Massena Central Faculty Board of Ed approves District Complete Enchancment Plan | Schooling
MASSENA – The Massena Central School Board of Education approved a state-mandated comprehensive district improvement plan that was required to be submitted to the state Department of Education after the district was identified as a target district last year.
The district was identified because a subset of high school students – people with disabilities – did not meet criteria for state assessments, graduation rates, and chronic absenteeism.
The State Department of Education examines several factors and rates the districts from 1 to 4 in several categories, with 1 being the lowest. Massena scored in these three areas, and although it was the performance of a high school subgroup, the entire district was rated as a target district.
Curriculum Director Stephanie Allen told board members on Wednesday that the plan “supports everything else we have done.”
“Due to COVID-19, the district is being forced into an unprecedented situation like no other time in education. When schools open in the fall, students will face incomplete learning and emotional and social problems that our current system could not have foreseen, ”she said.
She said the district master plan “supports the district’s goals of bringing students back with support and safety in the fall.”
The plan addresses three priorities – “incomplete learning”, teaching strategies, and the social, emotional and academic wellbeing of students.
“Those are three really big issues and priorities that we need to address this year,” said Ms. Allen.
She said they will be developing and implementing protocols for teachers to analyze kindergarten through 12th grade English-language arts and math data to determine where students are in the learning process and what steps need to be taken.
They will also improve the Academic Intervention Services process to “provide interventions for these gaps that can arise from incomplete learning,” she said.
They also plan to offer intervention training and support for mainstream and special education teachers, “so we are very consistent in the way we achieve these goals”.
Ms. Allen said the goals will be monitored and professional development will be provided to identify the appropriate tools to use to assist students in achieving the goals.
In addition, she said, “We will implement a lesson that includes differentiation and engagement strategies to increase student connectedness because students don’t care how much we know until they know how much is important to us.”
One of the initiatives of the district’s Community Schools initiative was to coordinate teams of teachers visiting the homes of new kindergarten and seventh graders in the summer of 2019 and 2020. Social workers starting in the fall will also help them hear and meet the needs of students and families.
And, she said, teachers will have the opportunity to switch to a new method of teaching if necessary to ensure the safety and health of all.
“Yes, there was a loss of learning and, as I like to say, incomplete learning. But please know this – our staff, our administration, our teachers and families and above all our students are resilient, ”she said.
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