District News

Lakota Local Schools is celebrating its inaugural group of “Lakota Gem Award” winners - the teachers, administrators and support staff who bring a sparkle to our schools. Selected from a pool of 130 nominations, Lakota’s most precious gems for November include: Heritage ECS principal Ben Schneider, Adena ESL teacher Helen Vassiliou, Hopewell Junior office manager Kimberly Phillips, Lakota West Freshman teacher Jason French, 
supervisor of accountability and assessment for grades 7-12 Mark Byrd, and maintenance and facility team members Bryan Hacker, Nicolas Pegram, Lucas Pennington, Jennifer Price and Matthew Smythe. 

Read all about the facets that make these Lakota staff members shine. Then nominate someone whose brilliance makes a different in our schools. Next month's gems will be announced mid-December.

Don’t be surprised if you see drones flying through the air in Ethan Hodge’s class at Liberty Junior.

Hodge teaches Flight & Space, a new semester elective for seventh and eighth graders offered through Lakota’s partnership with Butler Tech.

It’s a project-based, hands-on class where students become engineers as they design, prototype, and test models to learn about the science of flight and what it takes to travel and live in space. 

Lakota Local School announces changes to its summer school offerings beginning in 2025. The changes apply to credit recovery, high school credit offerings and the advanced math bridge program. Summer school will be offered May 27-June 27.

WE want to know how our Lakota Local Schools community prefers to stay informed about the District. By completing this annual survey, you will help us gauge the effectiveness of our district-wide communications. 

Why do they serve in Lakota? What are their priorities? What are their backgrounds?

We sat down with each of our Lakota board members to find out and we’ve recapped our conversations in a series of short two-minute videos. 

Lakota Local Schools hosted a traffic safety panel for its community on Oct. 23. The panel addressed top questions across several categories that were submitted ahead of time in a ThoughtExchange survey. Participants were also able to submit questions during the discussion. “The purpose of this evening is to talk about safety, particularly traffic safety, within our school district and our community,” Superintendent Ashley Whitely told the audience.

At Lakota West High School, inclusivity is more than just a concept—it's a way of life. Every Friday, students enrolled in the school’s sports medicine classes through Butler Tech join students with disabilities for "Games with Friends," a program that has been running for about seven years under the guidance of teacher Nicole Roether.

Five years after its inception, Lakota East Freshman School’s LINCC Lab - short for "Learning Ignited by Non-traditional Course Collaboration," continues to reinvent itself. Case in point: A brand new historical figure research project that combines writing, public speaking, art expression, peer critiques and more into a quarter-long experience. And while the lessons may look different, LINCC stays true to its original mission to gives “kids in the middle” a personalized experience that hinges on student choice and self-paced learning. 

As another step toward making ParentSquare Lakota’s singular school-to-home communication tool, the District is slowly introducing expanded features to Lakota parents and staff. 

A brief pilot involving four schools - Heritage Early Childhood School, Adena Elementary, Liberty Junior School and Lakota East High School (main campus only) - will allow for classroom-level communication as well as direct messaging between school staff and parents. The pilot will extend through the end of December, with the goal of rolling out the new features to all other schools in early second semester. 

Wrapped up in a record-breaking year for Shawnee Early Childhood School’s “Disney Dash” was a lot of commitment, creativity and community spirit. The same could be said of all the fall fundraising traditions spanning Lakota’s schools. In fact, Lakota’s 14 K-6 parent volunteer groups have collectively raised over $290,000 this school year so far, not counting two schools whose flagship fundraisers are still ongoing.

The record-breaking results of Lakota’s 2025 “Stuff the Bus” food drive gave new meaning to this year’s theme, “Together WE Can…” Together, Lakota students, staff and families collected almost 60,000 items for Reach Out Lakota, more than double last year’s total and the most ever in the program’s 17-year history.

Creativity was in full display in Andrea Menchhofer’s art class as VanGorden Elementary fourth graders put finishing touches on their self-portrait projects. There was a special twist though.

Lakota Local Schools is providing this annual notice to its parents and guardians regarding the monitoring of school-issued devices used by students. School-issued devices include any hardware, software, or accounts provided to students for personal use.