Report from January 3rd, 2008 Board Meeting

All in all, a pretty uneventful Board meeting. This summary should be pretty short, as not much was said, and it ended pretty early.

As always, your primary source for the facts of the evening should be BoardFocus.

The biggest issues were:

• NCLB report
• Bond issue approval
• Additional topics

NCLB Report

Kathy Peckron gave a report to the Board on the results of the Adequate Yearly Performance metric, as defined by Missouri, for No Child Left Behind. The basic summary of the report is that Rockwood, as a district, is not in compliance. That sounds a lot worse than it actually is. The overall district is doing great in achieving its NCLB AYP goals. But the way the law is written, if any subgroup (I'll talk about these shortly) doesn't hit their own mark, the entire district is ruled not to be in compliance. For this year, there are three small groups of children in Ballwin and Boles Elementary Schools who missed out on Math AYP, which caused the district to be considered non-compliant.

These subgroups I'm talking about are enumerated below:

• White
• African American
• Hispanic
• Asian/Pacific Islander
• American Indian
• Reduced price or free meals
• Special Education
• English Learners
• Migrant status
• All students

Any student who qualifies for any subgroup is a member of that group. It is possible for a single child to be a member of multiple groups. There is a minimum number of students who need to be in a subgroup before you are held accountable for that group.

So, each year, the state sets an Adequate Yearly Performance metric that all districts in the state must meet. Failure to meet this metric in each and every school for each and every subgroup for which you are being held responsible results in the district being non-compliant.  To make things even harder, the metric is getting increasingly strict each year as we march towards the program's conclusion in 2014. For the year 2007, there were exactly 0 districts in the entire state who were in compliance with AYP. And it is going to get worse next year as the standards are raised again.

One reason for our difficulties, as described by Dr. Peckron, is a large and diverse district. For NCLB AYP purposes, that effectively works against us. District-wide, we are making good progress towards AYP, but we have 8 subgroups for which we are responsible while most districts have 2 or 3. Having so many subgroups increases the chances that just one of them, in just one school, will miss their mark, and make the district non-compliant.

So, what happens if you're not in compliance?

Well, for most of our schools, the answer is "not much". If they are not in compliance, they officially only need to adjust their plans for the next year to help them achieve compliance. Since this is what they would be doing anyhow, this is really not a punishment. On the other hand, for schools who are accepting Title 1 money, which is money paid to the district by the federal government to help low-income students, there are more dire consequences. These include having to send out a letter to your community stating that you are failing to achieve AYP, giving the students the opportunity to transfer to the nearest school that is in compliance, and eventually having the state take over your school if you're out of compliance for 5 years.

This led to a discussion about whether it was worth it or not to accept Title 1 money. Currently, 6 of our elementary schools accept these funds, so these schools are the ones at risk. The money amounts to about $510,000 per year total across the district. For that sum, we put ourselves at risk for these sanctions. If we chose not to accept Title 1 money, as a district, we'd still do the same things to ensure that all students were learning, so nothing would change from an instructional point of view, but we'd have to replace the money somehow to help these children pay for lunches and supplies and we'd be immune from the sanctions above. Interesting conversation for the Board to have.

The conclusion of this discussion was a wish that a representative from the state school board would attend a future board meeting and discuss options and consequences with our board, so that they can make an informed decision (this meeting happed on Saturday, 1/12).

Bond issue approval

Not much discussion or dissension in the ranks, but this was an important decision. The bond issue is going forward, at $74.5 million dollars, to be put to the voters on April 8th, 2008. This, co-incidentally, is the same day that we are voting for our new school board members :) The vote of the board was unanimous, 7-0. Thus have they spoken :)

Additional topics

Steve Ayotte, District Coordinator of Practical Arts, gave a presentation on the future changes to the FAC curriculum. He listed several problems with the current curriculum, including a lack of general understanding of its benefits, a lack of technology usage, and an out of date curriculum. They have set into place a series of improvements, throw their improvement process, to address these issues, and move the FAC curriculum forward. An important change is that the high school and middle school curricula will be coordinated, so that students will arrive at high school knowing what they need to know to succeed, and so that middle school students will not have to sit through repeats of subjects they already know. They are also adding new courses, including a culinary arts program for those students who are interested in becoming professional chefs.

There was a presentation on the Language Arts preliminary discussion. There is a movement to update the language arts curriculum in Rockwood, and this committee is going to be responsible for making it happen. It hasn't started work yet, but they talked about what is going to happen, what their goals are, and when things should start happening.

Finally, there was a presentation on the implementation of Everyday Math through the district. It was acknowledged that this program has been a little controversial. There was a discussion of how teachers were being trained in this way of teaching math, and mention of a parent web site portal, where parents can get information about Every Day Math, including samples, exercises, and games.

Next Board Meeting

The next meeting of the Rockwood School Board is on January 17th. Unfortunately, this is also Marquette Curriculum Night, so I can't make it :( But I'd love to hear about a big turnout from readers there. Time is running short for this board, so they need to know that there are concerned citizens out there watching them, to avoid any last-minute actions by them. Hopefully, by April 9th, we'll have a new Board in place, with new members, and a new power structure.

More on the Board election and about the slate of candidates who has my full and unconditional support will be coming soon.

-- bab