ELECTION DAY IS
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DAY FOR BEDFORD PUBLIC SCHOOLS FACULTY
There will be no school for kids on Tuesday, but our faculty
will be fully engaged in learning.
- · At Davis School, Andrea Salipante, our newly appointed K-5 ELA Coordinator/K-12 Reading Program Administrator, will work with teachers on writing assessment; and in the afternoon, grade level teams will work together on calibrating writing scoring by focusing on exemplars and then learning to look for patterns to identify whole class strengths and needs.
- · At Lane School, guest speaker and behavior specialist Kevin Russo will present to the faculty about particularly challenging student behaviors and effective strategies for managing and improving them; and in the afternoon, grade level teams will all work together on integrating coding into the curriculum at each grade level.
- · At JGMS, team-based parent conferences will occupy the morning hours; and in the afternoon, Principal Tracey will lead his faculty through an examination of the faculty-read book, Whistling Vivaldi, which addresses the issue of ‘stereotype threat’, a phenomenon that studies have shown to have a significant impact on certain types of achievement particularly for women and students of color.
- · At BHS, the faculty will reflect on faculty-student relationships by reviewing every BHS student in order to determine which students do, and which students do not, have a strong connection with at least one faculty or staff member, so that appropriate steps may be taken to ensure that each student does. In the afternoon, the faculty will be offsite engaging in a community building set of experiences using high and low rope type challenges.
SCHOOL COMMITTEE
PRESENTATIONS
This week, we made two important presentations to the School
Committee: the Class Size Report and the FY18 Capital Expenditures Proposal.
The Class Size Report apprises the committee of the
current enrollment at each school and in each grade based upon October 1
numbers. As well, it compares our class
size numbers with our class size guidelines and identifies those classes that
are either smaller than normal or that exceed our maximum standards.
Typically at the high school level, the handful of classes
under ten students (not counting support classes that are designed to be small)
are a product of scheduling. For
example, we might have 57 students enrolled in Algebra. To offer only two sections would result in
classes well over the maximum of 25, so in offering three sections, the
schedule might distribute them as 25, 23 and 9.
The schedule can also create classes that exceed guideline maximums even
if the total number of students in all of the sections would yield an
acceptable average. Alternatively, the
excessively high numbers may indicate a need for additional staffing, and this
would be subsequently addressed in the budget proposal.
2016-2017 Class Size Presentation
The FY18 Capital Expenditures Proposal presentation lists the combination of school facilities’ requests such as acoustic/PA systems for the Lane and Davis gymnasiums where all-school assemblies are held, and school requests such as our annual technology replacement cycle needs that includes networking switches, large scale equipment like interactive boards, and desktop and laptop computers.
Please note that a few items are included as placeholders in
that they depend upon other decisions that our presently in the hands of other
agencies. For example, we have submitted
a statement of interest to the Massachusetts School Building Authority for the
Davis School addition/renovation project, and we will hear from the MSBA in
December whether or not it will be supported.
If not, then the feasibility study and schematic design “place hold” costs
in the FY18 capital budget will become “activated” and the School Committee
will request of Town Meeting that the town proceed to fund that first phase of
the project. Similarly with the press
box lift, which ethics and ADA compliance require of us for the press box at
Sabourin Field, is included in the FY18 list as a place holder. This is because it will also be on the STM
warrant this November, and if it is supported it will come off the FY18
list. This timing is necessitated by the
state architecture board that has given Bedford until March to install the ADA
required lift. JS
