Eastern Allamakee Blog

At the School Improvement Advisory Meeting (SIAC) we discussed some "area-wide" concerns that were more about Northeast Iowa and economic development than just Eastern Allamakee Community Schools as an isolated entity.  Obviously, we will need to keep our SIAC meetings more centered on the "school events", as this is the major requirement and function of the committee.  However, we decided to start this blog to continue to discuss some of our thoughts about school events at EACS, AND the area-wide whole-ball-of-wax sort-of-thing. 

I did give out some demographic and financial data.  It was a lot in a short amount of time, but hopefully you were able to review this, digest it some, and think about these things. 

At our SIAC meeting we discussed some of our basic programs that we must offer:  ELL, TAG, Multicultural and Global Education, Special Needs, and Dropout Prevention.  We reviewed our test scores, reviewed student surveys, and then discussed the more area-wide concerns.

From my perspective (which may be wrong) some of our conclusions were that our test scores are high, our curriculum is broad-based and solid, we like/love our school and teaching staff, our school is currently financially and functionally sound, good decisions have been made in the past, and our facilities are new.  Basically we rock on all elements! 

AND 

We have had continuous declining enrollment, our K-3 has about 60 kids (or 20 per grade), the enrollment for the future looks bleak, economic development in the area could improve, and we are not alone in Northeast Iowa.   

What are we/should we be doing about this