Loudoun County High School has received the 2023 Continuous Improvement Exemplar Award from the Virginia Department of Education. Michelle Luttrell, principal, explains how. 

When a student enters high school as a freshman, they are a member of a cohort along with all the other freshmen moving towards graduation. You are a part of that cohort because you have a date you are set to graduate along with others in your grade. “You have a very determined amount of time to earn so many credits to pass so many state assessments, and the goal is to keep you guys together moving towards graduation,” Luttrell explains “It is about the efforts of the school, the teachers, school counselors, working together to make sure students graduate on time with their cohort.”

In the past, there has been an increased rate of people dropping behind their cohort. “For my first couple of years here, kids were not graduating on time, they were not graduating with their cohort, we still have a very high graduation rate so it was a very specific group of students in our school that were not meeting on-time graduation,” Luttrell says. 

There are circumstances where students will come from other states, districts, or even other countries with varying levels of education. Those people are still expected to graduate on time with their cohort. “They have a lot of classes to recover, so some students come and they are behind, and we have to try to accelerate and try to recover,” Luttrell explains. “It can be pretty complex and pretty tricky, but the goal is to make sure that everyone graduates on time with their peers.”

This specific award that the school has received indicates that the school is doing what it can do and controlling what it can control in terms of helping students with what they need. “I think our staff has been very committed over the years to creating the best lessons they can for kids,” Luttrell explains. “Something I think we should celebrate is that they’re really trying to be thoughtful about that, and I also think our unified mental health team has been excellent because it’s been a really tough stretch of time for kids.” 

This award is a good sign of how far the County has come, keeping in mind the fact that COVID-19 has had quite an impact on education. “Wearing masks impacted our ability to communicate with one another,” Luttrell says. “When you can’t see someone speaking to you and you can’t see someone smiling it kind of dehumanizes us a little bit and it impacts the way that we communicate,” Luttrell added. “This is the best school has felt holistically since we’ve come back from COVID-19. It’s better than last year, last year was better than the year before, so I think we’re going to continue to just start to feel healthier again.”

Even with all the things we are doing right, there is still room for improvement. “I think sometimes maybe we just approach things as “it’s just content,” without realizing that that might have been a lived experience of someone or someone’s family member,” Luttrell says. “Nobody cares about how many standards you have to cover, we want students to learn, we want students to discover who they are, we want students to be stronger and healthier and more confident when they graduate.”

“I’m really proud of the staff,” Luttrell says. “They really do love you guys, and they really try to give one hundred percent every day to the students. I’m glad someone from the outside is celebrating them because they deserve that. They do work very hard for our students and I’m really glad they’ve been honored in this way.”