Floyd County Schools was one of four Georgia school systems honored for completing a state-wide pilot to attract and retain quality teachers.  The system was recognized along with Bibb County Schools, Dougherty County Schools, and Lowndes County Schools at the quarterly meeting of the Board of Directors of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education on Tuesday, May 1, 2007 in Atlanta .  

Floyd County Schools and nine other school systems in the state participated in the BellSouth Quality Learning and Teaching Environments (QLTE) initiative to attract and retain quality teachers. The public and private initiative held the goal of using teacher input from an online survey to improve working conditions for teachers throughout the state.  The project was a partnership between BellSouth Foundation, BellSouth Telecommunications, Georgia Department of Education, P-16 Department of the University System of Georgia, the Georgia Board of Education, Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education, Georgia Association of School Personnel Administrators and the Partnership for Reform in Science and Mathematics

The system participated in the first QLTE survey in 2005 and a re-survey in 2006.  Floyd County teachers gave the school system high marks for teaching and learning conditions on the online survey.  The school system was pleased with the results, but sought to use the information provided by teachers to make an excellent school system even better.  Floyd County Schools worked hard to make sure that teachers were a part of the process to seek improvement for the children of the community.  The QLTE Committee held staff meetings at all school faculties to share the BellSouth survey results with teachers.  The committee then held district focus groups to clarify results of the survey and to get ideas for improvements as we developed the system action plan.  

The information teachers shared with the QLTE committee narrowed the groups focus for improvement to four major areas - Time Constraints, Improving Resources, Empowering Teachers, and Improving Professional Learning Opportunities.  The process of getting an Action Plan in place took longer in Floyd County than in some other systems because the administration felt it was imperative that teachers be involved in finding solutions to improve teaching and learning conditions.  This attention to detail resulted in the re-survey taking place before many of the elements of the system action plan were in place because the Floyd County Board of Education did not approved the system Action Plan until September, 2006.  The timing contributed to only small gains on the re-survey over the already strong results of the original survey.  One positive on the re-survey was that the biggest gain was in the area of Time - the lowest scoring area for the system on the original survey.         

One element of the plan that began with the start of the 2006-2007 school year has already proven successful is an effort to save teachers time in the school computer labs.  The school system and Berry College entered into an agreement to allow Berry students to staff a computer lab at Garden Lakes Elementary.  Teachers expressed a need for someone to staff the lab to help them trouble shoot problems and get the labs ready for a class so that instruction time was not taken with these chores.  Both Floyd County Schools and Berry College gained from the pilot effort.  Garden Lakes teachers were able to bring students into a lab ready to begin instruction and Berry students gained from the experience of working with children and technology.  The Berry pilot will now be expanded to Glenwood Primary this fall and plans are underway to add another school for the 2008-2009 school year.  The system seeks to use a similar program to staff all computer labs within three years.

For additional information about the QLTE survey, you will find details on the web at www.qlte.org.