Lindsey Hudson

TLED 315

Professor Greene

February 27, 2020

Task Five: School Artifacts: Lynchburg City Schools: Heritage High School Improvement

Plan

Heritage High School’s improvement plan focuses on behavior, achievement, and

culture. Their vision is for everyone to achieve excellence. Their mission is to know every

student by name and by their individual needs so that they will be led to graduation. This really

stood out to me because they have set goals to work towards and strive for which include

excellence in behavior, achievement, culture, operations, and personnel. It is amazing how much

time and thought has been put into this plan they have created to make their school better. They

included so many charts and graphs that really help everyone to be able to visualize their ideas

and how they are going to implement those. Their excellence in achievement is obtained by

maintaining graduation rate of 85 points or greater. They want to maintain their accreditation in

SOL areas and reduce the student failures by 2-5%. Their excellence in behavior will be

achieved by the decreasing the student referral numbers and increase the student attendance rate.

Their excellence in culture is achieved by the increasing of staff attendance. School culture

surveys are given and then analyzed when completed to ensure they do wat is best for their
students. They also try to increase parents’ involvement and try to recruit more volunteer to help

with in the school (Heritage High School: School Improvement Plan).

By providing their students with changes in their excellence will help students by the

student being able to maximize their potential and accomplish things they didn’t know that they

could. I believe that the Heritage High Schools improvement plan had many great points that

also coincided with a guideline form the Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria

for Teachers performance standards. That guideline being Standard 5: Learning Environment.

Within this standard it stated that the teacher makes the classroom a safe environment for

students to learn. The teacher should also give clear expectations of what is expected of students.

Promoted culture sensitivity is also one of the points made in the improvement plan and

guideline (VDOE,2015).

The school wanted to expand their excellence in culture. These points stood out to me

because these are things that in feel are important and that I want to incorporate into my future

classroom. I want all students to feel welcomed and safe and I want all cultures to feel at ease

and respected in my class. There are so many different cultures teachers come in contact with

and students should be taught that just because someone is different from them, they still deserve

respect and that everyone in the school is treated equally. Being of a different culture can

intimidate students and make them feel as if they do not fit in and I want to make sure that does

not happen in my class. This improvement plan and the guidelines have been a big help to me

and opened my eyes on topics I maybe wouldn’t have thought about.

 References:
Heritage High School: School Improvement Plan. (n.d.). Retrieved February 27, 2020, from

http://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching/performance_evaluation/research_base_ups_teache

rs.pdf

Virginia Department of Education (VDOE). (2015). Guidelines for Uniform Performance

Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers.

http://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching/performance_evaluation/guidelines_ups_eval_criteria_teac

hers.pdf