Greetings from Crookston Public Schools! It is hard to believe that we are already at the end of April with only a handful of weeks left of school! I want to thank our community once again for the continued support of Crookston Public Schools throughout this very challenging year. As we continue to plan for next year, we are hoping for a somewhat normal school year for next year.
There are several things going on at Crookston Public Schools that I would like to share with you. Our students are doing some really great things recently, some you may already know about and some you may not.
Crookston FFA: A couple of years ago, our district started to look at the possibility of having an FFA program here at Crookston Public Schools. The metrics seemed right for a program as we are in the heart of agriculture country, our economy is largely centered around agriculture, and Ag Education is a broad program that allows exposure to so many different careers for our students. Two years ago, Travis Oliver spearheaded this program by offering Intro to Ag classes as a test run to see what sort of student interest the program would generate. We were fortunate enough to hire a full-time Ag Teacher, Whitney Rupprecht, and have watched this program take off. In this first year, we have watched as students have competed in State FFA, our FFA program has been recognized as a program of excellence, and our FFA program is also doing a large project in front of CHS. We are incredibly proud of the direction of the FFA program and the students that make this all possible!
CHS Principal Hire: We recently offered the CHS Principal position to Ms. Nicki Martinez after a process that involved students, staff, and community members. Ms. Martinez has experience as an English Teacher and is currently the Assistant Principal at Laporte Public Schools. She has a strong emphasis on curriculum, professional development, and has been a part of actively improving Laporte Public Schools. During this process, I was especially impressed with our students as they took ownership of this process from creating questions to forming an interview committee, and welcoming/showing the candidates our school. I want to thank all of our community members, staff, and students for the work that you did throughout this process.
CHS Play: Our students put on the Spring Play “A Simpler Time”. I was able to attend the last performance of this play and was impressed by the quality of the play and the performances of our students. I absolutely love seeing students succeed and our students did not disappoint!
Crookston Bus Garage Open House: We are holding an open house for our new bus garage on April 28th from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Community members are welcome to stop by and go through the facility. We are proud of how this project turned out, it is a huge improvement over what we had! Once again, thank you to our community for making this possible!
Crookston Speech Program: We are incredibly proud of our speech program. Four students advanced to the state competition: Victoria Proulx, Zara Baig, Sophia Rezac, and Samantha Rezac.
MCA Testing: We are currently administering the MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment) tests. These assessments give us information on two things: our systems and our student growth. We use this data to improve our educational outcomes and point out areas that we need to improve in and we also use this data to monitor student progress from year to year. We appreciate how serious our students are taking these assessments as we work to determine how we can serve our students better.
We will finish this year strong and be preparing over the summer for a great start to the 2021-2022 school year. I am excited with what I am seeing in our district and the progress we are making despite the pandemic that we are currently going through. If you have any questions about Crookston Public Schools, please feel free to contact me at jeremyolson@isd593.org, call 218-770-8717 (cell), or stop by the district office. Go Pirates!
