Licking Valley High School

Licking Valley High School is a public high school in Hanover, Ohio, led by District Superintendent David Hile. It is the only high school in the Licking Valley Local School District. Its principal is Wes Weaver, the vice principal is Shane Adkins, and the athletic director is Mark McCullough. The current high school building was opened in 2000, and the old one became the current middle school. The new elementary school was built in 2007. The school offers college prep courses and advanced placement courses, and has specialized classes for juniors and seniors to help guide them to the next step, one of which is titled "Journey to College". The only foreign language course offered is Spanish.AcademicsIn the fall of 2012, Licking Valley High School launched a 1:1 computing program in which every student was issued an Intel Classmate net-book. In preparation, teachers were given laptop computers one year in advance and participated in numerous professional development activities designed to help them take advantage of all students being wirelessly connected to the Internet all day every day. Licking Valley Middle School will follow suit in the fall of 2014 when every middle school student will be issued a Chromebook. During the 2013–14 school year, district administrators led teachers, students and parents in a conversation about modernizing grading and grading practices. Administrators, teachers and parents read and discussed Ken O'Connor's book A Repair Kit for Grading: Fifteen Fixes for Broken Grades. The result was that there were significant changes made to the grading and grade reporting practices during the 2013-14 school year, some of which were implemented immediately and some of which will be implemented at the beginning of the 2014–15 school year. Many of O'Connor's recommendations have been implemented, including the elimination of zeros as grades, the consequence for not doing or submitting academic work is doing the work; the elimination of grades for homework because homework is practice of a concept and thus formative, not summative; separation of behavioral consequences from the academic grade, meaning not distorting the academic grade with non-academic factors such as attendance, work ethic, etc., these behavioral factors are graded and reported separately on the newly designed grade cards.