What a great presentation and evening this was on November 12, 2014 when 98 students were inducted into the National Honor Society! A big thank you to NHS advisors Allison Chanin-Bermudez and Doreen DeAngelo, the Wheatley administration, this year’s current NHS officers and the guest speaker, former English teacher (retired) and Wheatley grad, Ellen Holzman. Next Friday I will introduce the newly inducted members and present some detailed information on the program and the Wheatley National Honor Society program. Can’t wait to share.
North Side Tree Removal
The school district recently received permission to take down 15 trees on the North Side School grounds that were identified as diseased and determined a safety hazard. The tree removal was completed this past Tuesday. As required by the terms of the Village of East Williston permit, the school district will replace each and every tree taken down with a new, healthy tree.
Our Town
The Wheatley Theater Company will be performing Thorton Wilder’s Our Town on November 20, 21 and 22 in the Wheatley Auditorium. Tickets are on sale for $10.00, senior citizens’ tickets are free. Go to https://wheatleytheater.weebly.com/ to purchase your tickets. Wheatley English teacher Colin McKenna is directing the play.
I had the pleasure of not only acting in this play when I was in high school, but also directed high school performances of Our Town when I was a drama and English teacher. I still recall the audiences reactions to the evening performances, both excited and enthused by the play. I encourage you to buy your tickets and make this a great family night with your older elementary, middle and high school students. I hope to see you there.
Willets Road Sign-Up for Parent-Teacher Conferences
With the upcoming Willets Road Parent-Teacher Conferences scheduled for November 26, December 2 and December 4, 2014, you can register on-line to schedule your conference. Go to the following link https://willetsroad.schoolsoft.ca/login.jsf and log in, if you registered last year. If you forgot your password, follow the directions and you should receive an email and directions to change your password. If you don’t receive an email, you may have entered the wrong email address. If you did not use this system last year, follow links to register. Remember, you only need one account for your children who attend Willets Road. Once in the system, choose your child’s teacher and you will see available appointments. Choose the appointment you want, click submit when the pop-up box appears. Don’t forget to print your schedule. Note, you can log back into the system to review, print, cancel or reschedule your appointments. Please add appointments@schoolsoft.ca into your address book in your contact list. This will assure your receipt of emails from the system. If you need assistance, please contact the Willets Road Main Office at 333-8797.
Vocational Training Opportunities
Our life skills students have been participating in vocational training at local businesses and around Wheatley. As our students skills are improving, we are always looking for more opportunities for our life skills students. Therefore, we are asking for your help. If you are aware of any local volunteer vocational opportunities for our life skills students, please contact Dawn Muscarnera at muscarnerad@ewsdonline.org or Liza Laurino at laurinol@ewsdonline.org . Both can also be reached at 333-5690. Our students would work a few hours a week and are accompanied by a trained adult team member. Thank you in advance for any input you may have.
Congratulations
and Commendations
Dr. Staudt: Featured Speaker at Symposium
Dr. John Staudt, one of Wheatley’s Social Studies faculty members, is also a well-regarded historian, with a specialty in Long Island during the Revolutionary War. On Saturday, November 15, 2014, Dr. Staudt was a featured speaker at the “Long Island in the American Revolution: The Seat of Action” Symposium at the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook. Dr. Staudt discussed, “A State of Wretchedness: Suffolk County, New York in the Revolution.” Although the symposium was sold out, you can read a bit about it through the following article from the Suffolk Times: Long Island’s Role in the American Revolution.
Along with teaching AP U.S. History, AP Government and Politics and College Regional Studies (in conjunction with SUNY at Stony Brook where Wheatley students receive 3 college credits) at Wheatley, Dr. Staudt is the co-advisor of the Mock Trial Club, a professor at Hofstra University where he teaches American History and the History of Baseball and the liaison for the National History Day Regional Competition at Hofstra.
Alumnae Receives a National Teaching Award
I am enthused to share with you news about Roseann Maurantonio, Wheatley Class of 2000, who just received the 2014 Milken Educator Award. The Milken Family Foundation (MFF) has provided public recognition and unrestricted financial awards of $25,000 to outstanding K–12 teachers, principals and specialists who are furthering excellence in education. Ms. Maurantonio is a fourth grade teacher in the Rosendale Elementary School in the Niskayuna Central School District in New York. Ms. Maurantonio is one of up to 40 outstanding educators recognized this year by the MFF, and the only teacher from New York. Educators are selected confidentially by a panel appointed by state education departments.
