Week 5: Putting It on the Record

Before anything else, today marked twenty-five years since September 11, 2001. Patriot Day is not among the state's required instructional observances, so how the day was handled belonged to each of you, and I am grateful for the care you gave it. Every student in our buildings was born after that morning, which means the adults in our schools are the ones who remember it firsthand. A moment of silence, an honest answer to a student's question, or a word of thanks to a first responder or veteran in our community was enough. Our standards ask our students to know what happened. Our work is helping them understand why it still matters.Happy Friday!Five weeks in, the short week felt like we were moving from starting school to running with purpose and intent. Thank you for the work that got us here. Routines are settled enough now that instruction, not logistics, is what fills the day, and that shift is what makes the rest of the year possible. We are still working toward the same three targets: continued academic growth, daily attendance at or above 93.5 percent, and steady improvement in behavior and school climate. Attendance is the one I want on your mind this month, because September sets the pattern for the year. Every conversation with a family about getting a student here on time is a conversation about all three targets at once. Two items in this Wrap-up deserve your attention, and both come down to the same idea. Good work that is not documented is difficult to recognize, and requirements that are not planned for become last-minute scrambles. Leveling-Up means putting things on the record before the deadline arrives rather than after.Mena’s Merit Pay PathwayState growth scores will be released on September 17, and once they arrive, we will calculate local VAM scores using the process I presented to you before school started. Teachers who receive a state three-year growth average are automatically eligible for merit-pay consideration and do not need to do anything. Contracts for that group were already formed using the adopted index scale applied directly to the state growth measure. That is the straightforward half of the system.The other half is the reason we built a district pathway. A merit pay model should not reward only the teachers who happen to receive a state-generated score. Many of you influence student growth every day without teaching a directly tested course, and if merit pay were tied only to state VAM, opportunity would be uneven before the conversation ever began. Our District VAM and Educator Impact pathway exists to close that gap. It is equal opportunity, not lower standards, and I want to be honest that it is not the easier route. It asks for documentation, artifacts, and principal approval that the state pathway does not require.If you do not receive a state VAM score and you want to be considered, complete the Merit Pay Intent Declaration Form, sit down with your building principal to discuss it, and put your intent on record for the remainder of this school year. The form is linked in this Wrap-up so you can pull it up and get started today, and completed forms are due to your building principal by 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 1, 2026.The form asks you to name one growth focus area in English Language Arts, mathematics, or science, explain how your course, program, intervention, or instructional role connects to growth in that area, identify the student outcomes and strategies you intend to use, name the students or groups through which your impact will be documented, and mark the evidence you will maintain in the Educator Effectiveness System. Your principal then reviews and signs it. Filing the form declares intent and begins the evidence process. It does not guarantee merit pay, because final eligibility still depends on growth data, documentation, and administrative review.What Our Social Studies Teachers Need on the CalendarArkansas released its 2026-2027 social studies instructional observances last week, and two of them arrive within days. Constitution Day falls on Thursday, September 17, and federal law requires every district to hold an educational program on the United States Constitution that day, commemorating the signing in 1787. Celebrate Freedom Week follows September 21 through 25, when state law directs every social studies class to include instruction on the freedoms we enjoy and the sacrifices that secured them. The state resources for both are organized as general K-12 materials, so our elementary teachers have something usable as well. Suggested topics are named in the law, but curriculum decisions belong to us, so feel free to build something that fits your students and our academic targets rather than pull a generic lesson off a shelf.The newest requirement deserves the most attention. Beginning this year, districts must ensure instruction addresses the Founding Fathers and how their religious and moral beliefs shaped our founding documents, including the Declaration’s assertion of unalienable rights, the founders’ commitments to ordered liberty and the free exercise of religion, their influence on separation of powers and the Bill of Rights, and the connection between their beliefs and the freedoms Americans hold today. This is an embedding requirement rather than a separate unit, so the work is a review of our existing grades 6-12 curricula to confirm those concepts sit intentionally in the right courses.Two other items are required later. Holocaust Education Week falls January 25 through 29, 2027, with grade-band resources releasing December 1, and an Arkansas Veterans unit for our Arkansas History courses releases October 1. The Arkansas Celebrates America250 dashboard also remains open with standards-aligned lessons and enrichment projects. In the year our nation marks 250 years, our students should be able to explain what happened, why it mattered, and where Arkansas stood in it.Closing CelebrationsOur senior high Bearcats host Central Arkansas Christian tonight at Bob Carver Bearcat Stadium with a seven o’clock kickoff, and after the first two weeks of the season being on the road, our players have earned a full home crowd. Please come out and be loud. Our conference opener against Waldron follows on September 25 at home.It was a busy week across the rest of our programs. Our golf teams traveled to Mystic Creek to face Magnolia and El Dorado on their home course, with Fountain Lake and Camden Fairview also in the field, and our Bearcats came away with a second-place individual finish on a round of 74 while our Ladycats were led by a fifth-place finish overall. Our cross country runners competed at the Tom Stuthard Stampede in Acorn on Tuesday, where our junior boys placed fourth as a team behind a tenth-place individual finish, and our junior girls, senior girls, and senior boys were each led by strong efforts of their own. That team returns to Acorn on Tuesday, September 22. Our volleyball teams opened the week the hard way, falling at Lakeside on Tuesday at the senior, junior, and seventh grade levels, and then answered it Thursday with victories at Waldron. That is the part worth recognizing. A rough Tuesday is not what defines a team. Coming back two days later and winning on the road is, and our Ladycats and their coaches deserve credit for how quickly they turned the week around.Our fine arts students are another reason to celebrate. Our band has been at every football game this season, in the stands and on the field, and the great atmosphere at the games belongs to our band students and directors as much as anyone. In theatre, auditions for The Lightning Thief drew a record turnout, and the props that are being built speak to the creativity and dedication of our students. Just as impressive, the fair art on display last week was very creative and appealing to parents and fair patrons. To our fine arts staff, thank you for building programs students want to be a part of and bringing out the best of their talents.In Mena Morphology Matters, our Week 5 root is graph, meaning “to write.” Our youngest students will meet it in autograph, our middle school students in paragraph, and our high school students in epigraph, with biography, graphic, and telegraph available across every grade band. It is a fitting root for a week built around documentation. A biography is a life written down, an autograph is a name written by the person who owns it, and an epigraph is a short writing at the beginning of a book, chapter, or building. Everything worth remembering eventually has to be written down, which is exactly the point of both the merit pay form and a well-planned unit.It was a good week of post-Labor Day work at Mena Public Schools.At Mena Public Schools, our students are prepared, our staff is supported, and our community is confident.Keep Leveling-Up, and have a great weekend! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bearcatwrap.substack.com