Assistant Superintendent George Ferro and Director of Equity and MTSS Dr. Nicole Semas-Schneeweis reviewed the district’s midyear assessment data during the Wednesday, March13 School Committee meeting.
“I can happily say every class, every section we’re doing better in,” he said of the growth areas. “Please remember that as we talk about budgets, as we talk about things that say, ‘What have we accomplished? What did should we do? Is it because of whether it’s an ESSER issue or not.’ This is education, this is what we do and we’re proud of what we do.”
Reading and math assessments include intervention.
“We’re seeing improvement [in reading] from fall to winter,” Said Semas-Schneeweis of the first full year of a new reading curriculum. Ferro said the same trends were apparent in math.
“The trends are there,” Ferro agreed. “The trends are improving. … spending money to help students learn is not frivolous, it is a moral imperative that we should be doing.”
He said regression recovery in W-H following COVID is “moving faster and farther” than on a state or national basis. While there are students who are behind in both reading and math, there are also students who are on grade level.
“Improvement is improvement, and that’s what’s important,” Stafford said.
Committee member Dawn Byers said that should be better reinforced on data sheets, where color graphs show learners in the red zone are three grades below where they should be, yellow is one grade below and green outlines the degree to which a student is at grade level.
“Let’s keep that in mind,” she said.
“We’ve always had kids who struggled, maybe not this level of struggle because we weren’t in a pandemic, but we didn’t have the data to know for sure who they were or what they needed,” Semas-Schneeweis said. “This data points out exacly.”
Going forward Ferro cited the need for reviewing software as a resource compared to its price, that is expensive; continued participation in DESE’s Instructional Prioritization Institute to close gaps for struggling learners and writing support for all levels.
During the Public Forum, Hanson resident Frank Milisi posed a question about the regional agreement in hopes of helping to alleviate the budget situation.
“I’m not sure it’s legal, I haven’t checked with [town] counsel or the state, but is it possible, in the school regional agreement to assign a set increase to the school budget every year that the towns would be guaranteed to have to fund every year,?” he asked.
He provided the example of a 5-percent increase to the majority town written into the school agreement.
“At that point, the school would know exactly the increase that it’s getting in its budget, the towns would know how to budget for that 5-percent increase of the majority town” he said. “It would provide two things: less angst around budget season … and a way to project into the future revenues that are needed to fund the school and town departments and kind of alleviate the budget situation in both towns.”
Szymaniak noted the regional agreement is under review right now and that suggestion could be brought up between the two towns and counsel.