The premise behind Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) is to recognize the experts among us. It involves regular team meetings where teachers work together to find lessons to teach concepts. It encourages the best of what we already know.

These meetings are not your typical planning time. PLCs are formal meetings where teachers focus on the details of their lessons and adjust them on the basis of assessment results. They’re simply teachers coming together to find better strategies or lessons on how to teach skills such as addition with regrouping or writing better leads for personal narratives. The end result is standard based lessons and assessments created by teachers.

Early Release Days provide critical time for school wide PLCs to collaborate together and make informed instructional decisions for our students. We are appreciative of the commitment from the Bullitt County Board of Education to support this effort by providing the additional time needed for our faculty to plan, analyze and design enrichment and remediation plans for our students.

 Early Release Days also provide additional instructional opportunities for our students. Each month our instructional assistants use the afternoon to target individual students who need remedial instruction. Early Release Days are proving to be vital in providing the extra small group help some students need to gain important reading and math skills.