Our Beliefs

We believe that in Fife School District we have the finest collection of educators in the state and that the administration and support staff around them are second to none.

We believe that we have a very difficult task before us to ensure that all students meet the high standards that are set forth. We also firmly believe that if any district can accomplish this important task, none is better prepared for success than ours.

We believe that teachers are designers and leaders and that we should not work on the teachers or the students, instead we should work on improving the work that we design for students to complete. This should be done both individually and, whenever possible, collaboratively around our lesson design.

We believe that there is very real power in collaboration. While we cannot collaborate around every problem and lesson, we are better as a whole when we take advantage of our collective talent. The talent and experience is abundant in this district and we have the common language and trust in place to make it happen.

We believe that as a district our focus is precisely where it should be and that is on the student work. If we are truly focusing on aligning what we teach and creating more engaging lessons, the test scores will take care of themselves and will be but one important indicator of our success with every student.

We believe that it is nothing more than common sense that if we are reflective in our teaching and embed more design qualities in our lessons, then more students will become engaged and therefore more learning will take place

We have grown to deeply believe that effort affects learning outcomes at least as much as does intellectual ability and that it is our utmost responsibility to engage all of our students in the work. This is the most difficult task in our business, but also the most important.

We believe that we have created the environment to take our district to unprecedented heights. We have a common purpose, gifted staff, a common language, time created for collaboration, teacher driven staff development, more student performance data than we have ever had before, focused and aligned building plans, and steadfast school board and community support. The sky is truly the limit.