KALAMAZOO, Mich. — FOX 17 reporter Julie Dunmire met with the Kalamazoo Public Schools superintendent on Tuesday, June 17, to discuss how the last school year went and where the district is headed.
Dr. Darrin Slade has been with the district for two years now. He's entering his third year with the district.
What are the successes that Kalamazoo Public Schools has seen at the end of this school year in 2025?
“I’m really happy about our school year, we had an amazing group of students. Amazing teachers, hard-working staff members. So I’m just pleased that again, we can say we had improved attendance this year. Preliminary data speaks to that. Improved graduation rates. Improved test scores. So overall, improve the climate student behavior. Overall, we had another great school year,” Dr. Slade said.
Improved attendance, talk to me about what it takes to do that.
“We had an attendance policy that we created last year. That we enforced consistently every day. That’s teachers and principals who do that. We also have parents who understand the importance of sending their children to school every day. So they follow the attendance policy. Students come to school for the most part. We still have some areas of improvement for that. I will say that when I started here, we had a 50% chronic absence rate. We’re down to 35%. But the goal is to be down to 5% or less,” Dr. Slade said.
How do you combat challenges that you face in the summertime, when it comes to summer slide, brain drain, whatever you want to call it, that lost learning that happens in the summer? What resources do you have?
“Well, we have a very robust summer school program. Our summer school starts in about tw weeks. We have probably about 700, 800 students who are enrolled. We have some of our best teachers in place, working the summer school,” Slade said.
What’s next for you in the coming school year?
“We just want to keep the same things that we have in place. Keep the momentum going. Our goal is always to have all of our students graduate on time. Graduate on and above school grade level. We also want to make sure we have exciting extracurricular activities for our students. We’re really big on sports, band, orchestra, also field trips. Over the summer, I know people think it’s downtime over the summer. We’re here planning for next year, so we can have all those great things in place," Dr. Slade said.
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