Criteria used for this honor are as follows: Exceptional educational talent as evidenced by effective instructional practices and student learning results in the classroom and school; Exemplary educational accomplishments beyond the classroom that provide models of excellence for the profession; Individuals whose contributions to education are largely unheralded yet worthy of the spotlight; Early- to mid-career educators who offer strong long-range potential for professional and policy leadership; and Engaging and inspiring presence that motivates and impacts students, colleagues and the community. To read more go to https://www.milkeneducatorawards.org/newsroom/photos/view/439 .
Nov. 4 – Superintendent’s Conference Day Report
As you know, I enjoy sharing with you some of the important learning and work our staff participates in during those Superintendent/Staff Development Days, when your children are not in school but the administrators and instructional staff are here working at making our students’ learning experiences the absolute best they can be.
In addition to the ongoing planning of instruction our teachers do each day, staff development days, the before/after school faculty and grade level meetings and summer study training and curriculum work provide further opportunity for our articulated K-12 educational program. These events also ensure that all of us on staff are current with educational research, opportunities and initiatives as the world continues to grow and change around us. These days also provide the opportunities for staff members to collaborate on unified practice and to serve as important resources for each other, as the significant expertise we have in the district from each of our teachers and administrators is shared.
Below are some examples of the work teachers, administrators and other instructional staff were involved in on our most recent Superintendent’s Conference Day.
North Side
Last school year, the North Side staff, with the support and direction of Principal Jim Bloomgarden (who assumes primary administrative responsibility for elementary math) and Elementary Math Content Area Leader and AIS teacher Lisa Minerva did a Herculean job aligning the elementary math curriculum to the new standards and implementing the new shifts in math instruction. The staff’s work was realized in North Side’s notable performance in grades 3 and 4 NYS Math Assessment scores. During this past summer, teachers on each grade level continued to refine this work, utilizing the past year’s experience and student performance results to adjust and tweak the current curriculum work and refine the math curriculum map for the first half of this 2014-15 school year. On November 4, all grade level teachers continued this work, refining and aligning the curriculum map for the second half of the school year.
Secondary Mathematics
In a similar vein to North Side, many of the grade levels spent time working on “wrong answer analysis” from the past year’s state assessments and Regents exams to continue to refine math maps and instruction, building on the previous year’s successful work. This year, New York State released more of last year’s test questions with annotations of the correct responses. Educators from the field had been asking for more of this feedback, and it proved helpful.
Geometry and pre-calculus teachers participated in further curriculum review, examining course material alignment in light of new math standards.
Social Studies
The AP U.S. History team worked together to review changes in AP curriculum and to reflect the changes in their class exams.
The 11th grade Regents teachers developed a common mid-term exam, planned units for the remainder of the year, as well as discussing 3rd and 4th quarter projects. The third quarter project will include research to link family history with national history and the fourth quarter project will be an iMovie on the 1960’s designed to link modern history with key Regents themes.
The 7th and 8th grade team met to discuss the National History Day project and implementation going forward both for the rest of this year and planning for next year. The 11th grade team joined the conversation to discuss common issues and support articulation between 7th and 8th grade implementation as preparation for the 11th grade required research paper.
The 9th Grade Global History Honors team worked on a plan for reviewing essay writing, the creation of a common rubric and the structure for the comparative essay.
Global History 10Regents team worked to create a plan for a common mid-term exam based on the 10th grade material and a diagnostic exam on 9th grade material. Both tools, along with the document-based questions and thematic essays will be used to assess students’ progress and identify students who may need additional support.
Review began on the 6th grade social studies curriculum in light of the newly adopted New York State social studies framework.
The School Within a School (SWS) staff met to finalize plans for the new quarter and further planning was done regarding the SWS gardening initiative.
Art and Music
Teachers traveled to a variety of conferences and workshops from outside presenters. These included: workshops of new music for middle school and high school bands, the latest techniques in using Garage Band, jazz and blues sessions and orchestral reading.
Art teacher experiences included workshops on portraiture using pastels and Kamishibai, traditional Japanese story telling techniques using illustrated cards.
Foreign Language
The department continued their work preparing for the changes in the new FLACS exams (foreign language exams that replaced the Regents) focusing on read to write tasks that also support the overall new state standards in reading and literacy in the content areas. Middle school teachers researched sites for authentic listening and reading comprehension selections.
Guidance
In our Guidance Department’s continuing commitment to expanding our relationships with colleges and expanding students’ awareness of the college choices available to them, the Wheatley counselors and Director of Guidance Greg Wasserman spent the day visiting Marist College in Poughkeepsie. They met with students and the entire admissions office. They also attended a presentation from the College Board on the new SAT.
Other activities involved elementary and middle school guidance/social work support staff participation in anti-bullying webinars and planning for character education activities.
Science
Among the Grade 8-12 staff topic discussions were textbook considerations and continuing work on the physics goal from the 2014-15 Instructional Goals: Goal 8/Smart Goal N: Investigate various pathways to expose more students to physics concepts and classes at an earlier point in their academic careers.
The middle school examined continued alignment to support the new high school science sequence which has most of our eighth graders now taking the Living Environment Course and Regents in place of Earth Science. Additions were suggested for the sixth grade curriculum for 2015-16 school year including: Dependent and independent variables; human impact on the environment and greenhouse gases and a full unit on Ecology including ecology, food chains and food webs and human impact on ecosystems.
Pupil Personnel Services/Special Education
Special Education teachers and teaching assistants participated in content area meetings along with their general education colleagues. Speech therapists had the opportunity to discuss best practices with each other. English as Second Language teachers reviewed the new ESL regulations and got a jump start on planning for implementation next year while other staff conducted or participated in CPI (Crisis Prevention Institute) training or related social/emotional topics.
English/Reading
Teachers and teaching assistants providing LLI (Leveled Literacy Intervention) support to students identified as likely to benefit from this additional reading support had the opportunity to plan together and to receive additional training/support from our two elementary reading teachers, Kathleen Cunningham and Allison Douglas, who have several years of experience in teaching this program, which has been introduced in the Middle and High School this year as well.
The English Department met both as a whole and on individual grade levels to share ideas/continue articulation and lay future plans for the department and its students. They continued work on a detailed curriculum guide grid in 8th grade, fine-tuning of the ninth grade research paper, summer reading assignment planning reflecting the success of a most recent 9th grade summer reading project and the use of electronic tools to keep track of student progress regarding research work.
Having the chance to read over the teaching practices and idea notes the department shared regarding their work on Superintendent Conference Day, reinforced how valuable this opportunity for collegial sharing can be, as teachers share their own best practices with each other, providing insight and support to continue to grow student learning. Ideas shared among our English teachers included differentiating instruction through the use of stations, using rubrics to enable students to become more reflective regarding their learning and to take more ownership of their work, the benefits of peer editing, scaffolding supports such as the use of structured reading assignments, color-coded post-its and posters to annotate reading and help plan accountable discussion and engaging ways to teach grammar conventions and punctuation. Helping students understand deep reading through the use of a five-level reading rubric that provides a monitoring guide for students when they read: decode, scan, understand, analyze, master was also shared.
Physical Education/Health and Family Consumer Science and Nurses
The Physical Education Department attended a conference at Hofstra University sponsored by the Physical Education Consortium. The staff attended workshops including: Movement and Functional Movement; Dancing Classrooms – May I Have This Dance? Social Emotional Learning Curriculum Connections through the Art of Ballroom Dance; Dancing Classrooms: Transforming Lives One Step at a Time; Connecting CCSS to Nutrition Has Never Been Easier; Fitness – It’s Not Rocket Science, But It Is Exercise; Adapted PE- Physical Education for All; and Storytelling in PE for the Elementary Level.
The Health and Family Consumer Science departments attended workshops on Improving Health and Decision Making for our Youth.
The District nurses attended a county-wide workshop from the Nassau County Department of Health on effective health practices and worked on immunization reporting.
Have a Good Weekend
As always, please email me at kanase@ewsdonline.org or call me at 333-3758 with any questions, suggestions and/or any topics you would like to see in this newsletter.
Best regards,
Elaine Kanas, Ed.D.
Superintendent of Schools
