Welcome to Lincoln Southwest

I often receive great questions about how we work to reflect and improve on the work we do to help meet the evolving needs of our students as we prepare them to be college and career ready. This is all a part of the school improvement process that every school engages in from year to year. Most people know that our mission statement serves as a guide for what we aim to achieve as a school but what many people do not know is what that actually looks beneath the surface and how we put the school improvement process into practice. Over the course of the coming months, I will provide brief snapshots of the various components that make up our school improvement process here at LSW and how we use it to guide the services, supports and instructional practices that take place each day in our classrooms. I will begin this month by providing a brief overview of school improvement here at Southwest.

Everything we do is aimed to support our mission statement. In an effort to carry out our mission, we establish mid-range goals that align with and support the district goals established by the LPS Board of Education. Our mid-range school improvement goals are established every three to five years using the feedback we receive through the school accreditation process to help us identify areas where we can improve. In additions to the external feedback we receive, we spend time reviewing trends in our student performance data. Once we have established some specific, measurable three to five year goals, we drill down further to create a plan to support our work towards achieving those goals.

Each summer our School Improvement Team spends time developing an annual school improvement implementation plan that targets our efforts to improve student achievement by building capacity in a few very focused areas of student support and instructional practices.

To guide our annual work at the building level and to ensure that we maintain fidelity to our overall mission, our school improvement team has adopted the following purpose statement:

“We are focused on achieving our goals through a commitment to establishing a culture for learning and ensuring effective instruction for ALL learners.”

Using this purpose statement as a guide, we work to evaluate the systems we currently have in place and where we may have gaps in the ways we support students, parents and teachers. From there, we identify the areas of focus for the school year and establish a plan to provide staff development to strengthen our practices consistently throughout our students’ experience at Southwest.

Next month I will provide a more detailed look at our School Improvement Team’s purpose statement and how it is broken down into systems that wrap around our students’ entire experience here at Southwest.


Southwest[lsw.lps.org]