By Rusty Nixon Correspondent
PLYMOUTH — Recent recognition has only given the Plymouth School Corporation ideas for future plans.
The schools were recently given awards by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce as a “Best Buy” school and a U.S. News and World Report bronze medal as one of the nation’s top high schools. It has Superintendent Dan Tyree and the rest of the corporation looking at improvements.

“The two awards are distinctly different. The Chamber award is for getting the most out of tax payer dollars and that has always been something that we’ve taken great pride in here at Plymouth,” he said. “The U.S. News award is like an exclamation point on the impact of our last strategic plan. It was a specific point of emphasis to make a difference with our sub-groups – to bring the bottom up. The days are gone when you can drop out of high school and still get a good job. It’s been a goal of our schools to be able to guarantee all the graduates or our school corporation have the skills they need to be able to compete in a future that we can’t even begin to imagine right now.”
The task is a tough one given the drastic demographic and cultural changes undergone by the Plymouth corporation over the years. The changing face of the community presents an ever changing challenge to education in the city.
“Twenty-five years ago, 1 percent of the school population was minority students,” said Tyree. “Now 20 percent of the student population is minority with 16 percent of those as second language students.”
The award highlights the successes that the corporation has had with providing a quality education for all students in the Plymouth schools. Going on to become a silver or gold medalist for the U.S. News honor role is a point of emphasis with the schools new plan.
“The reason we weren’t in that level is something that we knew we were going to have to address in our new plan,” said Tyree. “We’re recognizing that we have to offer more challenges to our college readiness curriculum but we felt we had work to do in the trenches before we could do that.”
Presenting challenges and opportunities for the advanced students in the school system will now be a priority for the administration and faculty.
“We’ve wanted to offer classes like Calculus 2 and AP (Advanced Placement) Statistics but we had to accelerate our students in the fifth and sixth grade first,” said Tyree. “We had to get them to the point that they were ready for those classes by the time they got to high school. We’re about to that point. We have some 5th graders that will be taking geometry next year.”
Social Studies will offer the first advanced classes, with math adding courses next year. The determination is based on years when text books are being considered because of the cost of those books. The school also continues to look at the changing economic world scene to prepare students to enter the work force.
“We feel we need to look more at world languages,” said Tyree. “We need to look at Chinese and Arabic – things that are spoken in the global market. We need to boost our curriculum so that when it’s finished it’s a more specific fit to competing in the world market place.”