Due to early release and no school days this week, LSR7 is releasing its eNews Update early this week. eNews will resume its regularly scheduled Thursday release next week.

This week in eNews:

Oct. 15, 2019

The Lee’s Summit R-7 School District announces that Ms. Dawn Smith has resigned as the District’s Assistant Superintendent of Equity and Student Services to accept a position with the North Kansas City School District. Lee’s Summit’s Board of Education expresses its appreciation for Ms. Smith’s service to Lee’s Summit, and wishes her the best in her future endeavors.

The district will be working through this adjustment in the next several months. With this, we have appointed Dr. Rexanne Hill to fulfill additional responsibility in the student services area and Dr. Christy Barger to fulfill additional responsibility in the equity area. More information will be forthcoming as future decisions are made regarding these areas of responsibility.

As we’ve been relaying information regarding our equity plan updates, we hope you’ve had the opportunity to review our equity learning feedback thus far. It is important to our team to be able to release this information about the initial equity training experiences with Educational Equity Consultants. Thus far, five cohorts of district teams have embarked upon learning experiences with our consultants.

In late September, the district’s Diversity Team, comprised of 37 team members representative of each school in our district plus our district Tier I Specialists, participated in a two-day learning seminar of the “Just Schools” program. This 37-member diversity team has been our largest group of learners to date. This opportunity will be followed by four days of diversity training throughout the school year as these instructional staff members will continue to grow in their learning in the areas of diversity, equity and inclusion.  

After their learning session, members of the diversity team provided evaluation feedback. The evaluations consisted of likert scale ratings from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” The feedback was compiled by Educational Equity Consultants and is provided here.

We hope this evaluation feedback continues to be helpful for broader understanding of how our internal teams are moving through the learning process.