9.Janet Ricard — Direct (Recall) (Part 1)

JANET RICARD: Good afternoon.

JANET RICARD: Yes, ma'am.

JANET RICARD: I am currently working as an Assistant Principal at Pelion Elementary School.

JANET RICARD: Sure.

JANET RICARD: Is that better?

JANET RICARD: So just to elaborate on that. I worked at Saxe Gotha Elementary for seven years prior to that. I have a degree in Business and became certified to teach in 1998. I taught first grade for 13 years. Got my Masters from University of South Carolina in Educational Administration and have been working as a School Administrator since that time.

JANET RICARD: I just learned recently that the upcoming school year, I have been named Principal at Red Bank Elementary School.

JANET RICARD: Another elementary school.

JANET RICARD: I was at Saxe Gotha for seven years as an AP.

JANET RICARD: Okay. And I apologize if I get a little emotional. But when they came into us, Merah was going into first grade and Eli was going into kindergarten. Very sweet children, very loving child. Made friends very easily. Merah was a little bit behind academically, so we immediately began to put some interventions in place with her to try to bring her up to where she needed. She was behind in reading and early literacy, early math skills, so we worked to bring her up to where she needed to be. And then Elias started out in kindergarten. I called him Eli, so I'll probably revert to that often because we were -- we were very close. But both of them went through that school year. And then the next school year as they progressed on and Nahtahn came to us and entered kindergarten. So got to know Nahtahn as well. They both -- well, all three of them progressed on through the grades and they were wonderful children, made friends easily. Merah had her special friends. One little girl that she was particularly fond of, that they played very well together. And Eli loved making friends and just really was a friend to everybody. He was a little mischievous, brought a turtle to school, silly little things like that, but nothing that was really major as far as behavior goes. And those were just teachable moments for us. And then Nahtahn, he was an active little thing, very busy. Again, made friends well and did well in his class.

JANET RICARD: Yes, ma'am.

JANET RICARD: She was always dressed like a little lady, always had on a skirt or a dress, usually had her hair pulled back in a pony tail. Just very sweet. Typically, quiet, but always smiling, always happy. As I said before, she enjoyed making friends with others and she had certain children that she preferred to play with. Friendly and outgoing.

JANET RICARD: That's Merah.

JANET RICARD: Okay.

JANET RICARD: All right. So these items, this is Eli's leadership notebook. This is Nahtahn's leadership notebook and Merah's leadership notebook. And each child at Saxe Gotha had what we called a leadership notebook and that was just -- that was used to track throughout their elementary career. We kept items in it, their mission, their goals, data, leadership roles that they held, any celebrations. And it was part of our leader in, initiative. But the leadership notebook followed them from year to year, so it was a cumulative record of their academic performance. So it went from one homeroom to the next homeroom and they kept collecting their artifacts and just filled them in this notebook.

JANET RICARD: Well, it had a lot of their academic data in it. And we would -- you know, typically, if they got some type of award, we would make a copy of the award. We would send the original home, but we would keep a copy in here. So we collected all of this and turned it over to SLED in those early days after everything happened.

JANET RICARD: She had Ms. Fran Lee for first grade. When she came in, like I said earlier, she was a little bit behind, so, of course, Ms. Lee was concerned about the fact that she was not quite at the level of her same age peers. So we made sure that we started with RTI interventions to try to bring her up to where she needed to be.

JANET RICARD: You want me to just kind of go through these?

JANET RICARD: Sure.

JANET RICARD: I do. So this was a reading award that she received for making great gains in reading. That was for second grade.

JANET RICARD: Oh, yes.

JANET RICARD: Okay.

JANET RICARD: All of those, yes ma'am.

JANET RICARD: Yes, ma'am.

JANET RICARD: Yes, ma'am.

JANET RICARD: Yes ma'am, that was Ms. Lee and that's Merah on the bottom row to the far right.

JANET RICARD: Yes, ma'am. She was in Ms. Kestner's second grade class that year.

JANET RICARD: We do. We, typically, do a fall picture. And then, you know, our photography company, they like to try to sell some more. So they'll come back out and they'll take a group picture like the one that you saw from Merah's first grade year and they'll come out and do a spring picture with a pretty background. So that was her second grade spring picture, I believe.

JANET RICARD: Yes, ma'am. That was her first grade class and her teacher.

JANET RICARD: Yes, second grade with Ms. Kestner.

