Minutes of the Paterson Board of Education Regular Meeting
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MINUTES OF THE PATERSON BOARD OF EDUCATION REGULAR MEETING March 16, 2005 – 7:00 p.m. John F. Kennedy High School Presiding: Comm. Jonathan Hodges, President Present: Dr. Dennis Clancy, Interim State District Superintendent Mr. Michael Azzara, Assistant Superintendent for Operations Ms. Monica Peck, General Counsel Comm. Joseph Atallo Comm. Juan Santiago Comm. Chauncey Brown Comm. Andre Sayegh Comm. Alonzo Moody Comm. Willa Mae Taylor Absent: Comm. Daniel Vergara The Salute to the Flag was led by Miss Danielle Fields. Comm. Sayegh read the Open Public Meetings Act: The New Jersey Open Public Meetings Act was enacted to insure the right of the public to have advance notice of, and to attend the meetings of the Paterson Public School District, as well as other public bodies at which any business affecting the interest of the public is discussed or acted upon. In accordance with the provisions of this law, the Paterson Public School District has caused notice of this meeting: Regular Meeting March 16, 2005 at 7:00 p.m. John F. Kennedy High School 61-127 Preakness Avenue Paterson, New Jersey to be published by having the date, time and place posted in the office of the City Clerk of the City of Paterson, at the entrance of the Paterson Public School offices, and by sending notice of the meeting to Al Zaman, El Diario, the Italian Voice, the New Jersey Forum, the North Jersey Herald & News, and The Record. REPORT OF STATE DISTRICT SUPERINTENDENT Dr. Dennis Clancy: Thank you, Dr. Hodges. I’d like to speak shortly to three things and then we do have a short presentation as part of my report. On the first issue, there are several changes or dates I would like to call to the public’s attention. We had sent out and we have since closed the invitation time for those individuals who would be interested on the advisory committee for the long-range facility plan. That meeting is taking place on March 23rd. That committee will begin the planning for the next five- Page 1 3/16/05 year cycle with facilities, which is due in October. Our goal is to get that done earlier than October and to hopefully be in a position where some of our recommendations can be in the works in the State Department before the other districts get theirs in. So we want to be upfront with our plan. The second meeting is on March 30th and it is our budget hearing. As you have been reading in the paper, and I will speak to that later on, the issue of Abbott funding as well as funding for education period is a big issue again. In fact, we have been advised that we are looking at level or flat funding for Abbott districts for next year based on this year. We were originally anticipating inflationary costs. There are some issues we have to deal with, but clearly flat funding along with incremental increases in health benefits, salaries and other issues translate into reductions in programs and services for next year if things stay flat simply by the nature of inflation. So it is not going to be an easy budget cycle. It seems like in the State the commitment for some of those Abbott responsibilities, whether it be facilities or budget, are slowly eroding as the costs gets shared more and more by people throughout the state. So we are arguing and taking the fight to the State, but the truth of the matter is we still have to proceed with our directions so we are being very cautious about this. But I want to alert people to that. I know a lot of people have sent letters saying they would like to see this in the program. To be honest with you, it does not look like we are going to be looking at that. One of the things we will be talking about shortly is some of our initiatives in trying to reorganize our current resources to address the needs our children have. So that is on March 30th. We have a couple of date changes and it is really due to administrative conflicts in May. I talked to Dr. Hodges about this. When the schedule was put together last year, and I am just putting this on the table now because I think the Board needs to think about it, May 11th was originally scheduled as one of our meetings. I have a commitment and several other administrative staff members have commitments that have come up. What we are looking at is changing the May 11th meeting to May 18th, which was scheduled for a Board meeting. This would move the public session to May 25th instead of the 18th. It does not hurt us much because our next meeting in June is scheduled in the second and third weeks of June. So with the election and the budget, I think it does not throw us off in terms of paying bills and doing business. But it means the workshop would be on the 18th and the public session would be on the 25th. Some of the staff and the secretaries who put this meeting together have problems with that one week, so if we could do that to make sure it flows better it would be helpful. Lastly, before we get into the presentation part of this, you see this in the paper a lot and it is a continuing problem among the Abbott schools. But based on student performance over the past few years on test performance, the way that they do this now in the state with No Child Left Behind across the federal level is it looks at individual student performance in various areas. Not that I support it in any way, but in the old days they used to report general performance of a school and you would see averages. Sometimes if you had a child who was LEP or a child who was in a special education class, they were receiving special services but their scores were not put into the mix, averaged, and looked at. In many ways they became forgotten in the grand scheme of planning, the scores, and looking at it from a performance side. I fully support the idea that all children should be challenged and all children should in fact have the same curriculum, and you will see that shortly. But based on our performance over the past three years, they look at whether all the students in all groups, whether it is special education, LEP, or general population, show growth over a period of time on their performance. If you miss in any one category, you miss as a school. So if general population improves, if special education improves, and LEP does not improve in that school, that school does not meet their requirement for the year. I know I was quoted in the paper. Some of it is a little bit discriminatory because clearly if you are in a small school where you have less than 20 students who were special education or LEP those scores don’t count. They don’t show. If you look in a very small situation, the measure of schools being in need Page 2 3/16/05 of improvement are not the same as districts that have all those populations large enough to be counted. You count them all, and that is my position. I don’t think it matters if you have 19 or 15. You should be looking at those numbers. You either count them in all districts, which means an awful lot of suburban districts would not show the same kind of growth they are showing, or you don’t count them for anybody. I think they should be counted and I think everybody should be looking at the same statistics. I want to reiterate because I am hoping that some of the things we have done this year have made a change. But the Paterson School District, along with 29 other districts across the state, has been identified as a district in need of improvement. The fact that we are an Abbott district indicates socio-economically and funding-wise that we are in need of help and support. The fact that we are a state-run school district indicates that we have been identified in the past, but those have generally been on management issues. They have generally been on how we handle and process things from an administrative side, and in some cases on curricular side. This measure is very specific and it is on student performance. From that side of it, I believe, and I have said this publicly, we don’t deny the fact that we need to improve. In fact, I think everybody needs to improve, even our high performing schools. We have some high performing schools and we have some kids that do exceptionally well and some excellent teachers. That is not the issue. The issue is across the district we need to focus our resources on those kids who need the extra help and provide the services. One of the first challenges I faced was meeting with the staff and determining what in fact are those initiatives that we needed to do when I first got here. Thankfully, we had a good relationship with the Stupski Foundation and I think the staff across the district had pretty much made a commitment that we needed to start looking at individual kids and stop looking at the average test scores.