City of Norwalk

Board of Education

Curriculum Committee

Regular Meeting

January 11, 2010

 

ATTENDANCE:        Sue Haynie, Chair; Erin Halsey, Heidi Keyes, and

                                    Migdalia Rivas.

 

STAFF:                       Tony Daddona, Assistant Superintendent; Marilyn

                                    Liberatore

 

OTHERS:                   Dr. Lynn Moore, West Rocks Principal; Lisa Thompson,

                                    DDDMT Parent Representative; Mona Noir; Shirley Mosby

 

CALL TO ORDER

 

Ms. Haynie called the meeting to order at 7:06 p.m.

 

Pledge of Allegiance

 

Ms. Haynie led those present in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance

 

Introduction of Members

 

Ms. Haynie introduced each member of the Committee.

 

Discussion of opportunity for public comment following each agenda item.

 

There was a brief discussion about having public comment following each agenda Item and it was agreed that this was the practice.

 

Review of NPS curriculum areas and what types of documents describe them, e.g., parent guides, teacher guides, online, scope and sequence.

 

Mr. Daddona explained where a number of items were located on the Norwalk Public Schools website.  He explained that the District had developed the priority standards and how these standards would be implemented.  He explained that parts of the program for math and science curriculum have already been implemented.  Mr. Daddona added that the teaching model had changed from what a teacher likes to teach to what a teacher must teach. 

 

A discussion followed about giving the parents access to their children’s homework assignments, grades and to see their assessments via the website.  Mr. Daddona said that there was a meeting to coordinate the various computer programs used to produce the various documents.  Parents should know what the teachers are teaching their children.  The discussion then moved to the confidentiality and security issues.  

 

A discussion regarding what the phrase “unwrapping the standards” entailed followed.  Mr. Daddona then reviewed this and explained how the student teaching goals would be expanded.  He also explained the concepts of the “pacing guides”, “common formative assessments”, and “walk throughs”. 

 

Ms. Halsey left the meeting at 7:25 p.m.

 

Mr. Daddona explained that the NPS website would have to be redone and made more user friendly. 

 

No one from the public wished to comment at this time.

 

REVIEW OF THE CURRENT CURRICULUM REVIEW CYCLE AND WHERE WE ARE NOW IN THE CYCLE.

 

Mr. Daddona explained that the State standards are being amended to include National standards. The District is required to incorporate all the State standards into the curriculum.  The CMTs and CAPTs included this material. He then directed the Committee’s attention to a curriculum revision schedule, which he had distributed earlier.  One concern in implementing the new curriculum may be the cost of the textbooks.  All of the curriculum will have the State standards.  These currently do not include the National standards in most of the areas other than for Social Studies.  As soon as the State adopts the National standards, the District will be required to adopt the new standards. As the new standards come into play, the District will have to tweak the designated curriculum accordingly. 

 

Mr. Daddona explained that the curriculum review cycle was basically a five year cycle.  He also pointed out that sometime the implementation stages were broken into a two year implementation so that the District will not have to purchase textbooks for an entire grades in the whole district.  Because of the cost of the textbooks, there needs to be long range planning for textbooks. 

 

Mr. Daddona then reviewed the details of a Perkins Grant that covers business and other technical course.

 

Ms. Noir asked who does the evaluations of the instructional material.  Mr. Daddona said that the Norwalk teachers do the evaluations. 

 

Ms. Noir then asked how the National standards differed from the State standards.  Mr. Daddona said that in order to evaluate this, it would require comparing the two documents and reminded everyone that the movement towards National standards was an ongoing project. Also the creation of National standards was still occurring. 

 

Ms. Rivas asked how many parents were on the DDDMT.  Mr. Daddona said that there were three parents.  Ms. Rivas wanted to know if the Spanish-speaking community had been contacted.  Ms. Haynie said that the DDDMT composition had been set by the Board of Education more than a year ago.  Dr. Moore added that the individual schools had been asked to recruit parents through the PTO.

 

REVIEW OF HOW NPS CHECK FOR ALIGNMENT WITH STATE AND NATIONAL STANDARDS

 

Mr. Daddona gave a brief overview of how the District follows the State standards currently but reiterated that the State standards would change when the National standards are implemented.  The District is moving to the online benchmark developments because that is what the State is requiring.

 

PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION OF THE DISTRICT DATA DECISION MAKING TEAMS (DDDMT) BY ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT AND DDDMT PARENT TEAM MEMBER

 

Mr. Daddona explained that each District must have a District Improvement Plan and this breaks down to the level of individual School Improvement Plans.  The plan sets the goals, targets and sets the framework on how the District will achieve these goals.  These are all based on the CALI model.  Last year, the focus was on professional development and the District has recently been audited by the State.  The results of this recent audit were favorable.

 

The District has been required to incorporate practices from the CREC model and this has been done through SRBI (Scientific Research Based Intervention).  One additional aspect has been added in terms of tracking adults actions and the affect on students actions. 

