SCS nears 90 percent registration before first day of school
Caedyn Noah Thompson already knows what he’s going to put in his new, red Shelby County Schools logoadorned backpack.
Scissors. Erasers. Sharpeners.
Everything a first-grade student needs to learn “about animals and sight words,” he said, naming the literacy term for words young students learn in their first few years of school.
For Thompson and most of the rest of Shelby County, that starts Monday with the first day of the 2018-19 school year.
The school district held a back-toschool block party Saturday to register students and provide immunizations and school supplies. Students also had the chance to play games, ride ponies and jump in bounce houses — before or after the sugar rush of Italian Ice.
The block party was the culmination of increased efforts by SCS to register students ahead of the first day of school. The district held block parties in several neighborhoods and even set up camp at the zoo to catch families during the summer.
By Friday, the school district had registered 73,784 students, about 84 percent of projected enrollment for the year.
Superintendent Dorsey Hopson said he hoped to be at 90 percent by the end of the day. Five years ago, he said, the majority of students did not register until school had already started. That takes away time from learning, Hopson said, and ties up district and schoolbased staff.
“We can focus on having kids primed for instruction on Day 1,” Hopson said.
Every classroom will also have a certified teacher on the first day, he said, although it may not be the permanent teacher for that class. A year after having 250 teacher vacancies two weeks before the first day, SCS this year had 158. Two days before Day 1, the district has 54.
Hopson said the district will deploy teachers from a pool hired by the central office to fill in at schools that still have a position open. He said there are enough teachers in the pool to cover the 54 vacancies this week. Pencil boxes.
Durham School Services, the district’s transportation provider, conducted practice runs on all the bus routes last week, Hopson said, and is 105-percent staffed for the first day to make sure a driver is available for every route.
Two schools had air conditioning issues on Saturday, he said, but he expected them to be running by Monday.
Caedyn Noah’s mother, Latasha Thompson, said she registered both her children at the block party Saturday. She wanted to do it online but had limited internet access because of issues with her cell phone.
“I had to make certain it gets done because I work every day,” Thompson said.
Registration was one more item crossed off the to-do list before Monday. The rest of the weekend, she said, would be spent getting haircuts, uniforms, and a special blessing at church Sunday to start the school year off right.
Carla and Carlos Tellez brought their two sons, Joshua, 7, and Jacob, 11, who attend Treadwell Elementary, to get new backpacks.
Carla Tellez said she hoped to get her children excited about going back to school. She quickly realized she might be more excited for the first day than they are. “I am, they may not be,” she said. Laura Brown said she’d already registered her 5-year-old son, Logan, for kindergarten at Brownsville Elementary.
They were enjoying the last few moments of summer before Logan becomes a full-time student.
“I’ve heard it goes by pretty fast after this,” she said.
Reach Jennifer Pignolet at jennifer.pignolet@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter @JenPignolet.