ACT Scores Higher Than State Average

Board members discussed general housekeeping items during Monday’s Unified District meeting, which lasted less than an hour.

During the meeting, the board voted to approve Clearwater-Orchard Grad Dallas Reuss to return to the school as a volunteer with the Marching Band. Dallas Reuss graduated from Clearwater-Orchard two years ago.

Clearwater Principal Mike Sanne also discussed the ACT scores, which confirm the quality education students receive at the district schools. While the composite state score sat at a 21.4, Unified District’s #1 composite score was 22, putting the district .6 above state level.

Orchard Principal Cathy Cooper also said the board discussed a school improvement process all northeastern and northcentral Nebraska schools are participating in.

“We talked about the school improvement process we are using,” said Cooper, “The Northern Tier, which is a group of many other schools here in northeast and northcentral Nebraska are going through the same process of what we are looking at to improve our schools during the year. We kind of do the same things. We are looking at school processes and demographics at our November late start and we have representatives from ESU8 who come in and work with our staff to do that.”

In addition to higher than average ACT scores and a school improvement program, the District has also succeeded in moving the Hot Lunch Program to the black.

“Over the past few years we had been kind of trying to work to improve our Hot Lunch Program so that we were in the black and not losing money,” said Cooper, “and our kitchen staff has done a great job with that. We have some excess money and that’s going to be moved into some separate hot lunch accounts to pay for some items that might be in need of in the kitchen. So if the dishwasher were to go out or a freezer were to go out, there would be money that we could pull from that to put back into the facilities.”

Board members also discussed plans for the upcoming homecoming lunch at the Orchard Site. “The board members are going to serve the lunch,” Cooper said, “and that was donated by various businesses and clubs in the community.”

During the board also accepted a bid for the old HVAC units that were removed from the Orchard Kindergarten and First Grade rooms, and declared various items obsolete, including a water fountain at the Orchard site.