Week 35: Appreciating Our Teachers and Elevating Student Futures

Happy Thursday!Thank you for the steady, professional work you bring to Mena Public Schools each day. As we move further into the closing stretch of the school year, our goals for student learning, attendance, and school climate remain in clear focus, and it is the consistent habits you carry into classrooms, hallways, buses, cafeterias, offices, and activity spaces that keep us moving in the right direction.This week brings a mix of reflection and forward momentum. We are honoring the daily work of educators during Teacher Appreciation Week, recognizing the relationships and instructional skill that make our recent gains possible. At the same time, we are continuously using college and career planning tools and approaches to help students connect their present efforts to future opportunities in concrete ways.This week’s Wrap-up reflects both of those realities. There is a clear focus on the people whose work shapes students’ lives every day, new data for our college and career planning efforts, and several closing celebrations that highlight how Bearcats are showing up in ways that will stay with them long after this school year ends.Teacher Appreciation and Redefining ReadyThis Teacher Appreciation Week, I am thinking about our work through the lens of “college-ready, career-ready, life-ready.” Readiness is measured by what students actually do: taking advanced and CTE courses, maintaining strong attendance, engaging in work-based learning, participating in activities, and building the social-emotional skills that help them persist.When we look at those kinds of indicators in our college and career reports highlighted later in this Wrap-up, what we are really seeing is the daily work of Mena educators showing up in the data. Every AP or dual-credit assignment you design, every CTE lab you run, and every time you use a club, practice, or rehearsal to reinforce attendance and belonging, you are pushing students closer to those readiness benchmarks.When our students meet college-ready or career-ready indicators, it is not an accident; it is the result of thousands of decisions made by teachers, paraprofessionals, counselors, bus drivers, office staff, custodians, and administrators across the year. If you are a classroom teacher, I hope you take a moment this week to see yourself in those readiness stories.If you are in a support role, I hope you see how your consistency, relationships, and high expectations make it possible for students to show up and succeed. Teacher Appreciation Week is a reminder that our systems, our initiatives, and our goals only matter if they reflect and support the work you do with students every day.College & Career Planning 2026Earlier this year, we committed to giving every student in grades 8–12 access to the Encourage college and career planning platform, along with a set of College & Career Planning 2026 resources. Encourage gives students a free web and mobile app to explore careers, compare programs, and discover scholarships, while giving educators tools to see student interests, track engagement, and use ready‑to‑go planning lessons.That combination is exactly the kind of system we have in mind when we say we want to be purposeful, not random, in how we prepare students for what comes after Mena. As of April 2, 293 students across three Mena schools have participated in the Encourage program, with roughly half identifying as female and half as male, and a significant share identifying as first‑generation college‑bound. The majority of participants are in the classes of 2026, 2027, and 2030, which gives us a strong view of both near‑term graduates and students who still have several years to plan.The postsecondary pathways report shows that large majorities of students in every group are considering public state colleges and universities, and that many are also interested in private colleges, community or junior colleges, and career and technical schools. Students who would be first‑generation college‑goers are just as likely to express interest in public and private college options as students whose parents completed college, which underscores the importance of the information and support they receive at school. At the same time, meaningful percentages of students are looking at apprenticeships, direct‑to‑work options, and the military, reminding us that “college and career ready” must include a range of high‑quality pathways.On the career interest side, health and medicine, finance and business, and art, design, entertainment, and media rise to the top, each drawing interest from around one‑quarter of students. Law, criminal justice, and protection services; architecture and engineering; and education and teaching also show up strongly, with clear patterns by gender and graduation year. For example, many students in the classes of 2028 and 2029