DORCHESTER COUNTY, SC (WCSC) – The Dorchester School District Two Board of Trustees and Superintendent have finalized their list of goals for the years 2025-2028.

The goals chart includes six main categories: student growth and success, safety and security, community engagement, student growth and planning, staff recruitment and retention, and comprehensive financial planning. It is then divided into subcategories.

Return August, DD2 Superintendent Dr. Shane Robbins along with school board members met to re-evaluate their current goals and offer ideas on areas where they needed to see improvement.

Today, Robbins and board members have narrowed that list down.

Robbins said these goals are considered a tiered approach, meaning they start broadly at the school board level and then become more focused and tailored to the specific needs of schools, classrooms and individual students across the board. district.

“It’s really important that people understand that we’re looking at this on multiple levels and so the board has a 50,000-foot vantage point on what they want to see accomplished in the district. When it happens to me, it brings it down a little bit, and then it spreads through our buildings, into our classrooms and down to individual students,” Robbins said.

Some of the goals are permanent, such as improving reading and math skills across the district. This year, DD2 scored above the state average in both areas of its report card. However, Robbins emphasized the importance of continued growth and striving for more success.

“Just being above the state average is not acceptable to us. We want to try to get to the highest level possible, but we use our NWEA or SC Ready assessments and we look at this data to ensure we get down to the child we are raising as a school district,” Robbins said.

He said they were going to achieve this goal by holding quarterly data meetings with the principals of each school to ensure they were seeing this goal.

“If we do something really good in education, we evaluate it. What we don’t do well enough is take this data and disseminate it so that we can make the appropriate instructional changes in classrooms to maximize student outcomes. So we’re really trying to focus on that right now as a school district. ” Robbins said.

Dorchester School District Two board member Kellie Bates also emphasized the importance of academics in this goal cycle.

“We focused a lot on safety and really looked at what we can do to improve safety in our last goal cycle,” Bates said. “This time we really want to make sure academics are a priority. We want to see those math and reading scores increase. We want to see our graduation rates increase, and we want to make sure our students’ college and career readiness improve as well.

Another objective listed is the construction schedule of the new primary school in Les Étangs from referendum that was passed by voters this year, as well as the addition of what Robbins called an innovation school. This would be geared toward high school students and expand the district’s reach. professional and technological education program, or CTE.

“By doing that, we’re able to pull more students out of our high schools where they’re just attending school into this innovation center, which saves us a little bit of time and gives us a little bit of space in our high schools,” Robbins said.

Another district priority is ensuring the safety of students and staff. That’s why they added anti-bullying and conflict resolution classes among their goals. Robbins said they have focused heavily on the safety of their building structures, but they also want to make sure they are looking out for the mental and emotional well-being of their students and staff.

“Recently, in the last two security conferences that our team has attended, we’re starting to learn more and more about these conflict resolution courses and ways to try to address them early on, so that it doesn’t become a problem. in the background, creating some of these serious scenarios that you hear about in the news,” Robbins said.

Bates also supported adding anti-bullying and conflict resolution classes, as well as revising student disciplinary policies and procedures.

“Making sure we’re actually looking at them and they’re working for us? Do they work for our staff? Do our directors feel supported? Is what they do and how we use them working for them? In addition to just creating opportunities for kids to learn how to resolve conflict, learn about anti-bullying,” Bates said.

Another goal in the financial area is to invest more time in grant writing to try to acquire more funds that would help alleviate the district’s general fund budget. Robbins said the general fund budget is for employee salaries and benefits.

“About 85 to 87 percent of our general fund is for salaries and benefits, so the more pressure we can take off that general fund, the more we’re able to offer people higher salaries,” said Robbins.

Recruiting and retaining qualified employees has been a key priority for the school district. To support this, they set goals such as implementing a recognition and reward program, creating a teacher relief fund for school supplies, and exploring options for employee housing.

“We’re looking at ways to provide housing, possibly child care, and things like that that would entice teachers to come. We also want them to be rewarded, incentivized and celebrated, so we’re looking at programs where they can earn gift cards for doing different things,” Bates said. “So just little things that we can do to continue to improve the culture and the climate and maybe offer some incentives that aren’t necessarily based on salaries, but will still benefit them in their pocket and their bottom line. “

Robbins said they will make sure their employees are aware of the district’s business partnerships, which offer discounts to educators to help them save more money.

He added that two key components of their recruitment and retention goals are expanding the after-school child care program, as well as adding a day care program.

Another purpose of the goals board is to create opportunities for the community to provide feedback to the school board.

“We’ve added quarterly community forums with the school board and so that’s going to be something that we’re going to do with the school board and district staff throughout the district in order to just have a dialogue rather than a meeting where it’s is kind of they just talk to us and we can never really respond,” Bates said. “And then just having a portal that they can go to and give feedback, I think that will be a big one. issue.”

Robbins said he was looking forward to displaying the goals on the board and being able to mark them visually as they were achieved.

“The same thing we try to do with students in a classroom. We want them to reach higher levels and we, what we call progress, monitor them. That’s what the board is doing, tracking progress against the goals they set for the next three years for the district to make sure we’re moving forward. “Forward with the plans,” Robbins said.

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