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Category 3
Selected in 2019
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Grades: 9 - 12
School Setting: urban
Town Population: 7,470
Student Enrollment: 295
Student Demographics:
Black/African American: 1.4%
Teacher/Student Ratio: 1:22
White/Caucasian: 69.7%
Hispanic: 17.2%
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 1%
Asian: 1%
Native American: 1%
Other: 8.8%
% Reduced Lunch: 58%
% ELL Learners: 2%
Founded: 2002 -
PRINCIPAL:
Patrick Peters -
CONTACT:
3755 West Spruce Avenue
Silver Springs, NV 89429
775-772-5591
ppeters@lyoncsd.org
Silver Stage High School
Silver Springs, NV
Providing a safe learning environment to gain college, career and life skills for a successful future.
- Describe specific programs in place to ensure that families are involved in the success of your school and students.
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Parent Universities and Principal Advisory Committee are used to provide opportunities for families to learn about the goals of the school, discuss student data, and provide input on perceptual data. Various family engagement nights including Back to School Night, Principal Advisory Committee and Parent Universities have been planned to allow families opportunities to interact in both academic and non-academic activities.
Silver Stage High School uses Parent Night in the spring before 8th grade students are going to attend SSHS to begin the transitions between 8th grade and high school. Families are invited to an annual senior information night, topics discussed are graduation requirements, FAFSA information, local college information, and military overview. Four years ago Silver Stage High School implemented an ACT Information Night. Parents and 11th grade students are invited to dinner while an overview of the ACT is discussed. - Describe the most successful activity your school has initiated to strengthen ties to your community.
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Silver Stage High School has numerous activities that tie the community to the school.
•Town Advisory Board Involvement - The school administration reaches out to the two different communities by attending the Stagecoach and Silver Springs Advisory Board meetings to share the school goals, achievements, progress and activities
•Taco Feed - The community is invited to attend and participate in a dinner and entertainment from the students where the students do a Lip Sync.
•Spaghetti Feed - The community is invited to attend and participate in a dinner and entertainment of students and staff at the school with the talent show
•College and Career Fair/Day - Annual event for the community and students grades 7th – 12th throughout Lyon County.
•Veteran’s Day Assembly - To support and honor veterans from the community.
•Silver Stage Nighthawk Annual Family Bingo Night - Run by school staff and brings in students, parents, and outside community members - Describe your philosophy of school change or improvement.
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Silver Stage High School’s philosophy centers on continuous improvement. Since 2005, SSHS has made four revisions to its mission statement, each time, adapting the statement to meet the needs of the current student population. This statement was changed in the 2018-2019 school year after a data analysis of the school’s student achievement and perceptual data. The adaptations focus on the many needs of the student in the school today and the ever-changing challenges of the education expectations.
Over the last five years, SSHS has completely changed their grading system used by teachers in the classroom, adjusted the student intervention process used for student success, and implemented a school-wide positive behavior system (PBIS) to teach positive behaviors to the students of the school. These changes have improved the “student first” culture Silver Stage has been dedicated to since the doors opened in 2002.
- What are your school’s top two goals for the next year?
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Two goals that are important to Silver Stage High School over the next year are the ability to increase the life skills given to all students in the school and a continued improvement in the school’s failure prevention strategies.
SSHS will look to increase the amount of activities and events for entire the school that will assist the student body in gaining life skills that can be used throughout life. This is currently being done by the CLS classrooms through community outreach, throughout the school with our PBIS program, through visits to local colleges and trade schools, through events held to assist in post-secondary decisions, and through the support for at-risk students.
Failure prevention is another goal for the school as a way to increase the graduation rate of the school. Programs and strategies in place include; student intervention teams, effective grading practices, use of an F-clearinghouse and tutoring programs, and student graduation progress meetings.
- What is the single most important factor in the success of your school that others could replicate?
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The grading system at Silver Stage High School is a successful measure being used and could be replicated by other schools who strive for a true look at the knowledge retention of students.
The grading practices at Silver Stage High School is weighted into two categories; product and process. Process grades are 15% of the final grade and includes all the assignments that are part of the ongoing process of learning; these include homework, classwork, and participation assignments. Product grades are 85% of the final grade and are all the assessments that show how much the student has learned and/or retained. Students have the ability to reassess throughout the semester to make sure grades truly reflect their knowledge and retention.
The grading system of SSHS has evolved over the last three years to include unit success criteria, unit scoring guides, and standards based assessments in each and every classroom to assist in the transparency and accuracy of the grades given.
