Klamath Falls City Schools was asked by Herald and News to include goals, visions for the year 2024 by Superintendent, Keith A. Brown.
The newspaper asked many leaders in the community to provide information to the publication, including Klamath County School District Superintendent, Glen Szymoniak, Oregon Tech President, Dr. Nagi Ganapathy Naganathan and Klamath Community College President, Roberto Gutierrez.
Below is the information Herald and News published.
Food service
This year is our first full year with a new food service provider, Walker Quality Services. As of October, every one of our KFCS staff is able to have a free lunch at their work site. We want to continue providing healthy, fresh meals for our students and have heard positive feedback from our families about breakfast and lunches at our schools.
Updated buildings
This past summer, we made improvements to two of our four elementary schools. At Pelican Elementary School and Roosevelt Elementary School, we had a new HVAC system added with improved restrooms and lighting. As Roosevelt and Pelican finished its improvements back in September, we had our KFCS Board of Education go through both schools to see the improvements.
This summer, we have plans to do the same for Conger Elementary School and Mills Elementary School.
Long-range facilities plan
As some might know or have heard, due to a fault line near Ponderosa Middle School, we have been recommended to find a new location for our middle school. We are not building a new school yet but we have a long-range facilities plan and have been taking action by getting community input of how we want the new school to look.
During the month of November, we had a study team from KFCS travel to California in order to study and tour two very robust CTE programs. During our first day, we went to Mad Tec in Madera, California. The second day, we went to CART in Fresno, California. The goals we made for the study tour were:
1. Explore grade 8-12 school programs that use CTE as an essential organizing feature.
2. Learn about K-7 approaches to preparing students for middle and high school CTE.
3. View teaching and learning that is project-based, interdisciplinary and team-taught.
4. Explore new facilities that organize flexible spaces to facilitate learning and teaching.
5. Review models for leadership, governance, funding and partnering.
6. Examine schools with deep levels of community partner engagement.
7. As a study team, reflect on observations, lessons learned and implications for our work.
We believe our study team was successful in our review of the CTE programs that will provide us ideas on how we can expand CTE opportunities for our students in the future.
I want to thank KFCS School Board Members Trina Perez and Kathy Hewitt, KFCS administrators Fred Bartels and Brett Lemieux, KFCS teachers Leah Wall and Dan Steans, KU students Daina Hernandez-Alvarado and Emily Wiley, as well as Klamath Falls community partner, Ray Holiday, for participating in the study and actively engaging in the learning process on our tour.
