• Category 2

    Selected in 2018

  • Grades: k - 5
    School Setting: rural
    Town Population: 6,972
    Student Enrollment: 337
    Student Demographics:

    Black/African American: 0.9%
    White/Caucasian: 95.1%
    Hispanic: 2.3%
    Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0%
    Asian: 0%
    Native American: 0%
    Other: 1.7%

    Teacher/Student Ratio: 1:18
    % Reduced Lunch: 50.7%
    % ELL Learners: 4%
    Founded: 1889
  • PRINCIPAL:
    Robert Hohlbein
  • CONTACT:
    310 East Fourth St.
    Delphos, OH 45833
    419-692-8766
    rhohlbein@delphoscityschools.org
Franklin Elementary School
Delphos, OH
Our school mission statement is; “Excellence Today; Success Tomorrow; One Student at a Time”
Describe specific programs in place to ensure that families are involved in the success of your school and students.
Franklin Elementary incorporates many different activities into our school year to try to keep our parents as involved in their children’s education as possible. It all begins with our Kindergarten parent meetings and open house before the school year begins. These activities allow both the students and parents to meet our staff in a relaxed and rather informal setting. We also schedule parent-teacher conferences for all our students in the fall at times that are selected by the parents, so they have no valid reason to not attend.
We also send home bi-monthly newsletters to our parents, so they are informed of upcoming events for our building both educationally and socially. We have found that the more we can keep parents informed about what is going on in our building and their child’s education, the more they naturally become involved in the education of their children.
We also encourage our staff to make positive contacts with our parents. Parents are always made aware of any negative things their son/daughter does while at school. However we strongly encourage our staff members to reach out and make positive contacts, which really improves parent to staff relationships and increases parent involvement in their child’s education.
Finally, we have joined forces with our parent club to offer opportunities for both our students and parents to interact at various events throughout the school year.
Describe the most successful activity your school has initiated to strengthen ties to your community.
Franklin Elementary has partnered with a group of parents for the reformation of a Parent’s Club for Franklin Elementary which had previously dissolved many years ago. We have worked hand-in-hand with them to help bring in shows and hold events for both the students and the community here at Franklin Elementary. The reformation of this club has allowed for more public events to be held for not only the students of Franklin Elementary, but the adults and children of the entire Delphos community bringing everyone together for both fun and educational activities.
Describe your philosophy of school change or improvement.
Franklin Elementary has a philosophy on school change or improvement that is aligned with our school mission. We realize that you have to be continuously open to school change or improvement to continue to experience “Excellence Today; Success Tomorrow; One Student At A Time”. Change can be difficult for people to accept, especially if they have had success with what they are currently doing. Therefore, change must be backed by research and data that people understand and can relate to in order for it to be successful. Franklin Elementary does not embrace change just for the sake of changing, but rather we install changes to our practices for the purpose of continuous improvement for our students and staff.

What are your school’s top two goals for the next year?
Goal # 1 - We plan to continue to vertically and horizontally align our curriculum maps to the updated Ohio State standards. The more aligned we are in our curriculum maps, the less areas there are for gaps to develop. We need to keep up with all the Ohio State Standards changes, so our students are well prepared for the State Assessments.

Goal # 2 - We plan to continue to look for new and innovative ways to involve our parents in their child’s education. As we continue to develop more of a team environment between the staff, students, and parents the more success we will experience. The parents need to have an understanding of why we teach the way we do and why we teach what we do. When the parents understand these items, then they begin to build trust in our staff and are more willing to become involved in their child’s education.

What is the single most important factor in the success of your school that others could replicate?
Without doubt, the single most important factor for success in a school is the hiring of a compassionate, caring, and dedicated staff. The staff of a school is what makes a school experience success. You can provide a staff with the latest and greatest programs and initiatives available in education, but without a staff whose focus and commitment is on the education of their students success will not be achieved.