- Describe the program or initiative that has had the greatest positive effect on student achievement, including closing achievement or opportunity gaps, if applicable.
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Student Interventions
The cornerstone of Silver State High School is the professional practices of our Grading Practices. The grading system fundamental change was the core concept in grading on what students are learning, not the worksheet they get done. The grading practices led the charge to guide our academic student interventions. SSHS Student Intervention Programs:
• Lunch and After School Tutoring
• Amnesty Days - Make-up days within the classroom
• F-Clearinghouse Days
• Academic Scoring Guides for each unit taught
• Success Criteria
• Link Crew
• Student Intervention Team
• Student Study Teams
• Weekly Student Intervention Meeting
• SST Meeting - Student Support Team: meetings for all students that are struggling academically
• Student-Led Conferences
• Graduation Coach
• Graduation Contracts
• Intervention Contract for struggling students
• Freshman Intervention Contracts for students that are credit deficient from the middle school
- Explain how ESEA federal funds are used to support your improvement efforts.
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Silver Stage High School has leveraged the funding provided by the district through its general fund to support the interventions and needs of our students and staff. The general funds were limited but our staff made the best of the situation.
The additional funding provided may have had some positive impact on student achievement, however, it is not believed to have made the impact that the unfunded system and overall school practice changes made to the new way of operating within the school made. The school paid for tutoring out of the school’s general budget.
SSHS has been a Title I school since the school opened in 2002. We were funded for three years earlier in the school’s history. We were an unfunded Title I school for the past seven years until the 2018-2019 school year. During the 2018-2019 school year SSHS did receive $39,000 in Title I funds. The Title I funding has been a great help to all our intervention systems and our PBIS implementation.
- Identify the critical professional development activities you use to improve teaching and student learning.
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Silver Stage High School provides critical professional development to support the different initiatives to meet the needs of our students. Professional development has been provided for the new grading system, PBIS, and instructional Practices.
The school has provided professional development specifically designed to change the school’s grading system. The training was provided by Dave Nagel, author of book, “Effective Grading Practices for Secondary Teachers”. Mr. Nagel provide on- site training on three different occasions with online training to staff for additional support. Mr. Nagel also provided additional support to the school administration. This has provided a feeling that he has adopted our school without any additional funding needed.
The grading system change is built on learning and not on compliance. The grading system is an education fundamental change holding students accountable for their learning, not on their compliance.
- Describe how data is used to improve student achievement and inform decision making.
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Silver Stage High School takes pride in our data analysis. The form and system the school developed has been shared with all the high schools in our district as well as other neighboring school districts. The use of our data analysis form provides a simple process to take a plan of action to improve our student achievement and our perceptual data.
The deep dive into our data show our strengths, areas of growth and root causes. Through analyzing those elements we have been able to make recommendations and plan our action steps for the process of continuous improvement.
Through our analysis of our ACT and MAP reading data, our school developed a plan to improve our overall school wide reading skills. To achieve the above results, the first change took place in the learning culture throughout our school over three years ago, when we implemented Close Reading strategies through our Social Studies, Health and Science classrooms.
- Describe your school culture and explain changes you’ve taken to improve it.
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Silver Stage High School’s culture is built on the teaching staff who are focused on teaching the “Whole Student” and not just their content area. The focus of the staff is to meet the academic and social emotional needs of our students. The school’s mission truly supports our staff’s focus. The current mission statement reads, “Providing a safe learning environment to gain college, career and life skills for a successful future!” As you read our mission statement, one would wonder why a school would focus on life skills. Through our data from the NV-SCSEL Survey School Reports and Advanced Ed perceptual survey, we believe our students need targeted instructions through Advisory and our regular classrooms to help them learn the needed life skills.
The school culture is the belief that we can make a difference in our students’ lives no matter the setting our students reside in. Our activities in our school are focused on achievement, not on just checking a box to be compliant.
Stats
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Category 3
Selected in 2019
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Grades: 9 - 12
School Setting: urban
Town Population: 7,470
Student Enrollment: 295
Student Demographics:
Black/African American: 1.4%
Teacher/Student Ratio: 1:22
White/Caucasian: 69.7%
Hispanic: 17.2%
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 1%
Asian: 1%
Native American: 1%
Other: 8.8%
% Reduced Lunch: 58%
% ELL Learners: 2%
Founded: 2002 -
PRINCIPAL:
Patrick Peters -
CONTACT:
3755 West Spruce Avenue
Silver Springs, NV 89429
775-772-5591
ppeters@lyoncsd.org