SALISBURY, Md.- Wicomico County Public Schools hosted a State of the Schools Address Wednesday at the Civic Center to outline its accomplishments and challenges over the past year.
Superintendent Dr. Micah Stauffer said assaults are down across their schools.
“Our assaults and our fights are down about 10% for the overall school system. We’ve seen significant changes in middle school with a 27% decrease. In high school this year we’ve seen a decrease of 48%,” said Stauffer. “We’re still working with earliest grade levels and we see our most significant challenges and those ages of pre-K kindergarten, first grade and 2nd grade.”
Stauffer says more resources would help fix these issues.
“If we had more resources here on the shore that would be able to work with students with disabilities, may be able to work with some of the needs that we have with our English language learners and others that we would not only experience the success we see now but would be able to expand that even more,” said Stauffer.
The district attributes the success of their older students to the implementation of more after-school programs.
“Some of the programs that we’ve been able to add, we’ve added long-term behavior intervention program to both our middle school and high school this year in addition to our choices alternative learning school that we also have for those grade levels and we’re also working hard to expand the number of extracurricular activities that we’re able to engage students in,” said Stauffer.
State Senator Mary Beth Carozza says she is impressed with how many students in Wicomico County are engaged in after-school activities.
"I was very encouraged to hear how many middle school students are now participating in extracurricular activities. Whether it's sports or music programs, or art programs. There was a direct correlation between those students in middle school participating in those outside activities and the fact that they had better grades and they were doing better in school," said Carozza.
However the district still faces challenges. Stauffer says the changing demographics pose obstacles when it comes to learning.
“The challenge for us is the rapid change in the demographics that we see within our student population. We have always maintained around 15,000 students across our school system, that’s been the same for probably more than two decades. But what we’re seeing within 15,000 students is our demographics are changing,” said Stauffer.
“We are seeing more students in poverty, we are seeing a significant increase not in the number of special education, but in the intensity of the needs that they have, and we are also seeing a dramatic increase in the number of students that are learning English as a second language with the number of the immigrant population that were seeing within Wicomico county,” said Stauffer.
Stauffer also said the district was able to increase teacher salary by 2%, but that does not keep up pace with inflation. Stauffer says increasing teacher pay will continue to be a goal for the school district.