JANET RICARD: They were not for third grade. Eli for second. No, ma'am, those had not been taken yet.

JANET RICARD: Yes, ma'am, they did. Very early in the school year.

JANET RICARD: Eli was at kindergarten at Saxe Gotha. He was in Ms. Still's kindergarten class. That's him in the third row second from the left.

JANET RICARD: I did. We had multiple things that we would recognize our students for, whether it was academic gains, whether it was some type of celebration or leadership award. And oftentimes, I did sign off on those.

JANET RICARD: Uh-huh.

JANET RICARD: Well, Ms. Lee worked very hard with her and she did -- we did get her further academic assistance through RTI interventions. And she really did -- she made very good progress. And I think one of those certificates was for the growth that she showed over that year. She continued to grow and made great progress in second grade as well.

JANET RICARD: Oh yes, ma'am.

JANET RICARD: Right. That would have been the end of second grade. And I'm not sure what measure was used to track that, whether it was MAP or whether it was her reading level, but that just showed her growth over time. And she had, obviously, made great growth. She was named the brightest rising star, so it was a most improved category.

JANET RICARD: Uh-huh.

JANET RICARD: Very end of first grade and that was with Ms. Lee. And that was based on a measure called MAP and it stands for measure of academic progress. And it's just one of those -- just a benchmark too that we use to track student growth over time. So that showed she had made the highest MAP gain over that first grade year in reading, which was excellent.

JANET RICARD: Oftentimes, teachers would do just like little individualized awards to recognize their students for hard work, and that was one of those that Ms. Lee gave out. Now, I imagine, if I'm not mistaken, she probably not only got the certificate, but she probably got an actual Kit Kat, too, because that was pretty typical. So that was just to award her for all of her hard work that school year.

JANET RICARD: So being a leader in ME school and PBIS school, we worked very hard to give our students recognition throughout the school year, not just at the end of the year. So our teachers, including our related arts folks, any other people in our building could choose to give awards like this to a student. So that came from Ms. Marsh, who was our music teacher for related arts. And she would recognize students periodically for doing a really good job in the classroom and she would often give them a certificate. So that's what that was for.

JANET RICARD: So we did monthly lead rallies and one of our partners with our leader in ME initiative was Bojangles. They were a big supporter. And they would bring certificates to us that kind of reflected the work that we were doing with the seven habits. And they would give us the certificates that might be presented to a child for something that they had done a really good job at, in this case, for being respectful. Then on the other side, that was the real treat, they got to go to Bojangles to get either a biscuit, a french fry, a kids meal, that type thing. So that was something that she had received for being respectful.

JANET RICARD: Starbucks, so that was kind of our school-wide currency that we used. We -- as I said before, we used leader in me and we're also a PBIS school, Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports. But Starbucks were kind of our daily currency or our daily reward that we would give to students for seeing them modeling good behavior, making good choices, following school rules and expectations.

JANET RICARD: Yes, she did.

JANET RICARD: Yes, ma'am.

JANET RICARD: She sure did.

JANET RICARD: We are, absolutely.

JANET RICARD: Yes, ma'am.

JANET RICARD: Yes ma'am, it was.

JANET RICARD: Well, obviously, we had a lot of community members, law enforcement, parents, faculty, staff, a lot of people wanted to do something to memorialize the children. We knew that at the end of the year, we would have some type of tribute to them in our yearbook and that was done, but we also began to get questions about being able to make, like, monetary donations and that type thing. So through the Lexington Foundation, it's the Lexington School District One Foundation, Education Foundation, they established a fund where --

JANET RICARD: Yes, ma'am.

JANET RICARD: Yes ma'am, it certainly did.

JANET RICARD: I mentioned on both occasions that Eli had a habit of being a little mischievous and one of the things that he did was bring a little silver dollar turtle to school in his pocket. So when the tribute, the mural was developed and painted in the learning commons, the animal that was chosen to represent the children was a turtle. So each child had a turtle that had its -- had the name of the child underneath.

JANET RICARD: It was a beautiful seascape, a beach scene because they loved -- they talked about going to the beach a lot and how much they enjoyed it.

JANET RICARD: We had a sign, part of the mural, the painting that the artist, who was actually one of our teachers, one of their teachers, she had named it Jones Beach.

JANET RICARD: It does. It had five sets of footprints that were very reflective of five different ages of children to represent each one of the five.

JANET RICARD: Yes, ma'am.