Erin Nguyen

C.C. Ronnow Elementary School
Las Vegas, Nevada
waverem@nv.ccsd.net

Best Practices

1) Our grade-level teams meet for professional learning communities during protected time on a weekly basis to analyze data, share best practices, and plan reteaching opportunities. I attend each of these meetings alongside our teachers to gain insight into their work and provide input as an instructional leader. Each meeting follows a strict professional learning community protocol that allows the work to remain focused on student achievement and build our collective teacher efficacy.  The meetings revolve around four key notions: what we want student to learn, how we will know if they have learned it, what we do for students who have learned it, and what we do for students who have not learned it. The agenda is a critical component in moving our professional learning communities in the direction that we need to head in to positively impact student achievement.

2) We are a neighborhood school with a historically high rate of chronic absenteeism. All of our families reside within walking distance and the only buses we have are for our special education population. As a proactive measure, at the start of the school year, all of our teachers identified five students on their incoming roster who had low attendance during the previous school year and went in pairs to visit their homes. All of the teams took a backpack of school supplies and informational literature about the wrap around services that we offer to all families. These visits allowed our faculty and staff to form positive relationships with many of our families and set the stage for the upcoming school year. To continue to combat our chronic absenteeism, I conduct  home visits with our wrap around team on a regular basis. In our bi-weekly multi-tiered systems of support meetings, we identify students who would benefit from a supportive home visit. Due to these efforts, we have been able to lower our chronic absenteeism rate from 41% in 2021-2022 to 38% in 2022-2023. While there is still work to be done, we are trending in the right direction.