• Category 1

    Selected in 2023

  • Grades: pre k - 5
    School Setting: urban
    Town Population: 24,887
    Student Enrollment: 204
    Student Demographics:

    Black/African American: 6%
    White/Caucasian: 57%
    Hispanic: 13%
    Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 3%
    Asian: 1%
    Native American: 20%
    Other: 0%

    Teacher/Student Ratio: 1:19
    % Reduced Lunch: 93.4%
    % ELL Learners: 6.3%
    Founded: 1922
  • PRINCIPAL:
    Chad Radke
  • CONTACT:
    405 8th Ave SW
    Mandan, ND 58554
    701-751-6500
    Janelle.Heinsohn@msd1.org
Mary Stark Elementary School
Mandan, ND
Our school is a Love and Logic school which gives choices to all who enter.
1. Tell us about your school’s success.
Our success started about 3 years ago as we looked at test scores wholistic and we were not finding the success we wanted. We made a more urgent and intentional effort at looking at the scope, sequence, overlap and omission of standards being taught within our curriculum. This started by looking our state test scores and being able to define what areas needed addressing. After much horizontal grade level PLC meetings as well as vertical meetings, we started to address the needs and our school has been well rewarded for all of the hard work.
2. Talk about the greatest contributing factor(s) that promoted positive change in your school.
The biggest factor that contributes to the success of our school is the loving relationship we have with students. Our school is a Love and Logic school which gives choices to all who enter. The accountability train is of utmost importance, which emphasizes choices, consequences, and a huge dose of love for students and families.

I also believe our strong effort to sustain and honor our collaboration time. The staff looks at short-term data, which in turn prepares our school for long-term data, which is used during our PLC time as well as our MTSS time. The members of these meetings are classroom teachers, paras, instructional coaches, principals, and a variety of special education staff. We then decided to work from ground up.
3. How has ESEA funding supported the school's success?
Along with having the opportunity to participate in the National Conference, we are using the funds to provide a multitude of PD for staff to travel around the U.S. for a rich opportunity of professional development. This would not happen if it wasn’t for the generous funding.
4. What professional development activities were used to improve teaching and learning?
Our journey started with training on proficiency scales 3 years ago. We noticed students struggling with added verbiage in our math assessments. We wanted to focus more on primary grades to start to incorporate the science of reading and vocabulary. Since this has happened, our scores have started to improve
5. Talk about the cultural shift leading up to your school's success.
The cultural shift we started to experience was having more intentional meetings, giving ample amount of time to those meetings, and then asking ourselves how are we making learning better for students. We really started to look at our MTSS data, PLC had agendas which were meaningful, and we let our data lead us.
6. How has community involvement strengthened your success?
We couldn’t be happier with our community involvement.
We have a food pantry within our school. We have had community organizations donate both food as well as funds for us to help our school families. Parent nights at our school are creatively designed to engage parents with their child as well as staff members.
Stats
  • Category 1

    Selected in 2023

  • Grades: pre k - 5
    School Setting: urban
    Town Population: 24,887
    Student Enrollment: 204
    Student Demographics:

    Black/African American: 6%
    White/Caucasian: 57%
    Hispanic: 13%
    Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 3%
    Asian: 1%
    Native American: 20%
    Other: 0%

    Teacher/Student Ratio: 1:19
    % Reduced Lunch: 93.4%
    % ELL Learners: 6.3%
    Founded: 1922
  • PRINCIPAL:
    Chad Radke
  • CONTACT:
    405 8th Ave SW
    Mandan, ND 58554
    701-751-6500
    Janelle.Heinsohn@msd1.org