On Jan.31 Parkway held its 2nd annual State of The District Address which included a district-wide recap of prevalent issues and practices Parkway is implementing at Parkway Central. The Address was broken up into three distinct sections, each relating to the “core pillars” of Parkway: belonging, achievement, and relevance. Within those three distinct sections, participants had the choice of several different speaker sessions where a speaker from Parkway would go more in-depth on an issue. Here are some key takeaways from the event. 

Parkway is still a high-performing district 

Despite a recent dip in standardized test proficiency test scores due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Parkway School District is still above the state percentile. As of 2023, Parkway is 60.2% proficient in English, 57.4% in Mathematics, 50.7% in Science, and 45.6% in Social Studies, all of which are at least 6% above the state average. Parkway is looking to not only maintain but also increase those test scores in the district. 

Parkway mental health is reforming 

With a new director of emotional and social services Cherie Magueja, Parkway is setting in place a change in how they approach mental health, one change includes better education of students 

“The next thing that we will do is help them with psychological education. So that might be a student struggling with worry or sadness. So it might be anxiety or depression. And we’ll help them learn about what that means,” Magueja said. 

Also, the combination of the mental health roles of Care Coordinator and Social Worker is a new change Parkway is implementing. 

“We created one role, so that one person can do this more comprehensive service car students, and what this requires then is a clinical license. So it helps our schools have people who are therapists so they can provide therapy,” Magueja said. 

Parkway is trying to fix the achievement discrepancies

Although Parkway is still high performing in the proficiencies in several different subjects, Parkway is working to try to allocate resources to students who are struggling. Coordinator of Student Assessment Carter Snow explains how this ties into Parkway’s main mission 

“Our mission calls us to meet the needs of all students, not just some and that means we have to very intentionally organize ourselves as a district to meet the needs of all students,” Snow said.   

The district’s controversial decision to cut high school teachers’ plan time traces back to meeting the needs of all students “We know that needs from different kinds of groups of students, individual students can be pretty significant and we need to think about the flexibility of our resources. How do we provide the time and space so that teachers can provide groups of students with more targeted interventions and support,” Snow said.