The purpose of school improvement planning is to ensure that teachers and administrators work collaboratively toward continuous improvement of the quality of teaching and learning in their school. The school principal, the school leadership team, and the faculty are responsible for designing an annual School Improvement Plan to be submitted to the Superintendent of Schools by October 1 of each school year.  In those buildings where a Site Plan has been developed, the Site Plan is the School Improvement Plan.  The school improvement goals in these buildings will consist of the action plans chosen for implementation in that school year.

Professional development is a key component of the School Improvement Plan or Site Plan. Each school’s plan includes a professional development component that will lead to improvements in instruction and resulting improvements in student achievement.

Strong School’s School Improvement Plan for 2007-2008 builds on the success of the 2006-2007 plan. In 2006-2007 Strong teachers refined and implemented assessments that improved reading comprehension across all content areas. Teachers examined Connecticut Mastery Test results in reading comprehension to determine areas of weakness and developed content-specific reading tasks targeting the major comprehension strands tested on the CMT.  Strong teachers used the “Tuning Protocol” process in order to examine student work as a precipitous for improving instruction.

The 2007-2008 plan has three main goals:

1. To improve performance on the reading comprehension portion of the CMT by revising last year’s tasks based on CMT data and increased knowledge of effective task development;
2. To improve performance on the reading comprehension portion of the CMT by developing and implementing Individualized Academic Plans (IAP) for several students designed to target their strengths and weaknesses taking into account their learning style;
3. To improve upon each students grades 5 – 8 experience by collaborating with Memorial Middle School (grades 5-6) to align policies and practices.