Melani Spath

Thompson Valley School District

-The Thompson School District has 13 early childhood centers, 20 elementary schools, five middle
schools, five high schools and two charter schools. The number of students enrolled in the district for
the 2016-2017 school year was around 16,000 students. This school district has about 2,000
teachers and administrators. The Mission of Thompson School District is to: empower to learn,
challenge to achieve, inspire to excel. The Thompson School District Vision Statement is: the
Thompson School District will be a school district that empowers, challenges and inspires students,
faculty, staff, parents, school leaders and community members to learn, achieve and excel.

Thompson Valley High School

-The Thompson High School, in specific, offers numerous educational programs including advanced
programs such as Advanced Placement (AP). Thompson2Life is a program whose main objective is
to meet and discuss the quality of education in the district and places that could use improvement in
schools and in the community. The community of parents of the students in this school tend to be
involved in the athletics portion of the school. Thompson Valley has 1,238 students enrolled with
50.6 full time teachers. The student to teacher ratio is 25:1 which is higher than both the average for
the US and for Colorado. When looking more at demographics, it can be seen that 999 students
(80.7%) are Caucasian, 198 (16.0%) are Hispanic, and the remaining 41 students are Asian (0.7%),
Black (0.4%), a mix of two races (1.2%), American Indian (0.6%), and Pacific Islander (0.4%). This is
a pretty similar ethnic diversity compared to the whole district which has 78.2% Caucasian students.

My Class
-Mrs. Martinsons second period class is Algebra 1 has 34 students consisting of mostly 9th graders
along with a few 10th or 11th graders who did not pass the class when they originally took it. This
groups of students as a whole generally tend to not be advanced in math but may be advanced in
other areas. They also do not tend to be the students who are really struggling in math. There are a
good number of football players in the classroom as well as other types of athletes. When the
students are allowed to listen to music, a good number of them choose to listen to Hip-Hop and Rap.
A lot of the students in this class need a little push to get them focused and motivated to do their
assignments. They tend to do best when taught in the I do, we do, you do method and are asked to
quietly do problems for the you do part to make sure they can do the math without the help of others.
The class is set up so that there is a lecture and then time at the end of the class to work on the
homework due the next day (15 minutes on Tuesdays and 45 minutes on Thursdays). The students
are not asked to be productive during this to so many end up messing around and talking instead of
getting their assignment done. The volume is not very well controlled in the room so it frequently
gets noisy during work time. The classroom is set up with rows of desk facing the front smart board.
There are white boards lining the side wall but these are rarely used.