Bearcat Wrap-up Podcast

About Bearcat Wrap-up Podcast

things that Mena Public School staff members need or want to know presented in a discussion format. bearcatwrap.substack.com (https://bearcatwrap.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Dr. Lee Smith

Category

education · education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

30 Jun 2022

Latest episode

21 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

136 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   21 Aug 2026

   Week 2: Setting Our Benchmarks

   Happy Friday! Thank you to every teacher, bus driver, custodian, food service worker, office staff member, paraprofessional, maintenance worker, administrator, tech team member, and volunteer for the dedication you showed throughout this second week. This week gave us the chance to move beyond the introductions and routines of the opening days. Now routines are taking hold, classrooms are settling into rhythm, and our campuses continue to hum with the kind of purposeful energy that comes from students and staff who are ready to work. Your steady effort in building relationships and reinforcing expectations this week is the foundation that makes everything else possible. Tracking Our Performance Targets If this is your first time reading this Wrap-up, welcome. Each week in the Wrap-up, we track three performance targets (https://sites.google.com/menaschools.org/menapublicschoolsdistrictgoals/home) that guide our work as a district: continued academic growth, attendance at or above 93.5 percent, and steady improvement in behavior and school climate. These three measures are not just numbers on a page — they represent whether our students are learning, present, and supported, which is the whole of our mission in a sentence. Because we are beginning a brand-new school year, we are also starting our tracking over from zero. Last year’s totals do not carry forward; every week from here builds a fresh record for 2026-2027, and we will share our progress against these three targets regularly so everyone can see where we stand. In the coming days and weeks, our start-of-year assessments and screeners will begin returning results. Those results will give us our first academic benchmarks of the year, the starting line from which we will measure every bit of growth to come. These measures, along with the engaging teaching and learning we are already seeing, will help us keep a clear view of where we are and where we need to go. Building Improvement Plans Each of our buildings just submitted its 2026-2027 School Improvement Plan to the state, and I want every teacher and paraprofessional to be familiar with theirs. They are posted here (https://www.menaschools.org/page/school-improvement-plans) on our district website. These plans are built using a Plan-Do-Check framework and cover the same core areas at every campus: Literacy, Math, Science, and Engagement (attendance, behavior, and family/community involvement). For each area, the plan lays out a SMART goal, the strategic objectives behind it, the specific instructional and intervention steps staff will carry out, and how progress will be monitored, whether through ATLAS interim data, common formative assessments, PLC reviews, or quarterly reports. These plans are not a compliance document to file away. They are our shared playbook for the year, connecting the goals we track in this Wrap-up to the day-to-day decisions happening in classrooms and PLCs, from how intervention groups are formed to what gets discussed at your next team meeting. Knowing your building’s plan helps you see how your classroom work connects to our schoolwide targets and gives you a head start on the data conversations, PD topics, and support structures you will see throughout the year. Building principals will be sharing your specific plan, and I would encourage you to read it closely and ask questions. High-Impact Tutoring This week, we submitted our application for the state’s High-Impact Tutoring Grant, a LEARNS Act program that helps districts fund during-school Math and ELA tutoring. Our proposal focuses on literacy support for grades K-2 and 6-11, pairing an experienced certified elementary teacher with our grades 6-11 literacy intervention tutor to provide up to 68 concurrent tutoring placements, three 30-minute sessions per week per student, built entirely into the school day without displacing core instruction. If awarded, this program would give many of our students exactly the kind of frequent, targeted support that helps early gaps close before they widen. We expect to hear back around September 1, and we are hopeful. For Our Teachers A few opportunities and reminders worth your attention this month: * Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is offering free K-12 learning experiences (https://adecm.ade.arkansas.gov/ViewApprovedMemo.aspx?Id=5870) this school year, including free admission, transportation, and substitute reimbursement, and complimentary lunch for facilitated visits. * The Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators grants page (https://www.theaaea.org/page/grants) maintains a running list of grant opportunities for classroom and school needs. A few with near-term windows include the ASTA Teacher Scholarship and Classroom Grants (up to $500, deadlines March 31 and October 31), Gravely and Paige Grants for STEM Teachers (up to $2,000, rolling applications), and Spark Good Local Grants (up to $5,000, next quarterly window opens November 1). Take a look and see if something fits your classroom. * Through a partnership between the Arkansas Department of Education and NIET, all of us now have access to the Arkansas Calibration Content Library in EE PASS. It offers hundreds of resources, including professional learning modules, TESS and LEADS calibration tools, and instructional video exemplars, available 24/7 for individual learning, coaching, collaborative planning, and PLCs. Whether you are looking to strengthen your own instructional practice or calibrate expectations as an evaluator, this library is worth exploring. Visit next.eepass.org (https://next.eepass.org/) and use the Contact Us tab to request access. Each of these opportunities is designed to invest in you and to support your work with students. Closing Celebrations On the athletics front, our Bearcats and Ladycats opened the week strong at DeQueen. The Bearcats won 3 of 5 tennis matches, picking up wins in both singles and doubles play, while the Ladycats swept all 5 of their matches, with two doubles teams remaining undefeated on the season. On the links, our golfers opened the week against Greenwood, Van Buren, and Lavaca, with the Bearcat boys finishing 3rd as a team, highlighted by a medalist finish, and the Ladycats posting two personal records on their way to a 7th place team finish. The boys followed that up with an even stronger showing at Magnolia on Thursday, placing 3rd out of six teams and upsetting a higher-ranked Hamburg squad to climb to 10th in the state 4A rankings, while the Ladycats added another strong individual finish. Both squads are back in action Tuesday, August 25th at Waldron and Thursday, August 27th at DeGray Country Club in Arkadelphia. Last night, our Bearcat football team took the field for a scrimmage against Bismarck and Poteau. The Bearcats looked sharp against both opponents and are ready to open the regular season next Friday, August 28th, at DeQueen. Also last night, our Ladycat volleyball team took the court for a benefit game against Van Buren at the Union Bank Center. It was a great tune-up before the season opener next Tuesday, August 25th, at Greenwood. Looking further ahead, Bearcat and Ladycat cross country will open their season on Tuesday, September 8th, at the Tom Stuthard Stampede in Acorn, kicking off a full fall schedule that runs through the state meet at Oaklawn on November 6th. We also want to recognize the generosity shown to our students and staff this week. Mena First Assembly of God treated the Holly Harshman Elementary staff to breakfast as a small thank-you for all they do. A group of parent volunteers fed our Bearcat cheerleaders before Thursday's football game. And Ouachita Hometown Realtors partnered with the Office of Child Support Enforcement to donate backpacks and school supplies to students at Holly Harshman Elementary. Thank you to our churches, businesses, and parent partners for investing your time and resources in our students and staff. In Mena Morphology Matters, our Week 2 root is vis, meaning "to see." Students across all four buildings are exploring words built on this root, from visible in our K-2 and elementary classrooms to vision in middle school and supervise in high school, along with word family members like revise, visual, and television. Watch for this week's Bearcat Word Detective Challenge and see how many vis words your student can uncover. It was a good week of groundwork at Mena Public Schools. At Mena Public Schools, our students are prepared, our staff is supported, and our community is confident. Continue Leveling-Up, and have a great weekend! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bearcatwrap.substack.com (https://bearcatwrap.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   14 Aug 2026

