Putting It All Together

DPS has many services that support the social, physical, and mental development of young students. However, they are not fully funded to truly take on the challenges that many of our students face daily.

Many of our schools use research based instructional strategies and quantitative and qualitative data to inform their instruction. The number of beginning teachers and a high turnover rate hinder improvements which causes schools to continuously have to start over. A greater focus on empowering beginning teachers and decreasing teacher retention is needed in our schools.

We have discovered, even though DPS has access to co-located mental health, there are greater needs for these services. Principals and teachers have shared the physical and emotional challenges their students face and what a difficult challenge this is for teachers in the classroom. The support of our county commissioners to provide full-time nurses and social workers, would increase access to mental health and counseling to quickly identify the needs of all students at an early age.

One of the challenges many schools face are the number of students who enter kindergarten with little or no exposure to literacy or basic numbers. There is currently a movement in Durham to offer a universal Pre-K program to assist with helping children in the community to have that exposure before coming to school.

While testing is a given from grades 3 and up, our schools make sure they are not solely focusing on test preparation at the expense of whole-child development. We need to keep out commitment to the arts and physical education, and make sure to create an educational experience that allows students to play, create, and inspire as they learn.