School Improvement Council
Our SIC Report to Parents 2022-2023
Forest Creek Middle School
Laurie Gallagher, SIC Chair
Clarissa Jones, SIC Vice Chair
Email: mcneilc@fortmillschools.org
Website: https://fcms.fortmillschools.org/
Location: 2212 Whites Road, Fort Mill, SC, USA
Phone: 803-396-3450
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/forestcreekmiddleschool
Vision, Motto, Beliefs, and Family Norms
Forest Creek Middle School will provide excellent instruction founded on a growth mindset, adaptability, and innovation.
Motto
At Forest Creek Middle School, we: Focus on a growth mindset, Commit to excellence, Make meaningful connections, and Succeed together.
Beliefs
Positive relationships are vital to the success of our school.
Instructional excellence must be the focus of every day.
All people are capable of learning something every day when presented with the opportunity to do so paired with the expectations that they can.
School must be a safe place to learn. All people must feel safe academically, socially, emotionally, and physically.
All students must have access to a challenging curriculum and staff must have access to professional development and growth opportunities.
Collaboration is essential and drives achievement.
All voices matter.
Current Enrollment (April 17, 2023) = 757 students (increase of 50 from 21-22 school year)
Grade 7 = 242 with 12 General Education Homeroom Sections
Grade 8 = 257 with 12 General Education Homeroom Sections
Our On-boarding Focus Areas and Strategies (FCMS opened August 2021)
Student Achievement, Including Sub-groups
Spring 2021 SC Ready ELA Reading Assessments provided baseline student achievement data for our students in grades 6-8. In grades 6-8, the number of female students who performed at the proficient level was 72.7.0% compared to 61.6% of our male students. Goal Area 2 performance goals for 2025-2026 are to decrease the percentage of students who do not score at the proficiency level by 1 percent each year. Strategies include creating specific intervention groups for males, utilizing STEAM lessons in ELA classes, creating a male focus group to discuss barriers to reading, incorporating high male interest books into literature circles, and inviting a male guest speaker who is a champion of reading to present at a school wide literacy celebration.
Teaching/Administrator Quality
SCDE Teacher Survey overall data for the district indicated that 93.6% of our teachers were satisfied with working conditions. We are a new school so we do not have baseline data specific to FCMS. Goal Area 1 performance goals for 2025-2026 are to increase teacher satisfaction related to working conditions by 1 percent each year. Strategies include creating opportunities for Collaborative Colleague visits, implementing Workshop Wednesdays for in house PD based on staff needs, modifying our current Club schedule to create a more structured day, asking our PTO to provide funding for PD for staff who apply, and continuing to offer coverage in house for partial leaves of absence.
School Climate
SCDE Teacher, Parent, and Student Survey overall data for district indicated that 95.3% of our teachers are satisfied with the social and physical environment in their school, along with 80.2% of parents, and 63.5% of students. We are a new school so we do not have baseline data specific to FCMS. Goal Area 3 performance goals for 2025-2026 are to increase this satisfaction as follows: teachers from 95.3% to 98% over the five years / parents from 80.2% to 90.2%, and students from 63.5% to 78.5%. Strategies include updating our cell phone policy to eliminate distractions during the school day by requiring students to place cell phones in their lockers, implementing activities that celebrate all students and their cultures, restructure duties to provide greater visibility and supervision of students, and develop and implement quieter hallway habits.
Updates for 2022-2023
At the end of the 2021-2022 school year, the number of female students who performed at the proficient level was 76.1% compared to 66.9% of our male students. This data shows that we are successfully closing the achievement gap between females and males in Reading at FCMS. This year, we have implemented STEAM lessons in ELA classes and have held a year long male intervention group for those male students in need of Tier 2 support. Our STAR data is showing growth among our male readers! We are looking forward to the results of this year's SC Ready ELA assessment.
Teacher/Administrator Quality
At the end of the 2021-2022 school year, we received data specific to FCMS. The SCDE Teacher Survey data for FCMS indicated that 91.8% of our teachers were satisfied with working conditions. This year, we continued to cover partial leaves in-house when able, our PTO was able to sponsor several professional development opportunities for our staff, we modified our club schedule, and we began our Collaborative Colleagues observations. We look forward to our Teacher survey responses in July!
School Climate
At the end of the 2021-2022 school year, we received data specific to FCMS. The SCDE Teacher, Parent, and Student Survey data for FCMS indicated that 96% of our teachers were satisfied with the social and physical environment in their school, along with 77% of parents, and 85.2% of students. This year, we have worked to increase the number of responses we received on this climate survey by our parents. Last year, we had 151 parent responses. This year, we ended the survey window with 246 responses. We are excited to see the results of this survey in July. This school year, we implemented the "away for the day" policy in which students place cell phones in their lockers to eliminate distractions, we created and communicated the Coyote Way behavioral expectations for all areas of our building, we incorporated a multilingual bulletin board that captures our school motto, we created a "Parent University" website and administered an in-house survey to evaluate our communication methods. We anticipate greater satisfaction among all groups on the 22-23 survey!
Support Staff Member of the Year
Level Up
Teacher of the Year
Bragging Rights and Other Highlights
We've continued our leadership building club called Coyote Crew along with the implementation of Character Strong.
We launched three new student clubs this year: RoboYotes, Future Engineers, and CoyoTV.
One of our student teams in our Future Engineers club was a winner of the NASA TechRise Challenge. They were 1 of 60 winning teams in the nation.
