Bluffton’s Pritchardville Elementary named national Blue Ribbon School of Excellence
Pritchardville Elementary School has been named a 2021 Blue Ribbon Lighthouse School, Beaufort County School District Superintendent Frank Rodriguez announced Tuesday.
Pritchardville is one of two schools in South Carolina that received the award this year, and one of about 1,000 schools across the nation to receive the award since it began in 2001, Blue Ribbon Schools of Excellence CEO Judy Fields said Wednesday.
Typically, the evaluation process to qualify as a Lighthouse School — the program’s highest honor — takes about a year, according to a district press release.
For Pritchardville Elementary, it took two months.
Principal Brenda Blue said Wednesday that she decided to apply for the award after attending a virtual conference in December, despite the ongoing pandemic. Pritchardville had just renewed its STEM certification from AdvancED and had already gathered a lot of the data needed for the Blue Ribbon application, she said.
Schools apply for the Lighthouse award and are evaluated in nine categories, including curriculum, student focus, school culture, active teaching, community relationships and technology. The program then conducts school visits — held virtually this year — classroom observations, stakeholder surveys and interviews.
“What’s great about this is typically, there’s an area of improvement that’s identified, and you fix that and come back to the Blue Ribbon team,” assistant principal Mary Beth Roulston said. “For us, we met in all areas, which is awesome. ... We were top of the line.”
Blue cited the school’s extensive communication with parents, positive reinforcement discipline model and academic progress data notebooks as the reason for the school’s success.
Pritchardville Elementary will receive its award Dec. 3 at the Blue Ribbon Schools Conference in Orlando, Florida.
The Lighthouse School designation lasts for five years, during which time the school will host other Blue Ribbon hopefuls and participate in discussions with other Blue Ribbon Schools, Fields said.
But before any of that, Blue has something planned that’s true to her last name and the award. Thursday will be a special spirit day for the school, where everybody will wear blue.
“There have been so many first starts to the school year and retooling since last spring,” she said. “The one thing that’s such a positive here is that our staff has never lost sight of the main thing, which is our students.”