SAHS honored

The Starfires stand alone.
South Adams was the only high school in Indiana to earn National Blue Ribbon recognition when the list of 335 schools nationwide was announced Tuesday.
“It’s a great honor,” SAHS principal Trent Lehman said this morning while giving credit to the school’s students, staff, administration and parents. “We’ve worked hard to help kids achieve and be successful, and it’s great, when you achieve at a high level, to be recognized.”
“It’s great,” added South Adams superintendent Scott Litwiller. “It’s very gratifying when you work at a school to help develop students, help them learn. And when you’re working with a professional staff and teachers who care about what they’re doing, who care about always trying to be better, to receive that recognition is just fantastic.”
The award is the second in the area in as many years as East Elementary School in Portland was named a National Blue Ribbon School in 2014.
Other Indiana winners this year included Centerton Elementary (Martinsville), Farmersville Elementary (Mount Vernon), Memorial Elementary (Valparaiso), Murdock Elementary (Lafayette), North Elementary (Poseyville), Oak Trace Elementary (Westfield) and Prairie Vista Elementary (Granger) as well as Our Lady of Mount Carmel School (Carmel) and Saint Pius X Catholic School (Granger), which are both kindergarten through eighth grade facilities.
Nationwide, 335 schools — 285 public and 50 private — were selected for the award and will be honored by the U.S. Department of Education at a recognition ceremony Nov. 9 and 10 in Washington, D.C. The honors is based on overall academic excellence and/or progress toward closing student achievement gaps.
“This honor recognizes your students’ accomplishments and the hard work and dedication that went into their success,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday in a video message to the winners. “Your journey has taught you collaboration, intentional instruction, and strong relationships in school and with your community. You represent excellence — in vision, in implementation, and in results — and we want to learn as much as we can from you.”
Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz nominated South Adams for the Blue Ribbon early this year, and the final application for the honor was due March 20. That included a summary of the school’s test scores from the last five years broken into sub-categories including race, gender and income, as well as written statements about the school’s curriculum, instruction, assessments and connection with the community.
As he did during the application process, Lehman today emphasized the quality of his staff.
“The thing that really continues to stand out to me, we have … a higher percentage of staff than any place I’ve been that really invests in kids lives beyond the classroom,” said Lehman, whose school was named a Four-Star School by the Indiana Department of Education for 2012 and 2014. “They care about them as people. … When you have a staff that really cares about kids and the success of kids in more than just the classroom, that’s a great foundation.
“They want to be good. They want our kids to be successful. They want our school to be the best it can be.”
SAHS had not always been a high-achieving school based on Indiana’s annual A through F grades, having received a D four times from 2006 through 2010. But its grade leap to an A in 2011, and its performance has been strong ever since. It repeated with an A in 2012, had a B in 2013 and returned to an A last year.
The change, the school’s administration and staff said, came from looking at test scores not only as a whole, but also breaking them down in order to try to find ways to help individual students in areas in which they might be struggling.
“I think that has been key,” said Litwiller. “It’s very easy to say we care about kids and care about students … What the staff hass done at the HS, and really at all levels is looked and what does the individual student need and then put interventions in there to help them. We try to make it really, really hard for students to not be successful.”