MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Engagement will be the name of the game for the next 100 days at Memphis Shelby County Schools.
Oct. 28th, district gave a look behind the curtains on how students and teachers were doing at it's Achieving System Excellence night.
“As a parent, I want to know what’s next,” said Trenetia Lowery, a member of the educational advocate group The Memphis Lift.
What's potentially next for her child has been the question Lowery has asked a lot as a parent, ahead of their enrollment in the district. While fighting to increase the literacy levels of MSCS students at The Memphis Lift, Lowery hopes to get answers from district leaders.
“We still know we have great work to do, great work has been done, we’ve just been building on that this year,” said MSCS Superintendent Dr. Marie Faegins.
Despite a controversial start to the school year, leaders at the ASE meeting say, what she's doing is working.
In a Facebook post the same day, Faegins was quick to announce the districts successes including:
- Increased Student Enrollment by 2.4% Year-to-Year
- Increased Student Attendance 93% to 94% Year-to-Year
- Decreased students involved in all fights by 11% compared to Quarter 1 in 2023-24.
- Launched Safe365 weekly call with the Superintendent and all Law Enforcement Partners.
- Reduced Exceptional Education Teacher vacancies from 84 to 67.
- Rehired 255 former MSCS teachers.
However, district leaders admit there are still several issues to overcome, including teacher burnout especially at Pre-K levels, and school literacy rates.
During the 2023-24 TCAP tests, only 26.6% of 3rd graders met or exceeded proficiency on the reading test. For 4th graders, 28.5 percent met or exceeded the same expectation.
“We just can’t take forever to get things moving in the right direction,” said Dr. Jared Myracle, MSCS Director of Literacy.
In the 2024-25 school year, the mission has been to drive up engagement at school and at home. The district has worked to provide reading calendars for parents to help track the topics students are learning about. Over the past month MSCS has also launched a Parenting Literacy Toolkit.
While parents like Lowery say the district appears to be heading in a good direction, additional work should go towards providing high dosage tutoring for struggling students. This would see students in smaller tutoring groups three times a week, to take a more individualized approach to literacy.
If you missed the meeting, a recording can be found online, and another will happen at 160 S. Hollywood St. at 2 p.m. on Oct. 31st.
You can check out a list of reports from MSCS including: