Slightly Smaller School Dist. 5 to Focus on Academic Achievement

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

The superintendent of Anderson County’s largest school district, with 21 schools and 12,000 students, said academic achievement and security remain top priorities heading into the new school year.

“Our goal is to ensure academic success for every student and every student reaching their potential,” said Dist. 5 Superintendent Brenda Kelley. “We are on the right track.”

The district is also working to meet the challenges of changes in the student population, including advanced instruction for those whose native language is not English.

“We are now serving 29 languages in our district,” said Kelley. “That means there are families that speak 29 different languages, so we felt like to really encourage that academic achievement, partnering with our families, we needed to provide more support. Through the board's recommendation and approval, we're able to add an additional multilingual learner specialist, which is a teacher that is going to teach our children, but we're also able to hire another translator.”

The district is also expanding a mentoring program, called Impact A5, that helps to pair students with mentors. The program served 60 students and plans to expand to serve more students in the upcoming school year.

The district has 300 students that have been identified through the McKinney-Vento process and grant, and it provides services for them, including school supplies, and, if needed, clothing and food.

“We do what we can to help them to provide the resources that we can to help them achieve,” said Kelley.

While the district is growing, the number of students in the schools has so far not reflected the expansive growth of housing in the district.

A demographic study completed for the district in 2023, not only did not project significant growth over the next eight years, it projected a slight decrease.

“We didn't believe it when that came out, but that has been the truth,” said Kelley. “So we have declined in our enrollment while houses have been being built and being expanded upon, we have seen a little bit of a decline in our enrollment.”

Kelley said the chief goal for the coming year are the same as last year: academic achievement.

“Our goal in our strategic plan is for every school to have a good or excellent on their report card, and that is what we're shooting for,” said Kelley. “We want every school to rate excellent; we want to meet that goal of good to excellent. This past year, we had some schools that didn't have good/excellent on their report card, and we identified those and put some changes in place.”