ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Members of the Allentown School District gathered at the PPL Center on Hamilton Street Monday to kick off the new school year, which starts next week.
The event included speeches, musical and dance performances and an awards ceremony. Allentown Schools Superintendent Carol Birks said the year's theme was "guiding lights."
- Allentown School District held a back-to-school celebration at the PPL Center in the city's downtown area
- The school year's theme is "guiding lights"
- The event included student artistic performances
"Illuminating student success and embracing excellence," she said. "Embracing excellence for all of our learners and all of our staff so that we can become one of the highest performing districts in Pennsylvania."
Birks highlighted some of the successes she said the district had recently accomplished, such as improvements by some individual schools on the Pennsylvania System of State Assessments, known as the PSSAs. They are administered to students in grades three through eight to test proficiency in English language arts, math and science.
Birks also pointed to four schools that decreased the rates of chronic absenteeism and said chronic absenteeism rates districtwide has also gone down. Districts across the Valley, including Allentown, have seen high numbers of chronically absent and truant students over the last two years.
"Are we expanding opportunity or are we reproducing inequities?"Pedro Noguera, distinguished education professor at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA and event keynote speaker
The keynote speaker, Pedro Noguera, emphasized the importance of equity in providing youth with a quality education. A sociologist and author, Noguera is a professor at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. His research focuses on ways schools are influenced by social and economic conditions, as well as by demographic trends.
He said students who need it the most to improve their lives are often the hardest to serve. Typical barriers included the tendency to see teaching and learning as disconnected, unequal access to external support and ignoring the need to compensate for the effects of inequality outside of school, he said.
"Are we expanding opportunity or are we reproducing inequities," Noguera said. "I pose it this way because across the country what we typically see is that the backgrounds of kids are determining who's most successful."
The program ended with an awards ceremony, where students, teachers and support personnel were honored. Teacher of the Year was given to Ali Wight, school counselor at Dodd Elementary School.
