COLUMBUS, Ohio — Columbus City Schools’ superintendent is kicking off the new school year along with 45,000 of the district’s students. This time Angela Chapman, Ed.D., is doing it as the permanent superintendent, something which adds a little more pressure to the job. 

What You Need To Know

• Chapman said the district will stay the course on literacy, graduation rates and attendance 


• Progress from last school year with chronic absenteeism is already being occurring


• A fairly new student governance model which tracks performance will continue to be implemented, so the community knows where students stand


• Chapman indicated that greater transparency with the community is slated even when challenges arise

Angela Chapman, Ed.D. has some time under her belt leading the largest school district in the state.

“I probably have more jitters now about the first day of school because there's so much to be worried about," she said.

This, as Chapman shifted from the interim role to the permanent superintendent a few months ago. Chapman is encouraged going into the new school year because the district began to see some improvement before the last school year ended.

“We saw that we were actually able to decrease our chronic absenteeism significantly and decreasing our chronic absenteeism by 10% really made us realize that we're onto something here, right?”

Since attendance, literacy and graduation rates are top, long-term board goals, Chapman said they’ll stay the course as they look to make continued improvements in academic outcomes. 

Meanwhile, Chapman said got a lot of feedback from the community about the need for the district to be more transparent. This is why now there is an effort to communicate in a greater way this year with the help of the student governance model. It’s a fairly new model that the board has been learning and intends to work on implementing.

“Our community can expect to see and know exactly where our students are performing, not just when they get to third grade, but we'll be monitoring the progress of our kindergarten students, our first grade students, our second-grade students," Chapman said. "So you'll know, we'll all know before our students even get to third grade what each group of students, the skills that they're coming in with, and what needs to be identified for areas of support."

For now, Chapman and others are looking forward to seeing all the smiling faces this week as kids start the new year.