   Week 1: Time to Level Up

   Happy Friday! The first Friday of the 2026-2027 school year is here, and after another summer that felt like it passed in a blink, our campuses are once again filled with the energy that comes when students and staff return to Mena Public Schools. I want to sincerely thank every teacher, bus driver, custodian, food service worker, office employee, paraprofessional, maintenance team member, administrator, and volunteer whose preparation made this week possible. Your work behind the scenes over the summer set the tone for a smooth and successful start. This year, our performance targets remain the compass that guides our daily work: continued academic growth, attendance at or above 93.5 percent, and steady improvement in behavior and school climate. Everything we do in this Wrap-up, and throughout the year, will circle back to those three measures because they represent what matters most — students who are learning, present, and supported. It Is Time to Level-Up As we begin the 2026-2027 school year, Mena Public Schools has chosen “Level-Up” as our district theme. The phrase is energetic and easy to remember, but our purpose goes well beyond a slogan. Level-Up means building on what is working, learning from what can be improved, and challenging ourselves to take the next step. It means helping every student grow from where he or she begins while continuing to raise expectations across our district. Leveling up will look different for every person. For a kindergarten student, it may mean developing confidence as a reader. For a middle school student, it may mean attempting a difficult problem without giving up. For a high school student, it may mean earning college credit, completing an industry-recognized credential, improving attendance, or making a plan for enrollment, employment, or enlistment. For our staff, it means continuing to collaborate, studying evidence, refining instruction, and building the relationships that make learning possible. You know… doing the small things that Jason Curry emphasized to make improvements, and building self-efficacy within our students and collective-efficacy among ourselves, as communicated to us by Jeana Williams. We will not define Level-Up as simply doing more this year. We will define it as doing the most important things with greater clarity, consistency, and purpose. We will celebrate progress without becoming satisfied, address challenges without losing confidence, and keep students at the center of every decision. A Strong Foundation to Build On We enter this year with good reason for confidence. Although Arkansas has not yet released the official 2025-2026 school report cards, our latest ATLAS results and independent statewide rankings point to meaningful academic progress. SchoolDigger’s (https://www.schooldigger.com/) 2026 rankings place Mena School District 45th among 251 Arkansas districts, an improvement of 28 positions from last year and ahead of approximately 82 percent of districts statewide. Mena Middle School rose 45 positions to rank 59th among 327 middle schools, while Mena High School climbed 51 positions to rank 71st among 293 high schools. Our mathematics results provide another reason to celebrate. Districtwide Algebra proficiency reached 57.4 percent, compared with 36.9 percent statewide, and Mena Middle School recorded 100 percent Algebra proficiency among the students tested. Holly Harshman Elementary also posted science proficiency of 54.8 percent. These results did not happen by accident. They grew from focused instruction, collaboration, careful use of assessment data, and the steady work that happens in classrooms every day. We are proud of these gains, but Level-Up also means being honest about the work ahead. A ranking is not a finish line, and a test score never tells the complete story of a student or a school. We will continue strengthening reading fluency, written reasoning, mathematical thinking, and students’ ability to work independently with challenging material, and we will use the official state report card, when it is released, to study our progress and identify where additional support is needed. Mena Morphology Matters This year, we are also launching Mena Morphology Matters (https://drive.google.com/file/d/10cqzBAAWdIcTjQBRefGSXB4QUpjdsLe0/view?usp=sharing), a new K-12 districtwide word-learning initiative built on a simple but powerful idea: when students understand the building blocks of words, roots, prefixes, and suffixes, they gain the ability to unlock the meaning of hundreds, even thousands, of words they have never seen before. The program unites all four of our buildings, Louise Durham Elementary, Holly Harshman Elementary, Mena Middle School, and Mena High School, around one shared root each week. Every grade band studies the same theme with a developmentally appropriate focus, meaning a kindergartner and a senior may be learning from the very same root on the very same week. One root. Four buildings. One language of word learning. The