Greg Mathis Charter High School is helping all students develop the world class skills of the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate by ensuring that our standards, curriculum, instruction, assessments, professional development and learning environment are structured to align with improved and sustained student outcomes in the areas of critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. The differentiated professional development provided for teachers allows them to deliver student instruction that is developmentally appropriate, differentiated and data driven in the various subject areas. Our school continues to work toward improving literacy in order to meet the district’s goal of all children reading on grade level by implementing reading across the curriculum as a universal instructional focus in our school, with all teachers receiving continuous instructional coaching and support to improve critical reading skills for our students. Schoolwide reading goals that align with skills such as close reading and conducting text- dependent analysis using multi-disciplinary texts are used to achieve weekly standards-based tracking for each student. Evidence-based adaptive digital curricula are also used to provide rigorous differentiated grade level texts that support inferential and critical reading skills. In addition, our teachers use student performance data to determine instructional gaps and implement intervention strategies including; but not limited to students being placed into flexible groups and learning centers in order to meet their individual learning needs based on the academic progress monitoring data. In addition, restorative practices, PBIS, daily behavioral coaching and weekly mental health counseling offer our students valuable social and emotional learning support to develop the soft skills needed to support them as they navigate career or college pathways.
A key goal of our school is that students will graduate with the ability to identify and solve complex problems, think critically about information, work effectively in teams and communicate clearly. Our teachers use integrative thinking, ladders of inference and the growth mindset to encourage students to examine multiple viewpoints and critically assess problems to determine viable alternatives. During the 2022- 2023 school year, we were able to increase our graduation rate by 30% and expect to increase this even more on our 2023- 2024 School Report Card. We were also able to have 58% of our students complete the CareerSafe OSHA certification and 76% of our students participated in our STEM program focusing on indoor Hydroponics. Students were able to successfully grow vegetables which they also ate during schoolwide nutrition sessions. As a result of the focus and support that we provide students as an Alternative Education Campus, 94.1% of our qualified seniors graduated in June 2024. By continuing our ongoing progress monitoring and the transference of our data into actionable steps using quick cycles of correction, our students will continue to register growth in the 2024-2025 school year.
Natrice I. Henriques, Principal
Darrell Chaplin, SIC Chairman
Dr. Natalie Johnson, Board Chairman
