Michelle Carroll Smith really knows her district. The Superintendent of Lytle ISD, just outside of San Antonio, Texas, is a third generation graduate from Lytle High School and her children represent a fourth generation. She started working at Lytle ISD as an elementary teacher and worked her way up to being superintendent in 2002.
Sharing Success with the Community
But just because she been around the district her whole life doesn’t mean she’s happy to stick with the status quo. In fact, she’s spearheading a movement in the district to make wholesale changes in their accountability system so that the community can become aware of all the successes that take place in the district and not just focus on state-mandated test scores.
A Positive Impact
They implemented a strategic plan five years ago, and last year developed a dashboard so that parents and other members of the community could have an “at a glance” view of what’s going on with the students and the schools. She has received full support for the changes.
“Our school board is very involved with it and our administrative teams are very involved” she says. “This TPAC (Texas Performance Assessment Consortium) organization has really provided us with a lot of direction ─ looking at a variety of what we can assess and telling our story to the community: What are the great things that are going on at Lytle? What are the great things our students are accomplishing that our traditional accountability system does not tell us?”
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