Focus on Student Learning, Focus on Collaboration, Focus on Results

Minnieville Elementary School is a phenomenal school located in Woodbridge, Virginia, and has been serving the community for over 40 years. Minnieville serves a highly diverse, high second language learner population and high economically disadvantaged student population. As the student population continued to become more ethnically, linguistically, and economically diverse, it was imperative that the school community seek out and implement sound instructional strategies and methodologies to ensure the professional expertise of the staff would be effectively utilized. With the support of the division and under the guidance of several effective school administrators, the professional learning community framework began to evolve and take shape to allow teachers to meet the needs of a diverse student population as state standards began to rise as well. Every aspect of the instructional decision making, instructional planning, assessment implementation, academic and behavior intervention framework, and community involvement efforts are carried out through the PLC process. Teams are empowered to collaboratively set norms, create goals, develop instructional plans, create and share resources, and share ownership over all students successes and challenges. Specific schoolwide systems have been put in place to allow transparency and clear understanding of schoolwide procedures processes for all staff. Decision making has become a shared process with not only staff, but families as well. The administrative team plays a pivotal role in ongoing grade-level instructional planning meetings and data talks. Minnieville also works hard to develop outside-the-box strategies and methodologies to meet the needs of an extremely diverse and academically needy student population. Creative scheduling is collaboratively planned to ensure interventionists have the daily time needed to implement tiered interventions. Shared ownership and collaboration among reading specialists, ESOL staff, support specialists, and teachers is a part of the school culture as teams of teachers enter into classrooms to support guided reading instruction through the school's "PRESS IN" (Pushing IN Reading Exceptional Support Specialists) model. New families to the country are provided weekly classes about the American school system and, through a partnership with a language learning software company, taught English as well.

Like all schools with a diverse student population, challenges continue to arise. State benchmark mandates and assessments continue to evolve, and daily challenges beyond the school walls are presented. Even with these challenges, the PLC processes at Minnieville have allowed our school to continuously raise student achievement, implement effective systems for academic and behavioral interventions, meet the needs of our family community, and help shape our learners for the challenges of the 21st century.

Minnieville is a Nationally recognized Professional Learning Community. All staff are committed to high levels of student learning and achievement, collaborative planning, teaching and monitoring of student performance.