Source:
In our district, building strong relationships between teachers and students is an integral part of meeting academic goals.
Beaumont, Texas, is in my DNA. My family has been here since the 1800s, when the area was mainly devoted to cattle ranching and rice milling, through the great Spindletop oil discovery, which was the first major oil field and the largest in American history. We have so many great opportunities in our area, including Exxon Mobil, Lamar University, and Lamar Institute of Technology right in our own backyard. At Beaumont ISD, we must prepare our students to take advantage of these amazing opportunities.
Beaumont ISD is a district of more than 18,000 students, with 80 percent of our students coded as economically disadvantaged. Our diverse student population has a high mobility rate, so a number of our students move from school to school during the year based on family financial situations. As other districts experiencing these factors know, this presents a variety of challenges to the fidelity and cohesiveness of instruction. Our solution is a combination of strong data-driven instruction and social-emotional learning (SEL).