Describe the program or initiative that has had the greatest positive effect on student achievement, including closing achievement or opportunity gaps, if applicable.
During the last couple of years, Franklin Elementary behind the lead of our Title I teacher has taken an in depth look at our Phonics instructional materials and strategies. We admittingly were kind of all over the board without much vertical or horizontal alignment in our building or across our districts two elementary buildings. We began having meetings led by our current and previous Title I teacher to look at what everyone was using in their classrooms and at each grade level. After realizing how in-cohesive our program was, we decided that we needed to research programs that were available which would allow this to change in our buildings. After much time being invested the teachers decided that we needed to look more closely at two programs; the “Phonics Dance Program” and the “Phonics First Foundations Program, an IMSLEC Accredited Multisensory Structured Language Professional Development course based on the Principle of the Orton-Gillingham Methodology”. Franklin Elementary then began sending staff to professional development sessions for these two programs. As the staff became trained in these programs, we were able to see much improvement in the vertical and horizontal alignment in our buildings in this area and the students’ scores began improving. Our gaps between different student groups began to close.
Explain how ESEA federal funds are used to support your improvement efforts.
The Delphos City Schools and specifically the Franklin Elementary Building uses a portion of our ESEA Federal funds to cover the salary of our Title I teacher and supplies that she needs to continue to close the gap for any students who are considered “off track”. The Title I teacher has played a major role in researching and recommending professional development for our staff, especially in the K-3 grade levels. Franklin Elementary has spent funds for staff professional development on programs that we felt would allow us to better reach a larger portion of our population in areas that they were struggling with based on the research conducted by the Title I teacher. We have had nearly all our primary K-3 teachers attend training on the “Phonics Dance” program and purchased many of the manipulatives that go along with the program. Now that our staff are all using the same strategy to reach our students in the phonics area, we have seen the students’ skills continue to improve as each grade builds on the previous grade. We have also sent a Title I teacher and a K-3 Intervention Specialist to a Phonics First Foundations Program, An IMSLEC Accredited Multisensory Structured Language Professional Development Course based on the Principles of the Orton-Gillingham Methodology. These staff people have shared their experiences and manipulatives with the rest of the staff to provide an additional resource to reach students who learn best with the use of the multi-sensory tools.

We have used a portion of our federal funds to help with the cost of outside tutoring for our struggling students, especially those who are at risk of not meeting the Third Grade Reading Guarantee based on their Fall AIR test results. These services are offered to students based on their academic needs not their financial needs, however most of these students would not be able to have the financial resources for this additional tutoring without our use of the Title I, Part A funds.

Finally, the small amount of funds that may be left are used for ancillary resources that are research based and shown to be effective in the education of today’s students.
Identify the critical professional development activities you use to improve teaching and student learning.
We believe that it is critical for our professional development activities be aligned both vertically and horizontally with our curriculum maps. We feel strongly about having our own “experts” share with the other teachers in our district. We try to develop a family like atmosphere here at Franklin Elementary where no one feels superior or inferior to anyone else, therefore people are always working as a team to improve student learning in our building.
When we go to outside sources for professional development, we try to find topics that can be implemented into what we are already doing, rather than trying to completely revamp what we do constantly. It always looks exciting to chase the “latest and greatest” releases in education, but this is not only not possible in a district with our financial resources but also totally an impractical and reckless way to educate today’s children.

Describe how data is used to improve student achievement and inform decision making.
Data is used in many different ways and at many different levels at Franklin Elementary. We not only analyze our own personal data from our results on testing from our own students, but we also analyze data from all research based programs and initiatives that we use with our students. Franklin Elementary is part of a financially strapped district which makes it even more critical that we dig into all the data as much as possible to be sure what areas we need to improve in to allow our students to have the most success.
We start by looking at the data provided by our state required assessments to see specific areas of weakness and also areas of strength. The areas of strength are extremely important to our student achievement in many ways. We examine these areas and try to determine why we have had success in those areas. We can then use that data and information to drive our changes and new initiatives in the areas where we were not as successful. Using these data analysis of our own combined with the data of research based programs that we look at implementing, make us confident that the programs we are implementing will have positive impacts on our students’ education and future.
Describe your school culture and explain changes you’ve taken to improve it.
The school culture at Franklin Elementary can be described in many different ways including but not limited to:

Positive
Collaborative
Welcoming
Pleasant
Friendly
Flexible
Forgiving
Cohesive and Supportive

Our school mission statement is; “Excellence Today; Success Tomorrow; One Student At A Time”, and we truly follow this mission statement everyday. We have worked hard to successfully compile a staff that allows us to follow this mission statement day in and day out which continues to have positive impacts on our school culture. We continue to try to involve the parents in their student’s education more than ever as we all realize that it takes a total TEAM effort to have success in the education of children today. The trust that these parents have in our staff and programs gets them wanting to be involved in helping their children be successful in school. They realize and have been explained the reasoning behind what we are doing with their child(ren) while they are at school, therefore they openly assist and support what we are doing on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.
Stats
  • Category 2

    Selected in 2018

  • Grades: k - 5
    School Setting: rural
    Town Population: 6,972
    Student Enrollment: 337
    Student Demographics:

    Black/African American: 0.9%
    White/Caucasian: 95.1%
    Hispanic: 2.3%
    Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0%
    Asian: 0%
    Native American: 0%
    Other: 1.7%

    Teacher/Student Ratio: 1:18
    % Reduced Lunch: 50.7%
    % ELL Learners: 4%
    Founded: 1889
  • PRINCIPAL:
    Robert Hohlbein
  • CONTACT:
    310 East Fourth St.
    Delphos, OH 45833
    419-692-8766
    rhohlbein@delphoscityschools.org