Mindy Robertson

From your seat or from the district perspective, what do you see as the number one concern this school year?

The number one concern, really for the state of Ohio and us, is chronic absenteeism that really ramped up through COVID and aftermath because of the lack of required tracking and reporting during COVID. We have seen that as a result our chronic absenteeism is at about 30% for the district. And I know that for the state of Ohio it is an issue too.

 

Taking absenteeism as the number one concern for this year and stretching it out to what you and other district leadership see as the longer-term, 3-, 4-, 5-year vision for the district? Can you kind of build on that?

Some steps that we’re working on right now are increasing our absence-intervention plans and really looking for the root cause, so we can hopefully address that issue.

This year we’ve been involving our local police a little bit more as well. We follow the steps with the House bill and then we end up having warrants for parents. But we have a couple of kids that have not been to school since 5th grade and they’re in 8th grade now. At some point we need some reinforcement because having a warrant out is not doing the job.

This year there’s a little more skin in the game for our police because when the students are not in school, they’re starting to wreak havoc in the community. So now there are other issues evolving around not being in school.

As far as community wide, we are starting to have those conversations with other districts of what their strategies are because we’re all in the same boat since it is a statewide issue. I know we have supports through Hamilton County ESC who helps us with the paperwork, but we really need to figure out what the big issue is and how can we tackle that on a bigger scale.

 

What is the role of technology at Deer Park, as it stands now, and as it relates to the longer-term vision for the district?

The big topic right now with technology is ChatGPT. I think the big thing with ChatGPT is making sure we embrace it and that we’re not afraid of it. It is an amazing productivity tool in terms of drafting an e-mail or writing a lesson plan for a teacher, if you have a sub. You can type in a prompt, it’ll give you some feedback, and then you can ask it to revise with more specifics of things that you’re looking for.

I think our teachers were eager to catch kids cheating or there was more of a concern with cheating, but if you know what the output will look like, you know how to prevent the cheating from happening. I used to be an English teacher, so I feel like I can look at something immediately and say, “oh, you definitely used ChatGPT.” The vocabulary a lot of times might be out of someone’s ability or range so that’s an easy piece.

We’ve had an English teacher try it before to put in a prompt for an essay, and you can tell because the essay might talk about foreshadowing or something that comes later in the book, and they haven’t read that part of the book yet. So, there are some easy spotters.

We also developed a technology plan last year. We worked with Forward Edge, our partner with technology, a teacher who is getting her master’s degree in tech education, and our administration, talking about how we can provide support for instruction and differentiation with technology versus focusing on the tools and websites.

 

Are you guys seeing any difficulties with teacher retention or staff shortages? And if so, how are you addressing that?

We’re not seeing it terribly because we have two building subs in each building right now. We only have two buildings, an elementary and a junior/senior high school. We hired a second building sub because someone was having some long-term health issues, and it was easier to keep a long-term sub in the building just in case.

Our idea that we started to use last year or the year before was the emergency sub licensure through ODE for instructional aides. That was our first step because we had some aides that were fresh out of college that were just looking for a job. We hired them as aides, got them sub licenses, and then two of them filled in for a long-term maternity sub because we didn’t have any people. That was the 21-22 school year.

So we’ve kept with that. If we saw any aides that had any interest and skill in long-term subbing or being a building sub, or filling in, we encourage them to get that emergency sub license which I don’t think is going to go away anytime soon. Through ODE it’s always for one year and then you have to reapply.

We also started having our high school students shadow and aid at the elementary level. Number #1, to see if they’re interested in the education field and they get true experience before they go off to college, but #2 if they graduate from high school, then they could be an aide.

We have one student this year graduate and be an aide at our elementary. And then two years ago, we had a student graduate and he’s been an aide the last two years.

Right now, at the college level, they’re working on creating an apprenticeship opportunity for students. That’s really in the weeds right now, but it did get approved. Now the thing that’s up in the air is how they get paid.

Colleges are looking to partner with schools to allow, basically what we were just saying, if a student can be an aide and it would count as student teaching through university. The law that had to be removed was that student teachers couldn’t get paid. So that’s been lifted and that gives us some opportunity, but it might get sticky with the pay piece there. I think that would be a great streamline into the education program.

For short term, our union also increased pay for teacher coverage for each bell when you’re covering for each other. So that’s kind of helped alleviate that.

 

What is Deer Park doing to help cultivate that environment that promotes positive mental health?

I do think that’s a strong area for us. I started working at Deer Park five years ago, and I was the assistant principal at the junior/senior high school. When I was interviewed, that was the reason why I wanted to work here. I was teaching at Middletown before and I was teaching at Lakota, and you just see a lot of need. How do you meet those needs or how do you even identify them?

When I came here to Deer Park, they already had a couple things in place that were unique. We had an individualized therapist, and we had an H3 room—H3 stands for help your school, help yourself and help others—and a classroom being taught by a therapist, so it’s basically group therapy and it counted as an elective. The H3 room is the calming space if a student feels escalated, they can go cool down and do rotations and different stations that are created and supported by MindPeace, a part of Children’s Hospital, and then they go back to class. It’s about a 10- or 15-minute visit.

As time has gone on in those last five years, we now have two individual therapists, so we are not turning students away if their caseload is maxed out. We have the H3 Bell, which again addresses group therapy and sometimes kids are in individualized and group therapy or just one or the other depending on their level of need. That is offered all day with a max of eight kids in a bell, junior high and high school, and then we still have the H3 classroom.

Another layer is that we give all students a mental health assessment called Terrace Metrics. It assesses students’ well-being and pings any priority one student that may be depressed or have suicidal ideation. We use that data to give to our counsellors to help address groups of students.

The last piece of data we had showed that we had a small group of kids that felt ostracized or that they didn’t connect. It didn’t specify if it was within school or their outside world, but at least our counselors could address that small group of kids. We also had a tier one large issue, but not terribly bad issue, of hope and grit. I’m assuming that hope and grit are connected to the chronic absenteeism.

The other thing too about the H3 class is if someone didn’t have insurance, the school pays for the H3 therapist. So, if you cannot get individualized therapy, but we think that you should, we can at least get them support that way.

 

How is your district supporting the health and safety of student athletes?

From my administrative hat, I can share we always have one of the main building administrators at any home athletic event game to help with supervision or parent contact. Our school safety officer is also present at our home events, mostly by choice because he has a great relationship with our kids, but that has really helped to have him there as well. Then any potential rivalry type of game, all our admin are there.

We also reviewed our reunification plans and safety plans with our athletic director to make sure he could share with coaches because you never know if an event happens on school grounds after school, people need to know what the emergency plans are. Our athletic director is also at home and away games as well. Currently, our principal used to be an athletic director in the past, so he’s very sports motivated, and I know he goes to a lot of away games as well.

Our school nurse also just partnered with Project Adam and brought that in with us too, to make sure all our AEDs are updated. We’re getting more current and we’re updating staff on all that training as well.

Our athletic trainer is also a teacher in our building now. She teaches sports medicine half of the day. We have career academy courses that we started a couple of years ago and that’s one of them. It’s in conjunction with Mercy Health.