Dr. David Hopson
I enjoyed the high school commencement activities and the opportunity to hold graduation outside on Booster Field. As always, our students who spoke during commencement were excellent, we had a great crowd, and the students seemed pleased with our two guest speakers: Diana Dahill Janes, president of the Class of 1964 and Mary-Anne Shipman, a retired Gateway teacher. Celebrating both the graduation of the Class of 2014, and the 50th year of the District, there were many references in the speeches to changes, remembrances, and hope for the future. I’ll reiterate my congratulations to our graduates and wish them success in fulfilling their dreams.
Any hope of having the FY’15 budget approved by the towns by the end of June ended with Montgomery’s defeat of the above-minimum portion of the Gateway budget. Despite the difficulties this causes, I was pleased to note that most of the comments at town meetings did not revolve around the district’s expenditures but rather the lack of having final state aid numbers for the coming fiscal year, particularly related to regional transportation reimbursement. I believe the school committee took this into account when they voted on two budget-related items at their June 11 meeting. The first was to return to the towns, via decreased assessments, the difference in the final ‘Cherry Sheet’ regional transportation reimbursement amounts and the amounts listed in Version 1.2 of the budget (those amounts were the original Cherry Sheet numbers); this action should appease many of the concerns expressed at annual town meetings. The second vote was to create a new budget draft that maintains all existing services and also accounts for the additional educational needs that have arisen since the creation of Version 1.2. These changes are primarily in two areas: the need to add an additional half day of preschool due to the projected numbers of students needing this program and the need to add additional staff time at the middle, junior, and high school levels to meet the increased requests for foreign language instruction. This second need results from the change from a 5 to 7 period day in grades 7 through 12. We expect to have the expenditure part of this new budget done before the school committee meets on June 25th and hope to have the final budget, with state aid and town assessments, done for school committee approval on July 9th. Once the school committee meets their 30-day deadline for submitting a new budget to the towns, the towns will have 45 days to hold special town meetings to vote on accepting the new budget.
I also want to briefly update everyone on a decision that the district needs to make by June 30th related to state student assessments. Massachusetts is considering moving to a new computer-based assessment system (PARCC) to replace MCAS. You may recall prior columns where I wrote about the change and our ‘piloting’ of the PARCC test this spring. Districts now have the opportunity to pilot the PARCC test next year for all grade 3-8 students as well as 9th and 11th grade students. There are a number of pros and cons to the issue, and I’m still collecting information and attending DESE sessions on the implementation of the new test, but I will need to provide a recommendation to the school committee at their June 25th meeting on whether to pilot the new PARCC test or remain with the MCAS test. The downside of the pilot is that students will take a test for which we’re still updating our curriculum to meet Common Core requirements; students are not accustomed to taking these types of tests on computers; we’ll certainly have our work cut out to manage the technology aspects of the new test; and there is no guarantee that the state will adopt the PARCC test. The upside is that the state is ‘holding harmless’ in terms of district accountability all schools that pilot the test, meaning that neither the students or schools will ‘lose ground’ in terms of MCAS testing, thus giving them the opportunity to experience computer testing prior to the possibility of this being required by the state; an opportunity for the district to find out what, if anything, needs to be done to meet the technical requirements; and the opportunity for staff to review data from state assessments in a more timely manner. If you have a particular concern, or question, related to this ‘pilot’, please feel free to address these to me or to [email protected].
