Superintendent Update for the Week of March 4, 2024:
Dear Vega ISD Community,
Next week is Spring Break for Vega ISD and we will have an early release this Friday. This time of the school year always goes by very quickly. It’s always important for us to enjoy each of these moments, even during the busy times.
The 2024-2025 Academic Calendar was approved during last week’s Board meeting and is posted on our social media for you to see. The district’s site-based decision making committee reviewed the calendar options and the feedback provided by teachers, parents, and community to make a calendar recommendation which was presented and approved by the Board. We appreciate our community’s involvement with the development of our calendar.
Congratulations to our girls powerlifting team who represented themselves and our school very well at the Regional competition in Colorado City. Several of our girls had personal records at regionals and a couple of 6th place finishes and an 8th place finish. Check out our webpage and facebook page for pictures and more information.
Our One Act Play will compete at the District Meet this Thursday in Panhandle. The OAP has been working hard on their performance and are excited about their opportunity to compete and advance to the Bi-District competition later in the month.
We also want to wish our boys powerlifting team good luck this week as they travel to Brownfield for their Regional competition. The team has worked hard this school year and we are excited for them.
This past week has proven to be very busy for our students as they continue to engage in their academics and extracurricular activities.
In Ms. Jones’s Pre-K class her students were working on the letter “M” and one of her students showed me how he was the Red Power Ranger. I can fully testify that he was very excited to be a Power Ranger! I was able to see Mrs. Johnston’s 3rd grade class work on their math assignment as they continue to prepare for their very first STAAR test later in the semester.
Our 4th grade students did amazing on their Interim ELA test last week. The interim test is a practice test TEA creates to help students and teachers gauge where they are and what they need to do for the end of the year STAAR.
Tennis, golf and track all participated in different tournaments and meets last week. A special shout out to the boys and girls golf teams who both brought home gold trophies from the Vega Invitational Golf Tournament.
Our high school theater department hosted the 1A One Act Play contest for one of our neighboring 1A districts. This was a great opportunity to showcase our amazing facilities to other schools and for our theater students to see the operational side of the One Act Play contest before their contest later this week. On top of that, this served as a great fundraising opportunity for our theater department who received the proceeds from the 1A district who used our facilities.
We will host the Vega Junior High Track meet on Tuesday and the High School Track meet on Thursday this week so if you have a chance, come by and cheer for the Longhorns and Lady Horns. Tennis and Golf will compete in Amarillo this week as our athletes continue to refine their skills preparing for district competition. We also want to wish good luck to our students who will be in San Angelo this weekend for the Region II Rodeo. There are certainly lots of exciting activities going on right now to keep our students busy.
I met with all of our staff on Monday throughout the day for a debrief meeting to review the feedback provided by our parents, community, students, and staff members from the stakeholder questions. We also reviewed the budget deficit and the work the district has taken over the past 12 months to reduce the deficit. There is still more work to be done. We will talk more about this and some opportunities we have to help reduce the deficit in the weeks and months ahead.
One announcement that was shared during this meeting with our staff is that at this time we will not replace the third principal position. Mrs. Rosas and Mrs. Porton will continue to split the campuses next school year, just like they have done this school year. Mrs. Rosas will be primarily responsible for grades 7-12 and Mrs. Porton will be primarily responsible for PreK- grade 6. They will continue to work together as needed and help with other grade levels when needed to best serve our students and staff. I have been very impressed with Mrs. Rosas and Mrs. Porton and they have done a tremendous job working together. In addition, our staff on each campus has done a tremendous job with this as well. Everyone’s ability to work together provides us the opportunity to continue this arrangement for the 2024-2025 school year so we can reduce spending and have the opportunity to provide support for classrooms as needed.
Over the next several weeks, we will share on our webpage the feedback trends we received from the Stakeholder survey. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me.
Thank you,
Jerry Adams
Superintendent
Vega ISD