The agenda for Wednesday's board meeting can be found here. Items of interest:
Election of board officers.
Review of the New Teacher Mentor Program
Presentation of the Artist in Residence project for Winnequah.
Consider a proposal for increasing the administrative resources for Maywood next year with an assistant principal.
Update on implementation of the Block Schedule: Principal Brost will provide information on the state of readiness for Block Scheduling at the high school.
Update on the first year of EPAS (Explore/Plan/Act) testing.
Energy Conservation RFP review: The board will consider proposals from various vendors for contracting for energy efficiency upgrades and energy management. Successful management of these projects will have significant long term implications for the financial status of the district.
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(photo ©2008 Bruce Fritz)
About Me
- Peter Sobol
- My family moved to Monona in 2003 and have been happily ensconsed in the Frost Woods Neighborhood ever since. I have 2 kids who graduated from Mg. I have been serving on the school board since April of 2007. We moved back to the Midwest in 2002 after spending 10 years in California, where I was a Department Director for Maxtor, a Fortune 500 company. In truth we left California largely because of the school situation - chronically underfunded schools did not offer the kind of programs or opportunities we wanted for our children. We picked Monona because our thorough research showed that this was a place we would really like to educate our kids. Our experience has taught us to value the quality schools we have here in Monona, and the importance of careful stewardship to maintain community support for those schools.
15 comments:
Hi Peter,
On teh Explore/Plan/Act thing, can someone please explain why my kid, who is a Junior, has now taken the Plan test twice (once as a sophomore and once again this year) and also the ACT a month or so ago, has never met with a guidance counselor to go over the results of the PLAN test? Why are we doing this if nobody talks to the kids about their results?
Peter, will you vote yes for the assistant principal position at Maywood?
I am just wondering your position, since your other posts here indicate that you think there is already too much staff in this building.
Please don't misrepresent my position. I have never indicated that I thought there was "too much staff" in the building. Merely that the evidence indicates that the building is not "half-staffed" or being stripped of staff by the district as some have contended. The low student/teacher ratios are a natural consequence of small schools and the level of support staffing the district provides.
As a matter of principle I won't indicate my positions here before votes are taken. The point of this blog is to hear from the community and provide information in response.
For this matter it all depends on the details of the proposal and an evaluation of its alignment with district needs now, and the future commitments it produces.
Can we talk about something besides this principal thing? Enough already. I was serious about the PLAN test thing. This entire Junior class has lost class time both last year and this with this testing, and they have yet to meet with any guidance personnel about the results. What was the purpose of testing them? It is almost too late now for it to have been useful!
Yes, I forwarded your comment on to Ed O'Connor, but the email system is acting up today and I can't log in now to see if I have a response.
Thanks for bringing up another topic however. Testing is a critical issue if we are going to make improvements in our educational system. For better or worse education in this country is moving toward a data driven and goal oriented model. And while assessment of the results for an individual student are important, the more important use is to take the aggregated data and use it to assess curriculum and programming to figure out what works and what needs work.
What use we are making of the testing data, both for individuals and as a district, will be an important part of the discussion tomorrow.
The PLAN test is supposed to be for the student's use, is it not? I think you have better assessments to use in aggregate.
We had an hour long discussion of the testing last night at the board meeting. Bill Breisch and Ed O'Connor presented the status of the testing, and future plans for making better use of the data.
It is clear that we are still learning how to best utilize these tests and that we have some distance to go, both for analysis of the performance of our schools, and for helping individual students utilize the test results.
I normally would ask specific questions like this be directed directly to the appropriate staff, however this issue of sufficient interest and importance that I thought I would address it here.
Ed O'Connor's response to the question:
I can only say that we have not yet achieved a strong routine for discussing student assessment results with individual students and parents. However, we do see this as an important "opportunity for improvement" that we continue to work toward. At present, we still have a fair amount of planning and training to do, especially at the middle and high school levels.
