Systemic Practices

Equity

At MCSD, equity in education is defined as each child having access to relevant and challenging academic experiences and educational resources necessary for success across race, gender, ethnicity, language, disability, family background, and/or income. Equity means designing an education system that ensures all children can achieve their academic potential despite personal and social circumstances. To create an equitable education system, our district works to understand the unique challenges and barriers students face and implement policies, practices, and programs to overcome those barriers.

Cultural Responsiveness

MCSD believes culturally responsive learning practices are integral in meeting the needs of the whole child. These practices increase students' safety, connectedness, confidence, and engagement in learning and their overall health and well-being. They ensure all cultural identities are affirmed, valued, and used as vehicles for teaching and learning. Embedding cultural responsiveness into our learning community helps students become independent learns so that they have the skills to master academic content, the ability to knowledge and new skills, and the self-motivation to enable them to be successful after high school, whether it be college, career or life.

Research long supports that learning is dependent on the establishment of strong positive relationships between and among teachers and students in identify-safe environments where all students feel safe and have a sense of belonging. To enable authentic, culturally responsive learning in identify-safe settings, students need opportunities for voice and agency. Engagement and effort are supported in settings when students feel they are respected and valued by their teachers and peers, where they see that they can improve with effort (for example, by receiving feedback and revising their work), and where they are working on things that matter to themselves and others - including projects they choose and pursue to accomplish improvements in their lives, families, and communities.

Marion educations have high expectations for all students and work to provide additional supports to close equity gaps and ensure all students meet the guaranteed and viable curriculum. Administrators, teachers, and all staff work diligently to use culturally responsive approaches in teaching social-emotional skills, behavioral expectations, and academic content. There is an ongoing commitment to reflect and engage in evidence-based practices to inform, support, and ensure high-quality instruction lies at the core of our cultural responsiveness.

Coordination of Policies, Processes, and Practices

Implementation of the Whole Child Framework will require the coordination of district policies, processes, and practices. Policies are the guidelines and rules that drive the processes and practices. Processes describe how the work will be completed. Practices are the actions performed. MCSD works to create and coordinate district and school-level policies, processes, and practices that align and support students' health, safety, and engagement and help them feel supported and challenged. District and school policies, processes, and practices need to support the five whole child tenets and their associated indicators.

Continuous Improvement

MCSD utilizes a continuous improvement process to analyze data, identify and implement strategies toward established goals and outcomes, and determine the impact of implementation. Successfully integrating the five Whole Child tenets into our culture, curriculum and community is a whole district effort. It requires dedication, patience, and persistence, a team mentality, deliberate and data-driven actions, and ongoing reflection. Our continuous improvement is led by our district's Curriculum and Instructional Council which is made up of teacher leaders and our administrative team. This group analyzes a comprehensive data set, which includes input from our stakeholder groups in the form of the Whole Child School Improvement Survey. This data drives our annual professional learning plan, building level improvement plans, learning standard action planning, and individual educator's professional learning goals.

Marion's continuous improvement process involves the following stages:

• Engage - involve key stakeholders

• Design - review results and plan goals

• Act - implement actions plans

• Review & Modify - reflect on the process and outcomes and make targeted adjustments