English teacher Jennie Allen said during last year’s eighth grade PLC, teachers focused on skills.
“We looked at our curriculum holistically, focused on the prioritized standards and then broke those standards down by the essential skills that we felt kids needed to know in order to be ready for high school,” Allen said.
Using the WY-TOPP authoring tool, she said English teachers created assessments that aligned with what students were working on during a particular quarter. They also held Friday stations in each classroom where students could practice grammar, writing and WY-TOPP testing skills.
“A large part of it is teaching them those skills and modeling what it looks like based on a prompt,” Allen said.
“We are teaching the content, but we are also being more deliberate about providing the scientific skills students need to break down the test questions,” Weeks said.
When the results came in staff members were able to see how this work paid off. The 2024–2025 school year is the first year since 2019 that Carey Junior High students grew in nearly every area on the WY-TOPP state assessment. Seventh graders also scored above the state average in math.
Jenkins said along with academics, staff worked to provide students with clubs and extracurricular activities to help keep kids engaged and wanting to come to school. This has kept attendance rates at more than 90%.
“Our teachers are willing to get students involved in extracurriculars and spend their personal time and energy making sure kids feel connected,” Jenkins said.
“It seems like every week there’s another club being offered,” Schlagel said. “If there’s a club that a kid wants, there’s a teacher here willing to sponsor it.”
In fact, Merry said Carey was the first school in the nation to host a Congressional Award club, and last year they medaled the first-ever junior high Congressional Award member, Braxton Stults.
Schlagel said, “I applaud all of the teachers for their work in developing those relationships and strong classroom procedures. We’ve seen a decrease in referrals over the last three years. We’re spending more time focused on academics and activities and less on behaviors.”
Weeks added, “I think the WY-TOPP scores were a trophy and are something we’re all proud of, but that wasn’t the goal of this committee. The goal was to give kids what they need and look at what we can control in this building to give kids the best environment to succeed.”
This approach has also helped staff, Weeks said. “As it played out, we built that community, and people want to be here.”
Merry said, “I have been here at Carey for 17 years and I would say the morale in this building is pretty high. People love coming here and they feel like we’re all on the same page. The students are so kind and polite, and I think that really is some of the residue of all of us doing this work. The kindness is really there.”
