The biggest achievement is building a culture of care — care for our students, care for our families and care for our staff. Oftentimes, because there’s so much talent already here, what you’re trying to do is just create the conditions that allow for the power of education to happen every single day, and just remove the barriers so the work can work, can happen. …
You see on everything we have that it’s “excellence grounded in equity.” And I just always want to make sure that when I say “equity” — when we say “equity” in the Verona Area School District — equity means that each student has access to the resources that they need to thrive in our society. I fully understand that the word has gotten politicized, but we have held firm to our stance through our equity framework.
This is not a political statement. This is an action that anyone — if you break down the true definition of what we’re saying — you want us to remove barriers to allow access for any student to receive the resources that they need.
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1,855 Verona 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.