La Salle-Peru High provides a plan to ‘Narrow the Gap’ following a school year in a pandemic

La Salle-Peru High School administrators are looking into hiring a social emotional learning specialist that will better help the school deal with the emotional needs of students.

This action item, along with others, including the goal of returning to full in-person learning for the fall semester, was presented by the school’s administrative team to the board Wednesday titled “Narrowing the Gap,” focusing on insight into the academic status of the district’s students, their social emotional needs, participation in school extracurriculars and the school’s plan for the immediate future.

Superintendent Steven Wrobleski, Principal Ingrid Cushing and other members of school leadership gave the presentation.

The numbers the school has tracked to understand the current state of their students can be broken down into the aforementioned categories.

Social Emotional Needs

The school provided an update of some of the student’s social emotion experiences and needs that can greatly affect the student’s level of education.

The school’s counselors mentioned students have experienced, in some cases, an increased level of anxiety, depression and a lack of coping skills.

The school reported in the second half of this school year they have seen 23 suicidal screenings that resulted in an outside referral of ER visit, 68 referrals for outside mental health counseling, 35 psychiatric hospitalizations and 18 truancy and probation consultations.

While the school’s social emotional needs are high, recent findings by the district reported students feel supported at school and are meeting with counselors, social workers and the psychologist when they feel the need.

The school plans to screen all students to determine their needs and to continue to work with the students and their families to help them continue to gain an education while taking care of their needs.

Student’s Academic Status

L-P has 272 seniors and, as of Wednesday, 21 of those seniors or 7.7%, are not on track to graduate. These students will have to attend summer sessions or return to school for another year.

An additional 24 students are on the bubble as the grading deadline and graduation quickly approaches. These students could very well reach the requirements for graduation in the coming days.

The school will know at the end of the day on Friday the final list of those graduating as the worst case scenario will include a little more than 16% of the senior class will not be graduating.

Comparing first semester percentage of failing grade rates from 2019-20 to 2020-21, the school saw a 10.12% increase in the most recent year.

This increase was an outlier in the previous five-year trend that had seen these rates range from a high of 11.17% in 2016-17 to a low of 5.63% in 2018-19.

While the percentage of failing grades has increased during the year that was highly affected by COVID-19, the number of students earning A’s has remained consistent with a 36.91% — comparable to the 35.57% in 2019-20 and 37.91% in 2018-19.

Participation in school extra-curricular activities

This year L-P recorded a slight drop in the participation numbers in the school’s athletics. This year the district had 380 students in athletics compared to the average of about 455 for the five previous years.

Officials believe this to be because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the multitude of cancelled and rescheduled seasons. Some athletes may not have been able to participate in as many sports as they have in the past due to their seasons overlapping.

While extracurriculars, such as basketball and band, may not seem as important as the students’ social and educational needs, they are still crucial to students.

Some students reported the extracurricular activities that took place over the pandemic gave them “something to look forward to” and provided a “reason to get out of bed and return to normal.”

School’s plan for the future

Moving forward from the past two school years that have been widely-affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, school officials said their priority for the coming fall is to return to in-person learning and only utilize remote learning if it is required by a doctor.

The school will be performing school-wide benchmarking and increasing the already approved staffing needs of a math teacher and special education help as well as exploring the need for an SEL interventionist.