Yote Yips is a positive note activity that was started to encourage students as they make great choices in school!
Steven D.K. Brown, Founder and President of Dreams Imagination & Gift Development Program was our guest speaker at our first Black History Month Program. (We were not able to host an in person program last year due to COVID restrictions.)
Our SIC hosted a virtual event presented by an FBI Special Agent from Crimes Against Children/Human Trafficking Task Force that was about the dangers students face online (social media, cyberbullying, and sextortion).
We hosted our 7th Grade Career Fair, 6th grade Career Speaker and Exploratory Day, along with 8th grade Job Shadowing.
We have students going to the World Robotics competitions in May - Team Enginauts (all organized by themselves)!
FCMS received a shout out on the well known CNN10 broadcast this year!
Our Mock Trial team made it to the state finals this year!
MathCounts is our Math Team sponsored by one of our parent volunteers, Mr. Steve Sibley. Our MathCounts Team won the Chapter competition with 4 students going to the state championship. They were also featured on CN2.
Our Academic Challenge Team made it to the regional tournament this year.
We held quarterly celebrations for the students to foster a school environment of community, encouragement, teamwork, and commitment to goals.
To provide more opportunities for our students to lead, our Student Council President and Vice-President are empowered and allowed to inform our students of what’s happening at FCMS during the morning announcements.
Having fun is essential, and therefore we instituted Student “Fun Friday Jokes”. Every Friday, a joke is posted for the students and families to enjoy. We have had over 310 jokes submitted! (Last year we had just over 200.)
To encourage the students and staff to celebrate each other, their peers selected Student of the Month and Staff Members of the Month based on the Character Traits we recognize each month: Respect, Commitment, Patience, Humility, Selflessness, Kindness, Courage, Forgiveness, and Joyfulness.
Our students, staff, and parents submitted "Words of Wisdom" quotes this year that were shared during Wednesday morning announcements and on our Facebook page. Several of these quotes will be made into posters and hung on campus for next school year. We had over 150 quotes submitted!
We hosted our Junior Beta Club Ceremony in January.
We offer several sports at FCMS, including basketball, soccer, track, cheerleading, volleyball, baseball, and football! We added dance this year!
The Coyote Clubs launch took place in January. We host over 25 different Coyote Clubs.
We celebrated 35 Junior Scholars at an in-person Junior Scholar Award Night in March.
Our students did an excellent job performing in our second production, Fame, Jr.
Our 8th grade Band and Honors Chorus performed at CPA and received SUPERIOR ratings and both groups attended workshops this year at Universal Studios in Florida.
Honor Roll Stats (#students achieving A and A/B Honor Roll:)
Q1 = 518
Q2 = 445
Q3 = 445
FCMS TechRise Winning Team
What is TechRise?
The Forest Creek Middle School Future Engineers Club students were select by NASA as one of 60 winning teams for the second TechRise Student Challenge, a nationwide contest designed to engage students in technology, science, and space exploration. The challenge was open to students in grades six through 12 at American public, private, or charter schools, including those in U.S. territories. This year, winning teams include about 500 students representing 38 states and territories. These teams will work together to build science and technology experiments in preparation for a suborbital flight test.
Each team will receive $1,500 to build their experiments and an assigned spot to test it on one of two NASA-sponsored high-altitude balloon flights scheduled for this summer.
Winning proposals address a wide variety of science and technology challenges, including evaluating the effects of climate change; protecting humans, electronics, and various materials against radiation; testing machine learning and computing techniques for space technology; and supporting human health on long-duration space missions.
Student experiments will be tested via a high-altitude balloon flight from one of two commercial providers: Aerostar of Sioux Falls, South Dakota or World View based in Tucson, Arizona. On flight day, the payloads will gather data as the balloons launch and ascend to an altitude of approximately 70,000 feet, where they will float for at least four hours. During flight, they will be exposed to the unique thermal and atmospheric environment of the stratosphere, providing conditions for student experiments that cannot be replicated in ground-based tests. The high-altitude balloons will simultaneously allow payloads to observe the surface below them and collect data on land features such as vegetation, crops, urban centers, and bodies of water.
“I am incredibly proud of all of the students in our Future Engineers of Forest Creek Middle School Club. They were risk takers and tried something new, starting with applying to be in this afterschool club. The group that was selected to move to the next round is full of innovative thinkers that will impact the world around them,” said Joanna Barney, Sixth Grade Science and Social Studies Teacher. “At the beginning of this process, one student from this group asked if it was really possible for their idea to get selected. My response: I guarantee it won’t be selected, if you don’t submit it. I can’t wait to continue on this journey as we build an actual model for the weather balloon flight.”
“This is incredible news for the students in our Future Engineers of Forest Creek Middle School Club! We strive to create real-world connections at FCMS, and I cannot think of a better example of this coming to fruition than with this opportunity for our Coyotes! I am truly inspired and encouraged by the ingenuity of our students and thankful that Mrs. Barney and Ms. Floyd were willing to sponsor this brand new club at Forest Creek. I am so grateful that our students get to see firsthand how they can make an impact in science,” said Principal Christine McNeil.
“We are very proud of these students and Mrs. Barney for being selected for this honor,” said Superintendent Dr. Chuck Epps. “It is truly amazing to see the work these students are doing. We can’t wait to see how their experiments with NASA turn out.”