With the new school year rapidly approaching, Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) is gearing up to welcome back a student body of more than 110,000. Superintendent Dr. Myriam Rogers confidently sets the tone for a year intent on continuing the district's recent upward trajectory. In a confidence-infused address about the forthcoming academic period, Dr. Rogers discussed a variety of focal points ranging from improving test scores to reducing chronic absenteeism. According to WMAR-2 News, the superintendent's mention of last year's achievements and her team's tireless summer efforts are quickly being transformed into a blueprint for the future.
Dr. Rogers also introduced a novel mechanism aimed to really keep parents in the loop—an initiative that will see them receiving weekly reports detailing their children's grades and attendance. This effort is set to target, and hopefully to eradicate, the chronic absenteeism that saw more than a quarter of BCPS students missing significant amounts of school time last year. Through tools such as Focus and Schoology, parents will henceforth be more actively engaged in their children's education, WYPR reported.
These initiatives align with the four priority areas Dr. Rogers has set—academic achievement, infrastructure, safety and climate, highly effective teachers, leaders, and staff—pillars that the district believes are foundational to their recent successes. Teacher recruitment appears to be one success story, with the superintendent boasting "130 of our schools have no vacancies. And 97 percent of the schools with vacancies have two or fewer openings," a testament to the school system's ability to attract and retain educators, as Dr. Rogers revealed in statements provided to local media, as WYPR detailed.
A growing concern over technology's role in the classroom led Superintendent Rogers also to comment quite directly on the issue of personal devices such as smartwatches, which have been discouraged due to their capabilities to distract and circumvent existing cellphone restrictions.
