Greetings Wessington Springs Community. We are officially back in school for the 2026-27 school year. The first few days have been great. It is an exciting time for students, school staff, parents and the community. We are looking forward to a great school year. There have been some staffing changes over the summer. Some of these new staff have been highlighted or will be highlighted in the True Dakotan.
This past July the Wessington Springs Board of Education approved to have Dakota Education Consulting do a Strategic Plan with the Wessington Springs Schools. Dakota Education Consulting has completed many school strategic plans around the state and come highly regarded. The first step in this process is developing and disseminating surveys. There will be four different surveys sent out: Staff, Parents, Community and MS-HS Students. The plan is to send these surveys out right after Labor Day. We would greatly appreciate if everyone took the time to complete the survey. DEC will then take the survey responses and compile them into data to be reviewed. At some point in October we will have two focus groups look at the data from the surveys. One focus group will be staff and the other focus group will be parents/ community. Those focus groups will come up with actions they think needs to be done according to the surveys. The focus group information will go back to DEC and they will develop how the strategic plan will look. The focus groups will have opportunity to review the strategic plan before it goes to the school board. Hopefully, by end of December the plan is approved and work will start in January on implementation of the plan. We will be looking for volunteers so be on the lookout for messages early in October asking for those. However, the first thing we will ask everyone to do is fill out the survey when we get them out here in a week or so.
Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is a big part of our schools. We have an elementary team and MS/HS team that meets monthly and attends summer workshops to provide guidance to the rest of the staff on how this will be carried out. One of the big things they did last year at the elementary school and will continue this year is giving out tickets for positive behavior and then those students can use tickets to purchase items at the SPARK store. At the MS/ HS we recognized students of the month. We will be doing something similar at the MS/HS this year, but we will also be recognizing specific acts of being a good person. The whole basis of this program is to recognize positive behavior in hopes all will follow in those positive steps. We have great students, but we always want to strive for them to be their best in everything they do.
Have a great rest of the week.