science—alongside high-expectation academics. “We outlawed the word (COVID) everyone uses about the past few years,” Basnight, Dare County Superintendent, says. “We won’t lean on it as an excuse. We start where each student is, and we move forward.” PURPOSEFUL, SPECIFIC, TARGETED Internally, the district calls its approach PST— purposeful, specific, targeted. Rather than blanket fixes, DCS builds systems that meet real needs for real people. On the student and staff side, that has meant taking mental health seriously. Each school has a counselor, and the district’s three social workers serve Dare’s distinct communities—Hatteras, Roanoke Island, the beach schools—while flexing to where needs emerge. DCS recently partnered with Daybreak for additional counseling capacity and, through the county’s Department of Health & Human Services, is piloting on-site mental-health clinicians who see students during the school day. To make care more consistent, the district is launching a traumaresponse protocol so that any teacher, student, or parent who sees a red flag knows exactly how the system will respond. That ecosystem rests on unusually strong county partnerships. Health & Human Services provides a nurse in every school. The Sheriff’s Office staffs nine School Resource Officers; two towns cover the others. “Our tentacles go in all directions,” Basnight notes. “We don’t do school in a silo.” CAREER & COLLEGE, NOT EITHER/OR When Dr. Shannon Castillo took the helm of Career & Technical Education (CTE) in 2022, just 169 students were CTE “concentrators” (completing at least two courses in a pathway). Last year 246 students completed a full pathway—and even more striking, students earned 2,655 industry credentials, up from ~600 just a few years earlier. Credential attainment jumped from 16% to 87.4% in that span. These are adult-level certificates—Adobe Photoshop, ServeSafe, FAA ground school—that belong on real résumés. 247 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 06, ISSUE 11 DARE COUNTY SCHOOLS
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