OBSERVER Photo by Braden Carmen At a recent Board of Education meeting, Fredonia Superintendent Brad Zilliox called for a positive response to the struggling national and statewide academic landscape since the pandemic.

At the local, state, and national levels of education, students have been impacted dramatically by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now that more data is being shared on just how impacted students were, Fredonia Superintendent Brad Zilliox is calling for a positive attitude in hopes of moving forward to get students back on track.

“There’s a lot of desire or want to judge what we’re seeing in this data … I just want to caution everybody, regardless of what words we use to describe this information and however we feel about it, at the end of the day, this is where we are,” said Zilliox. “I ask everyone to stay positive.”

Zilliox shared examples of concern at a recent Fredonia Board of Education meeting, including a statement in which United States Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona called the national report card “appalling and unacceptable.”

Zilliox also highlighted an article that claimed under 40 percent of state students in grades three to eight passed state math assessments last spring.

“Yes, I would agree that’s not encouraging if it is true that 40 percent of students are not at a sufficient level. However, we’ll move forward together and we’ll make this work. I appreciate people staying positive and not being bogged down in negativity and keeping our eye on the goal and the task at hand of helping students grow,” said Zilliox. “That’s what we’ve done throughout our education careers, it’s just magnified and highlighted right now, but this is what we do. I look forward to seeing those accomplishments moving forward.”

Zilliox compared the current state in education through the pandemic to the Apollo 13 space mission. “The reason we use that analogy is because at one point during Apollo 13, NASA debated ‘Is this the worst disaster ever to happen, or is this our finest hour?’ ” said Zilliox. “One of the things we talked about is, in a lot of ways during the pandemic, this has been our finest hour. We had an administrative team, teachers, staff members, board members, students, community members all stepping up to the plate in ways that we really couldn’t imagine before and that we hadn’t asked them to do before.”

Zilliox said that moving forward, how districts respond will be the true measuring mark for the education system as a whole.

“We were able to show some resilience to make our way through (the pandemic) and I think the same is true of what we’re seeing in these test results and what’s coming next,” said Zilliox. “Is this going to be our finest hour, or is this the biggest disaster that hit education? I believe that we will show it will be our finest hour because we are going to help our students grow and develop over this year, into next year, and the following year, and make sure people are in a good place to be successful as they leave our school district.”

Along the lines of taking a tough situation and finding the good in it, Fredonia Elementary School has implemented a new program to reward positive behavior from its students.

“At the elementary school, we started to recognize some of the kids were making some choices that they shouldn’t be, so we rolled out a plan to highlight the positives,” said Fredonia Elementary Principal Mark Drollinger.

The plan to give out tickets, called “Billies”, as rewards to positive actions and behaviors. After the first full week of implementation, Drollinger collected all the tickets and pulled out names of select kids to be rewarded with time to play in a bounce house.

“It went over really well. These tickets have value to the kids and they know what they need to do to continue to earn them,” said Drollinger.

Board of Education President Brian Aldrich was pleased with Drollinger’s report of the new reward program.

“Thank you for taking a creative approach to some questionable behaviors,” Aldrich said. “I think that’s a tremendous way to look at this. Rather than discipline, you reward them for doing the right thing.”