The Cullman City Board of Education is composed of schools that serve the city of Cullman, Alabama, US. As of 2011, there are 3,017 students enrolled in Cullman City Schools. As of early June 2015, Dr. Doreen Griffeth has resigned as the Superintendent of Cullman City Schools, her interim replacement is Dr. Susan Patterson.
Cullman City Schools is notable for several things: offering advances courses, the most modern education technologies, leading the state in athletics, fine arts, and the 1:1 Laptop Initiative, which began in the 2006–2007 school year by providing all 7th and 8th graders of Cullman Middle School with a laptop to be used as a tool to further their education. As of 2011, the laptop initiative expansion has been completed. All students in grades 7 and 8 receive a take-home laptop. Cullman High School utilizes stay-in-classroom sets of laptops as well as Apple iPads. Students are allowed to bring their own personal laptops for school use or they may elect to use a school-owned laptop during the school day. Students are also allowed to check out laptops and iPads to use at home for homework and projects. Cullman High School also boasts a state-of-the-art multimedia classroom which allows entire classes of students to have teleconferences with students in other countries. Notably, several history classes at CHS have had multimedia teleconferences with high school students in Canada. The multimedia classroom is also used for the school's ACCESS program, which allows students to enroll in online courses and webinars. All elementary school students in Cullman City Schools experience laptops through the use of mobile laptop labs, which each class uses on average about once per week. This gets younger students acquainted with computing and is Cullman City Schools' more modern approach to the traditional computer lab. Elementary school students have also used iPads and other technologies as part of these mobile labs. Because of Cullman City Schools' extremely innovative and national-standard-setting technology programs, Cullman City Schools has received many national awards for technology use, including being named a National Salute District by the National School Board Association, winning the Technology TEAM Award from the Consortium for School Networking, and being recognized for technology use by educational media companyBrainPOP. In addition to these national awards for the district as a whole, Cullman City Schools superintendent Dr. Jan Harris received a National Tech-Savvy Superintendent Award from eSchoolNews recognizing her visionary leadership in the school system.
What Did You Read Last Night?
The What Did You Read Last Night? campaign is a pro-reading campaign launched by the Cullman City Schools System during the 2006 – 2007 school year. It has been highly acclaimed for its ability to promote reading to children of all ages and its acceptability. It was praised by the Alabama State Department of Education for seamlessly tying in with ALSDE English and Reading curriculum standards. It also greatly increased the amount of received AR and RC points at the elementary and middle schools. The scores for the STAR Reading test also increased exponentially. The campaign has also been widely publicized and has started a surge in similar programs at other school systems. A song to complete the WDYRLN program was written and recorded by East Elementary Schoolthird grade teacher and trained vocalist Cindy Pass, and arranged by EES music teacher Tim Clemmons.<.