Mineola school administrators are currently conducting a review of the district’s curriculum to ensure compliance with new state standards while also developing new systems to measure the success of school programs.
“We’re looking at our current curricula maps and we’re making adjustments to that,” said Patricia Burns, Mineola School District assistant superintendent, said at last Thursday night’s school board meeting.
The effort for the school district to comply with the new requirements called for by state Board of Regents includes what Burns described as professional learning center time to enable teachers to adjust their instruction based on the results of Northwest Educational Assessment tests.
The district opted last year to replace standardized tests that had been in place with NWEA tests, which are given three times a year.
The NWEA system is intended to help teachers customize their lesson plans to an individual student’s needs in particular subject areas, such as fractions in mathematics courses.
“All of the students have actual goals so they know what they need to be working on,” Burns said.
Some parents at the meeting said they hadn’t been informed of the change in recent parent-teacher conferences. Others said that teachers had explained the new system to them.
“There’s a lot of work on putting things in the right places,” said Mineola Superintendent of Schools Michael Nagler.
Part of that work is focused on determining the formula for evaluating teachers.
Students’ NWEA test scores will translate into points comprising 20 percent of each teacher’s evaluation, according to Nagler.
“It’s very confusing,” Nagler said as he tried to explain the new evaluation standards to the board members and district residents.
He noted that thus far, the results of NWEA tests generally showed less proficiency among students in the district than the state tests had previously indicated.
Meanwhile the state Board of Regents is poised to impose a new test schedule for June Regents exams in 2013 that could disrupt the traditional school year, Nagler said. He said the state board had indicated it would be moving up test dates by one week.
To meet the state requirements for 182 instruction days in the annual school calendars, the Mineola district would have to start classes one week before Labor Day. Along with affecting summer vacation schedules, Nagler said the shift could eventually prompt elimination of the week-long February break.
“There is a lot of talk that if they make that move, the February break will have to be removed,” Nagler said.
Nagler said he didn’t know when the district would receive official word on the new Regents exam schedule from the state. Nagler said the new schedule was needed to accommodate a new practice in which tests are sent outside the district to be graded rather than have them graded by district teachers.
At Thursday night’s meeting, the schedule uncertainty prompted the board to table a resolution to ratify the 2012-2013 district calendar until the regents test schedule is formalized.
“It will affect when students will be graduating,” Nagler said. “It’s problematic.”
School board president Christine Napolitano said she understood that residents needed to know the schedule to make vacation plans and schedule students’ participation in summer sports programs.
In other developments:
* Nagler said he planned to seek a second round of general construction bids on a new library to be constructed at the Hampton Street School. He said that bids for electrical, plumbing and heating and air conditioning services were acceptable as submitted. He said delaying endorsement of the four bids until Dec. 4 would not delay construction plans for the library addition.
“I think I can get a better deal,” he said, explaining why he’s seeking new general construction bids.
* Fourth grader Ethan Sargent asked the board to make it possible for him and his classmates to participate in the Town of North Hempstead’s recycling program. His mother, Abby, told the board that Ethan had been elected class president on a platform that promised recycling of bottle caps and other materials at the Mineola Middle School.
“We’re paying for this in our taxes and our children are not being given the benefit of those programs,” she said.
Nagler said schools throughout the district are already recycling through a private recycling company, Royal Waste Services, Inc. at no cost to the district.
“Unless the Town of North Hempstead wants to send me someone, someone has to coordinate this,” Nagler said.
Igor Sikini, town commissioner of solid waste, said the district’s participation in the town’s program would take its recycling program to a “new level.”
But the town requires school districts opting into its program to incorporate all aspects of it.
“I don’t understand the benefit if we’re already doing the recycling,” Napolitano said.
Joseph Mora, a representative of Royal Waste said the company is already “on board big-time with Mineola” at no cost to the residents.
Nagler ended the discussion by promising Sargent that additional recycling of bottle caps – and whatever else they wanted to recycle – would be implemented.
