Lakota has added 221 support staff since 1995. Every single year, Lakota adds eight new busses to its fleet of 160. And every year, with new roads, homes and developments popping up, the district has to completely rework its bus routing. Hellos and goodbyes Emotionally, such growth brings its own benefits and extracts its own tolls. Hellos and good-byes happen daily in Lakota.
Teachers move to new schools.
Academically, dealing with this amount of change would sink a lesser school system. Then proficiency tests roll around, the creators of which blindly assume you've had the same children, studying the same curriculum, all year. It is no small miracle that better than three in four elementary students pass each section of the proficiency test, that nearly 90 percent score at or above national norms on standardized achievement tests, and that Lakota high schools produced 10 National Merit scholars last year. So hail to the strong-hearted Lakotians, who work when the rest of us might whine. Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays.