Westminster Board Meeting June 4 and WNESU Mtg late May

Y'all are getting your money's worth out of the board member at least in terms of time. Another two meetings out after 10 pm! What took so long? Hard to say for sure--Principal's Report about lots of efforts to improve school results (partnering with preschools for all kids), professional development with outside consultants, RTI (monitoring system for student progress for identified students), need to look at a "core curriculum" for reading (agreed upon program school wide); Superintendent's Report on her goals (improving performance of SU office, reduce sped costs, complete curriculum development process (finally!), ensure better teacher supervision and evaluation) and the budget bill that will freeze school spending next year!; action planning committee work on new action plan; talk about getting rid of old bus (gifting to fire dept for practice); explore how to spend $17,500 of Microsoft legal settlement funds on new computers (PC laptops or notebooks?, shift teacher macs to fill out cart of younger kids, some new machines for west school.... The real time consumer was the Special Education Report from Sharon Reynolds. This was a wade through countless paperwork reflecting the complexity of all this process and accountability. She has made much progress of getting the house in order but the amount of paperwork to track these services is simply overwhelming. I raised a question about if we have looked at "working smarter" rather than "working harder"--looking at ways of structuring things differently rather than just get better in a system that has a long record of inadequacy (not just in our district but nationwide). There are schools in the nation and even in Vermont that do much more to individualize options and opportunities for all kids. I would like to see a more bold vision and leadership for this in our district. Simply doing the same old thing better, as we know from our own history here and educational research nationwide over decades, has a poor record of real improvement (see, for example, Fullan's New Meaning of Educational Change, now in its 4th edition). There were also some interesting stats in this report on comparisons of SPED costs and numbers statewide (WNESU ranks pretty poorly, but this is close to a lot of other districts in So Vt). Big variance from one district to another, with little explanation of why. And looking at trends of sped categories over the past 20 years, it is astounding how much some categories have doubled (such as autism, developmental delay, other health impairment (up 10 fold))(while overall population has fallen) and others have dropped more than half (deaf, speech impaired). Again, no one could explain this. A big issue that is on the table is the Article 6 Committee from Rockingham looking into the idea of building a new middle school and if Westminster wants to be a partner in this. I implore any interested community members to be involved in this discussion which would mean the end of any choice for 7-8 graders. Knowing how many have taken advantage of this choice opportunity for middle school over the years, I would think there are many who have an interest in expressing their views on this. Board members are remarkably responsive to public opinion, even if expressed even by a small number of individuals. I encourage your participation and views. One last note was the unexpected expense that may be imposed by a couple students moving into the district who have to be in out of district placements. This is just a shock to the budget but something that by law we just have to pay. WNESU meeting was a breakthrough with actual talk about learning and education! Curriculum work was presented by Science and Literacy. It is still shocking that none of this existed before, but the work done on these has helped identify essential learnings and set up a structure where teachers district wide can share in best practices. The board enthusiastically endorsed this effort and hope it can actually be used by teachers to improve learning for all students. There was then the regular boring stuff, interrupted by some heartfelt sensitivity by some Rockingham Board members to ask they are not looked at so critically by others. They are working diligently under a lot of challenging circumstances and rightly point out derisive remarks don't really help at all. There was also a fair bit of interchange about personnel matters and how these can best be addressed to value district employees appropriately and help each person work towards contributing most effectively to the well being of the district.