Rowan County schools again won the Kentucky Department of Education’s Best Practice award. This is the second year in a row the school district was recognized at KDE’s Continuous Improvement Summit.
Rowan’s LEAD program was the focus of praise this year. It’s also known as Profile of a Learner and aims to grow life skills in students. Officials said it was built on the idea focusing on students as unique people, instead of just numbers.
Brandy Carver, newly appointed Assistant Superintendent at Rowan County Schools, said Profile of a Learner promotes effective communication, global citizenship and active collaboration.
“We worked with the community to identify these areas as being areas that would be helpful for students to be successful in, and it shows some type of evidence that they have mastered those skills. They’re about 20 minute long presentations that students do at the end of their senior year, so they’re presenting those as kind of a culminating event of their senior year,” said Carver.
This project was rolled out three years ago, but Carver said last year was the first time they were able to truly achieve the whole project.
“While COVID kind of hindered our plans, in a way it really helped us to make that switch because with COVID everything really was, you know, individualized for students in that teachers and administrators really had to focus on individual needs of students because it was so different during that time,” said Carver,
This isn’t the first time Rowan County Schools has had a Best Practice, last year they were recognized for their implementation of professional learning committees at Rodburn Elementary.