 

Ms. Thompson then said that as a parent, she had suggested a “SWOT” analysis that includes Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  She said that the biggest challenge is that currently, there is no data base to draw from.  Ms. Thompson said that her only complaint as a parent was that she felt the process was not moving ahead as quickly as she would like.

 

Mr. Daddona said that from a District perspective, the District is becoming more consistent throughout all 19 schools.  The goals and objectives that are set are for all the schools across the board.  Even though the growth plans will vary from school to school, the goals will remain the same. It will be important to collaborate with one another, communicate with one another and become critical friends.  The services that are provided by the District need to be available to all the schools as needed.  This is a work in progress.  They will change as the plans develop. 

 

Ms. Thompson said that she had seen a tremendous change in the last year.  There are many good things taking place, but these changes are not being communicated to the parents that there are improvements happening.  The District is making steadily making progress but the parents are unaware of this.  The teachers, the principals and the staff are working hard to make the improvements.  Ms. Thompson explained that a parent would not sit down and read the School Growth Plans because it is too confusing. 

 

Mr. Daddona said that when the audit took place in June, the District did well, but it was hard to get the information to the parents.  Ms. Haynie asked how a parent could see the progress without reading the School Growth Plan.  Ms. Mosby commented that Roton had created a “data wall”, which was where the improvements were posted.  It was commented that there were other schools that were working on creating “data walls”.

 

Ms. Rivas asked what was meant by the use of “cultural resistance” to change in the last bullet point in the final section of the summary.  Ms. Thompson said that she was referring to the difference between the business model as opposed to educational model in terms of programmatic change and best practices.  Ms. Rivas said that to her cultural resistance indicated the cultural diversity of the District.  Ms. Thompson said that this was not about Hispanic, African American or any other ethnicity, but about how difficult it is to implement procedural changes. 

 

Ms. Rivas also object to the lack of information regarding funding listed on the outline.  Ms. Thompson said that the schools are struggling to provide supplies for their students.  Ms. Rivas said that she no longer felt comfortable speaking with Ms. Thompson because of the confusion over what “Cultural Resistance” meant.  Ms. Thompson said that she had used the corporate model language.  Ms. Rivas said that she was not from the corporate world and that she was not being appreciated. 

 

Ms. Liberatore suggested some specific wording changes.  Ms. Rivas said that the sentence was not clear and that if the staff couldn’t communicate with her, they couldn’t communicate with any one in the culture.  Ms. Rivas added that she didn’t like Ms. Haynie’s tone when Ms. Haynie spoke to her and if Ms. Haynie didn’t understand her, she couldn’t understand the Hispanic culture.  Ms. Haynie said that she was simply asking the committee to focus back on the issues of curriculum.

 

The next item Mr. Daddona said that all of the professional development was based on the where all the teachers need to be.  Mr. Daddona said that early release times had been considered in order to have the teachers attend professional development.  There is a major concern about early release in terms of childcare.  Norwalk is fortunate in that it has a number of after school programs. Mr. Daddona said that he had wanted to discuss starting the programs earlier in the day.

 

Ms. Rivas stated that she felt that the final section titled “Threats” should be on the top because having it on the bottom of page indicated to her that it was not important.  Ms. Rivas said that she wanted to bring up the word “cultural resistance” again because a parent would not know what the phrase meant.  Ms. Thompson repeated that she had been using corporate language for this summary and it had not been intended for the committee as a summary, not for the public or parents.  Ms. Rivas stated that she was a parent and had some modicum of intelligence.

 

Regarding testing, Ms. Haynie said that she noted that when the formative assessments were being done, one of the assessments used was DRA, which is mandated by the State.  However, it is not a good measuring tool because it is not objective, and she felt it was not accurate.  Ms. Haynie then reviewed the “educational resistance” to change indicated on a chart she distributed.   She then said that there had been an assessment program that was better and was able to identify issues like  dyslexia.  Ms. Rivas objected and said that there were other special education students who were not dyslexic.  Ms. Haynie said that the assessment testing covered all the students who were able to take the CMTs.  A discussion followed about whether this additional assessment testing could be done in addition to what is required by the State and the cost of implementing services.

 

Ms. Keyes asked about the professional development and how this would be implemented. Mr. Daddona said that while the District has a current plan, but that he would like to see a regularly scheduled early dismissal schedule.  Mr. Daddona said that the other Districts that did this said it was a struggle to implement.  Ms. Haynie said that frequently the parents were unaware that the teachers were at professional development.  She asked if there was a way to get this information to the parents.  It would also be good to have the costs of doing professional development by early dismissal versus pulling half of a single grade’s teachers for a morning of professional development, and then the other half for afternoon professional development sessions. Discussion followed.

 

 

ADJOURNMENT

 

** MS. RIVAS MOVED TO ADJOURN.

** MS. KEYES SECONDED.

** THE MOTION PASSED UNANIMOUSLY.

 

The meeting adjourned at 8:49 p.m.

 

 

Respectfully submitted,

 

 

Sharon L. Soltes

Telesco Secretarial Services

 

 

 

Category: Minutes