research behind this work is strong. Morphological awareness, the ability to recognize and work with meaningful word parts, is consistently linked to gains in vocabulary, decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension. Learning a single root like spect, meaning “look,” gives students a foothold on inspect, spectator, perspective, respect, circumspect, and dozens of other words. As texts grow denser with complex vocabulary, morphology gives our students a strategy to break unfamiliar words into interpretable, meaningful chunks rather than guessing or giving up, and it teaches a transferable skill rather than rote memorization. Brief, repeated exposure across the week, through principal announcements, family newsletter blurbs, differentiated classroom activities, bulletin board displays, and our Bearcat Word Detective Challenge, builds the kind of shared vocabulary culture that reaches beyond our classrooms and into our hallways and homes. Week 1’s root is spect, meaning “look.” It is a fitting launch. Before students learn to read the world’s words, Week 1 asks them to do the most fundamental literacy act of all, to look closely, and gives them the very root that names it. Throughout the year, watch for Junior and Expert Word Detective recognitions, monthly Morphology Madness challenges, a growing Word Detective Wall in each building, and an end-of-year celebration week with awards like Root Master, Vocabulary Detective, and Word Wizard. This initiative is a direct investment in our literacy goals as a district, and I am excited to see how it builds vocabulary, comprehension, and a shared word-learning culture across every grade level this year. Closing Celebrations This year’s staff has grown, and we are better for it. To our new bus drivers, teachers, paraprofessionals, office staff, and maintenance team members: thank you for choosing Mena Public Schools, and welcome. To our returning staff: thank you for the experience, consistency, and mentorship you bring to your new colleagues. Your combined effort adds new strength to our story, and I am excited to see how this year’s chapters unfold as our team levels up together. Mena’s First Fridays Festival on August 7th brought out a great lineup for our students and families, including a Splash Zone from the Mena Fire Department, bike safety demonstrations from Spokes & Sprockets, vision screenings from Walmart Vision Center, and a hands-on broadcast experience from Mena High School Journalism and Bearcat TV, alongside food trucks, games, and live entertainment at the Mena Train Depot. The weather ultimately cut the evening short, but the effort these organizations put into bringing engaging, student-focused activities downtown did not go unnoticed, and we are grateful for their partnership in kicking off the school year. Our community’s generosity leading into the school year deserves recognition as well. The American Legion Auxiliary and Junior Auxiliary member Teagan Childress collected school supplies for our Back to School Bash as part of her Junior Auxiliary Patch Program, CMA donated backpacks and school supplies for students at Holly Harshman Elementary, and the volunteers, donors, and community partners who organized the No Sale Yardsale and Back to School Bash helped make sure our students walked into Week 1 ready to learn. Your time, generosity, and support mean more to our students and families than we can fully express. We also want to celebrate the success of this year’s Summer Food Program. In partnership with Aramark, Mena Public Schools served over 70,000 meals this summer, and we thank every family who participated in making sure our students stayed healthy, learning, and ready for a strong start to the year. On the athletics front, our tennis and golf teams have already opened their seasons, and football and volleyball are just days away. Bearcat football held its Red/Black Scrimmage this week at Bob Carver Bearcat Stadium, with a scrimmage against Bismarck/Poteau set for Thursday, August 20th, and the season opener on Friday, August 28th at DeQueen. Good luck to all of our fall athletes as the season gets underway. Our open houses this year were a great success! Check out the results of our Open House Parent Thought Exchange here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/18VwcSqwHRWE1ttqNVgWZPR_7E2WL_O-q/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108864849311796287709&rtpof=true&sd=true). You are also invited to complete this Thought Exchange (https://tejoin.com/scroll/182454242) about our back-to-school professional development to provide your input as a Mena Schools employee. It was a good week of beginnings at Mena Public Schools. At Mena Public Schools, our students are prepared, our staff is supported, and our community is confident. We will do all of this again on Monday, so have a nice weekend! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bearcatwrap.substack.com (https://bearcatwrap.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   22 May 2026