Paul Brost's Response:
The Guidance Counselors have moved their "post-secondary planning meeting" to sophomore year. Parents of sophomores were invited to meet with their counselor and part of the information discussed would be the PLAN. However, very few parents took advantage of this invitation so we need to do some better advertising next year.
They also meet with all seniors during first semester to make sure that post-secondary plans are in place. There is not enough time to also meet with juniors. However, juniors certainly can schedule a meeting with their counselor if they would like to.
As we continue with these assessments in future years, we will need to make sure that students and parents are getting the information they need from them. We may need to revise what we are currently trying to do.
While I support the PLAN/ACT testing program, I am SOOOO unimpressed by the high school guidance office staff. I can't tell if they're lazy or burned out or overworked or what, but unless your kid has serious behavioral problems, he or she will get next to nothing in the way of guidance services. I once told a counselor I thought my child was in danger of falling through the cracks and was told "Yes. Unless your kid is really, really rotten or really, really smart, we don't have time to deal with them."
They seem to know nothing about any colleges out of state or outside of the UW System. If you ask them for scholarship information, they point you at a file cabinet and leave it up to you to muddle through. The kids think the guidance office is a joke.
If the point of the PLAN/ACT program is to boost MG students' scores, then it is imperative that SOMEBODY go over the scores with them and suggest ways to improve. But if PLAN/ACT data is purely for internal use by the district, then it's a waste of our students' time.
All that blather about aggregate scores being more important than individual test results is insulting to students and parents. We're talking about our children and their futures. We don't have time to wait while number-crunchers study the data and "plan" how to respond to our kids on an individual level.
I am the poster who orginally asked about the PLAN test. I, too, am very disappointed with guidance. Mr. Brost is correct that students can ask for a meeting, but let's be real. The students who are likely to most benefit from such a meeting are also those least likely to ask for it. To expect a 15-year old to be self directed in their future is not realistic. Yet, college admissions these days dictates that they will be judged on their performance starting at age 14.
I believe that the sophomore meetings with guidance over the PLAN should be automatic. You can notify parents of the time, and welcome them to attend if possible, but the meeting with the student should occur regardless. If Mr. Brost cannot do this with exisitng staff, he needs to make this clear to the board.
And for all of you who want a principal at both mini-elementary schools, here is a clear example of the shortage of resources. For me, I would say additonal guidance at the high school is more important than an administration position. But I say that because I have a high school kid. The board has to consider all the kids in the district all the time, so maybe it is time to understand the Solomonic nature of their task.
When did the "post-secondary" planning used to occur? Was it just the first semester of senior year?
"And for all of you who want a principal at both mini-elementary schools, here is a clear example of the shortage of resources."
First, it seems you elementary school envy! Frankly, I look mine mini not large.
SO, I just want a principal in the building. If you are not ocncerned about pincipals then ask the board to delete yours not mine.
sheesh.
Why don't we talk about the extra resources that will be used to have co lead principals?
Perhaps the board can't get it together. Or maybe there are simply people who will never be happy unless they get the whole enchilada all the time. How about everyone takes a chill pill and see how the task force or whatever they're going to call it works out? Keep an Open Mind? Maybe there is more than one way to do something and do it well? Maybe just because we've always done something one way doesn't mean there isn't another way to do it that will work just as well or even better? Change can managed, but not avoided. I think the board has used the controversy over the principal thing to do just that. They actually backed up and decided to look at the siutation comprehensively and still they get pounded. Geesh.
"They actually backed up and decided to look at the siutation comprehensively and still they get pounded."
I am not pounding. I am applaunding mini-me person with mini school envy went into attack mode.
You removed the comment above mine, so now mine doesn't make sense. The post that was deleted said something to the effect that the board does not have it's act together, thus my response. (It also contained a personal attack, so I agree with removal of the post - maybe you should do like Doug Wood and read the posts before they go public. You read them all anyway, right? So it wouldn't take any additional time. If people have to wait and don't like it, they can start their own blog! )
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