In 1965, the Nebraska Legislature created the Educational Service Unit system to provide supplemental services to school districts. ESUs are service-oriented, non-regulatory agencies designed to achieve a better balance of educational opportunities for students regardless of the population, financial differences, or geographic limitations of school districts.
The governing unit consists of an elected board of 9 members. Members are elected for four-year terms from nine distinct election districts. Meetings are conducted at 7:00 p.m. on the third Monday of each month.
Educational Service Unit 10 utilizes an advisory committee structure for the purpose of receiving feedback and developing recommendations for services that are provided to schools. Local school administrators and county superintendents are elected by their peers to serve on the Administrator Advisory Committee, which meets at least four times during the year. The recommendations of the committee are considered by the school districts in the ESU 10 area. Once two-thirds of the school districts that contain at least one-half of the student population approve the administrator advisory committee recommendations, the Board of Directors makes the final decisions concerning the program of services for the unit.
Educational Service Unit 10 employs 93 staff members who provide services to students in the counties of Blaine, Buffalo, Custer, Dawson, Garfield, Greeley, Hall, Howard, Loup, Sherman, and Valley. Included in these counties are 34 K-12 districts, 4 residential schools and 11 parochial schools. The area served covers approximately 9,325 square miles and includes an estimated 29,600 students in grades K-12.
Shelton Public Schools is currently in year five of the school improvement cycle. At this point we are collecting and analyzing data to see if the action plan we implemented is working. We will be preparing for an external visit in the fall of 2011-2012 to assess our goals and the results of our data.Currently, our two goals are reading vocabulary and math.We had a Steering Committee Meeting on April 14, 2010. For data collection purposes we will be using PLAN data rather than ACT. The reason for this is that not every student takes the ACT. We also decided to move ITBS testing to the fall rather than the spring.In preparation for our external visit in 2011, the steering committee attended a Technical Assistance workshop at the Educational Service Unit in Kearney to begin the planning process for the external visit. Because this is a continuous process, we will continue with our current school improvement measures as well as complete a needs assessment to assess what additional areas we need to improve.