Board hears intervention models

Graduation as launch, not exit, is goal

By Deb and Joe Fitzgerald

The Harrisonburg City School Board heard three presentations Tuesday evening that basically weave together a three-layer educational intervention model: a) The 2026 summer school plan, which aims to repair skill gaps early; b) the Community plan (which is part of the division strategic plan update) to stabilize the student’s environment, and; c) the Career readiness plan (also part of the strategic plan) to give purpose to the whole effort, turning high school graduation from an exit to a launch.

Summer Programming

Harrisonburg City Public Schools is redesigning its summer school to target academic catch-up, especially for the youngest readers and early middle-schoolers. High school summer programming focuses on students who need credit recovery in order to help them graduate on time.The district is using last year’s data to decide who to invite and what skills to attack.

This is a shift from remediation to prevention and targeted intervention, with attention applied at the right developmental moment. Early literacy and middle-school transition years are leverage points. If these are fixed, downstream tutoring, behavior issues, and course failures drop dramatically and the need for academic emergency medicine diminishes. Interventions have windows where they’re cheap and effective, and windows where they’re heroic and expensive.

HCPS data shows that the strongest gains in academic readiness happened for students who regularly attended summer programming. The program works, but only when the right students attend reliably. The district is now targeting seats instead of offering broad enrollment, and is concentrating capacity on students flagged as “High Risk” in the Virginia Literacy Act screening.

Students are invited to participate in the program. Some board members expressed concerns that attendance during the summer, especially for middle school students, would not be taken as seriously as necessary to obtain the impact the division hopes to see. At the elementary level, there will be more seats for rising 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders because early reading failure compounds exponentially. For middle school, there will be more seats for rising 6th and 7th graders because the transition to content-heavy classes (especially science and history) requires reading proficiency. Otherwise every subject requires a reading intervention.

Strategic Plan Update - Community

The update on this part of the division strategic plan reframes academic outcomes partly dependent on social factors, and treats that structure like networks of authentic connections: relationships lead to stability, which helps develop readiness for school, which produces achievement.

While the summer program redesign is about targeted academic intervention, this part of the strategic plan is about reducing the number of students who need intervention at all. HCPS sees school performance as an ecosystem, not just instruction, and that unmet household needs show up as classroom problems. So instead of fixing behavior, they’re trying to fix upstream constraints. Strategies include:

1) Map and organize every outside partner. Right now partnerships exist, but they’re messy and sometimes limited to one school. The system wants to develop one central list, defined partnership levels, and identification of gaps and overlap: make sure they know what they have, and communicate this information among schools.

2) Expand the Family Resource Center. Here, the district is treating schools as a central service hub, not just a teaching site. Planned actions include more Welcome Center staffing, centralized communication of resources, and expanded outreach for family basic needs.

3) Engineer welcoming environments. HCPS is treating culture as data, and trying to measure how welcoming the environment feels by collecting feedback from families and staff and potentially adjusting professional development accordingly.

4) Standardize family engagement plans. Family engagement moves more into the policy realm, as every school must have a plan that includes templates, expectations, and training for staff.

5) Create peer-to-peer connection opportunities. HCPS recognizes that students experience school mostly through other students and that peer belonging affects wellness, equity, and academics.

Strategic Plan Update - College and Career

Here, HCPS is trying to reframe “graduate with credits” to “graduate with a path.” Almost every strategy replaces more abstract aspirations with structured experiences. Strategies include:

1) Publish all opportunities Access used to depend on knowing the right teacher or counselor. Now, HCPS wants expanded visibility to help determine participation, effectively creating a public “opportunities list.”

2) Every student has a pathway. Students will have documented plans (such as an Academic Career plans, or an Academic and Career Plan Portfolio) and more community partner involvement.

3) Implement a plan for experience-based opportunities at each grade level to support college and career readiness.This strategy update is an explicit acknowledgement that competencies come from doing, not hearing about doing. The old strategy said to teach the Virginia graduate the 5 Cs: critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, communication, and citizenship. This will still happen, but HCPS will also work to build milestone experiences at every grade level with real projects, interviews, job shadows, internships, and presentations. These act as exposure to adult reality before graduation. The board also discussed the transition process of CTE education as HCPS withdraws from MTC.