   Week 37: Celebrating a Strong Finish to the School Year

   Happy Final Friday! Once again, thank you for all you have done to finish up a good week of school and a great school year! As we close out the school year, our district performance targets (https://sites.google.com/menaschools.org/menapublicschoolsdistrictgoals/home) give us every reason to celebrate. We set meaningful goals in attendance, school climate, and academic growth, and together our students, staff, and families rose to the challenge in impressive ways. Showing Up and Finishing Strong One of the brightest highlights of the year is that we exceeded our district attendance goal of 93.5% by finishing at 93.9%. This is the first time this has happened, and it is an outstanding accomplishment. It is definitely a reflection of the value our students, families, and staff place on being present, engaged, and ready to learn each day. A Meaningful Reduction in Discipline Referrals We also have much to celebrate in the area of school climate and student behavior. Our goal was to reduce discipline referrals by 10%, and we surpassed that goal with a 12.89% reduction, a strong sign that our schools are continuing to grow in positive culture, support, and student success. Growth Worth Celebrating Along with these important gains, we are encouraged by the academic improvements we have seen this year in English Language Arts, math, and science. Our schools have stayed focused on student learning, and that steady progress reflects the dedication, expertise, and persistence of our teachers, staff, and students. Thank You for a Great Year Thank you to everyone who made this school year such a success. As we wrap up Week 37, we do so with pride in what we have accomplished together, gratitude for the people who made it possible, and excitement about the momentum we are carrying forward. It was a good year of determination at Mena Public Schools. At Mena Public Schools, our students are prepared, our staff is supported, and our community is confident. Rest, recover, reflect, and have a great summer break! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bearcatwrap.substack.com (https://bearcatwrap.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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