New books, new buildings, new superintendent: The Liverpool Central School District’s education restructuring plan is initiated, but nowhere near completed, says new Superintendent Daniel Henner.

"It's really the beginning of the journey for our kids and how we're going to connect it to the school,” Henner said.

The large district's enrollment went down with state population decreases as the focus on career training and literacy went up. The restructuring plan, called "Education 2020," now has nine former kindergarten through sixth grade elementary schools divided up into four K-2 elementary buildings. This move can keep them hyper-focused on literacy and repairing the COVID-19 gap.

"When we had nine elementary schools, we would have a limited number of reading teachers that could be in every building,” Henner said. “So now that we have K-2 buildings, we can put more interventionists in these buildings to work with kids. So that's how you know at the end of the road of second grade, how we're confident that we can have more kids really at grade level.

“It's just really allocation of resources; rather than spreading things out nine ways, we can do it in four ways."

Elementary grades three through five are in four new repurposed spaces of their own. High school freshmen through seniors attend classes at Liverpool High School. The newly grouped four buildings of sixth, seventh and eighth graders can choose to study a potential career training passion through their new career training education courses.

"We're offering kids the opportunity to take three different electives in seventh grade and three different electives in eighth grade. Now if they're bound and determined and they know what they want to do, they can repeat those electives in seventh and eighth grade,” Henner said.

“The dream is to really create a vision for where our kids want to go. So when they get to the high school, then they can focus on a [career training class] program if that's if that's what they want to do. But I want to emphasize that a third of the kids across the country are doing very well and what we all remember what high school looked like, and we're still going to offer Liverpool our high-level AP and college courses."

Henner adds families' communication with the schools is critical for the success of this new initiative.

"We hear themes of things that we can improve upon. Those are how we make the improvements for our kids through that listening process. If we're not communicating with each other, then we can't make the improvements that we all want to make," says Henner.