April 2 Westminster Board Meeting

A good natured meeting, maybebecause I missed the first 20 minutes as I rushed back from Keene where I was teaching a graduate school class on the Psychology of Learning. I walked in to the principal’s report and the announcement of community playground building dates of June 13 and 14. Given my past commentary on the role of Home Depot in Saxtons River’s playground effort, I guess I better try to make this. The other topic was going over NECAP test scores some more. Not surprisingly, our scores can’t keep up with the rising expectations of the arbitrary 100% by 2014 standard. Especially when you look at subgroups, such as kids on free and reduced lunch, our scores are not meeting the cut scores. Of course, all these expected scores are somewhat arbitrary and there remains a huge question if it is possible to get 100% of students at grade level. Given the special needs of some students, this may not be realistic. At the same time, it isn’t clear we can’t do better overall with higher academic expectations. The one other news item is that there is a local assessment program being developed to find assessment methods to supplement the NECAP and to fit better with our goals and curricula. This seems an “about time” idea, but apparently even this seemingly obvious school need is hard to develop and agree upon, so this is still in progress. In reappointing faculty, we learned that a few staff haven’t gotten their certification documentation in. There is no wiggle room on this for the administration, so no matter how good a teacher, if they don’t do their cert stuff, they cannot be rehired. This is a shame as it may mean losing great people, but it seems everyone has done as much as they could to support these teachers to get recertified. Finally, we spent about 15 min to sign the 5 different loan documents for the water project (all required by the state and funded by the state). Why this is all so complicated was beyond all of us but we signed and signed and stamped with the official stamp and had the town clerk sign and ….. The most interesting part of the meeting was working out the Principal’s new contract. For working year round, he gets paid shockingly little more than teachers. And in an innovative idea, we made his pay increase next year largely related to incentive pay for reaching certain goals about school quality and academic improvement. It is refreshing to model this idea of tying some pay to incentives and this should be interesting to see how this plays out.