Dierks School Board votes to renew building principals contract

Tuesday during the Dierks School Board regular monthly meeting, the board members passed unanimously to renew Scott Feemster’s contract as high school principal and Craig Dodson’s contract as elementary school principal for the 2024-2025 school year, as per the salary schedule. 
According to Principal Dodson’s report there are currently 282 students enrolled at JoAnn Walters Elementary School. Dodson reported that the iReady trainer came last week and did a deep dive with each teacher on individual student data and that the teachers were taught how to utilize intervention tools within iReady to target each student’s weaker areas. Dodson added that the staff is taking a closer look at the iReady curriculum because it is directly tied to the assessment and interventions.

District Testing Coordinator Crystal Smith reported that students at Dierks High School recently completed the ATLAS Science Interim test. Smith said that 10th and 11th grade students will complete an ACT Mock Administration today. This will ensure Test Administrators and students are familiar with the testing platform, and that we have no testing issues on the day of the actual ACT in March. 7th through 10th grade students is scheduled to take the ATLAS Writing assessment on March 5th.

The other ATLAS assessments are scheduled for April. Smith added that local scholarship applications are beginning to be distributed to their students. She reported that there are several opportunities scheduled in the upcoming weeks to help students fill out their FAFSAs, apply to college, and earn Accuplacer scores to allow them to earn the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery Scholarship.