to be pulled from the consent agenda, which is voted on whole cloth, so the board members with a spouse on the list could abstain from only that vote; both Paul and trustee Kim Dillivan are married to educators. 

“But it is also so we can recognize what a remarkable job the staff has done this year,” Borcher continued. “They adapted to online, came back, dealt with masks, hand sanitizers and dividers, and kept our doors open.”

Superintendent Jay Curtis jumped on the band wagon.

“What they’ve accomplished this year is nothing short of miraculous,” Curtis said. “We can’t say it enough: We have an awesome staff.”

The contract offerings passed easily, with Paul and Dillivan abstaining. Then the trustees stood to give the staff a standing ovation.

Jason Sleep, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, next addressed the board with his annual report. 

“Here’s the data to support how good our teachers are,” he began.

Sleep said he went through the Wyoming Test of Proficiency and Progress (WY-TOPP) interim test results to look for holes in the scores from students being out of school last spring, when the COVID pandemic struck. Those results showed Park County School District 1 students 12 points higher than the state average in math and nine points higher than the state average in reading. 

“This shows the job we did teaching in the spring,” Sleep said.

He then went over the winter interim test scores for students through the eighth grade. 

“We outpaced the state [average] in every measure of growth. The middle school nearly doubled the state average in growth,” Sleep said.

Growth is set by performance indicators at the state and federal level.

“I’m excited to see what fall brings. I believe our teachers are even more focused on strategies, enrichment and intervention,” Sleep continued.

The growth indicators are especially outstanding, as Sleep explained, because some of the students in the group could not recognize letters when they entered first grade. Of those students, 75% were reading at grade level by test time. 

The schools each have at least one first grade teacher who is master’s level-trained in reading recovery. They, in turn, work to train other teachers at their facility.

“We start at the first grade with these students and keep pushing through the third grade,” Sleep said. “It puts their confidence through the roof, to have this success in school.”