After earning its bronze level certification, the district will now continue to plan for the future and assess its current capabilities for students before applying for its silver level
Earlier in the school year, Eastern Regional High School learned it had earned its certification as a “Future Ready” school at the bronze level. The school had made it a goal to be labeled as such over a year ago, and achieved its goal of receiving the honor in its first year of applying.
According to the Future Ready Schools New Jersey program, “Future Ready” is a certification program created to support schools with the resources needed to implement digital learning and promote the skills, abilities and capacities essential for student success in college and career.
Last year was the first year Eastern Regional became active in the pursuit of attaining the level of Future Ready, despite it being the second year of the program at the state level.
Rather than rush an application last year, school administrators wanted to focus on the path of applying.
“There was some talk about us rushing the application in, but we decided we wanted to make it part of our District Advisory meeting, which is [Superintendent] Dr. Melleby’s group of stakeholders in the community,” said Robert Cloutier, director of curriculum. “We wanted to make it part of that process because we saw it as more valuable of the process of getting feedback from our stakeholders.”
“The process itself was very valuable,” said Cloutier. “Not only because it led to the certification, but it brought up some different issues about revising the district vision and the mission statement.”
Several major areas determine Future Ready status: leadership, education, and curriculum instruction and technology support. The school gives itself a self-assessed score on “indicators” of the given area on the application, and then the awards committee determines a final score after reviewing the material and evidence provided by the school, ranking Eastern’s abilities on varying levels of success, from insufficient to achieving or exemplary and more.
Eastern received nearly a dozen “exemplary” marks on its application, including for the indicator of sustaining a digital learning environment, a priority one requirement, that schools must achieve to be labeled as Future Ready.
Through the program, a school must be at the bronze level for one year before applying to be at silver level, which requires much more vigorous standards.
There aren’t requirements yet for the gold level, however such standards are to be laid out in the future.
The school is already looking forward to achieving its silver level status through the program, making it a part of the long-term future for the district.
“Moving towards the silver level is now a part of our district goal,” Cloutier said. “It’s a part of creating a five-year strategic plan.”
While reviewing the school’s application, Cloutier believes the school is on the cusp, if not already able, of being able to pass as silver level. The application is the same for the next level; it just requires a school to score higher in certain areas than the bronze level does.
Cloutier and Phil Smart, vice principal of student activities and TV media and the supervisor of technology, look forward to continuing to work on the project over the next few years.
“There’s some areas that we’re doing well that we’d even like to do better,” said Cloutier. “Another nice part about this is it’s an ongoing process, its continual improvement. It’s a good tool for us to always come back to and say ‘are we progressing?’ It’s a wonderful structure that helped combine the efforts in the curriculum office with the efforts in the technology office.”
Smart appreciated the tangible and digital results that came out of the application process for the school to now have moving forward.
“It really created some living documents, those links to evidence,” Smart said. “Some of those are living documents that we’re using to evaluate and will continue to use to evaluate how we are doing in certain areas. That was an important part of this process as well.”
According to Smart and Cloutier, the current plan for the school is to apply for the silver level certification in the next two years after creating a five-year strategic plan and determining how technology relates to that plan, which is a large part of the silver level.
