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Schools

March Madness: Greenwich Style

CMT/CAPT testing, Harris Survey and Parent Portal

It's work session time for the meeting on Thursday night at the Havemeyer building. Among the topics scheduled to be discussed is a monitoring report on graduation requirements. During last April's review, the board added a requirement that a student achieve a score of proficiency on the CAPT Science exam as well as increasing the world language requirement to 2 credits.

March Madness

No, we are not talking about college basketball, but a different kind of madness that everyone is about to experience—March testing. Today is the kick-off of the testing month for Greenwich Public Schools.

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Greenwich's ranking within the state has been much discussed and speculated about. According to Deputy Superintendent Dr. Ellen Flanagan, "While standardized testing is not the only evaluation of an individual child's performance, it is an important measure of how well we are doing as a district or a school, or with a subgroup of students."

After the test scores are received, the adminstrators utilize the results to adjust, drive and focus on areas that need strengthening. "The results of these tests help us determine where teachers and schools need to focus their improvement efforts," said Flanagan.

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A recent additional analytical tool which the district has been using is the Vertical Scale Score or VSS. The VSS measures the growth in test scores experienced by students who have remained in the district year over year. VSS is viewed as a more reliable gauge of the impact of instruction on a student. While the GPS has shown solid VSS results in Grades 3-5 and 6-8, test scores for district tend to start lower at Grade 3 and then lag again between Grades 5 and 6, both of which negatively impact the GPS state rankings. The district continues to look for reasons for these results. 

Over at GHS, CAPT is the word. Headmaster Chris Winters believes that the high school is ready. "Our students are prepared, our staff is eager to get it started and we're confident that we have done all we can to help students succeed," Winters said.

Schools across the district were preparing for the start of testing by using some motivational techniques to get the students excited about testing. For example, over at Glenville School, the students were encouraged to take a deep breath and relax when faced with a tough test question. Then they were treated to a performance of 'Firework' by "Katy Perry" (aka 5th grade teacher Shannon Kelly) and the whole school sang along.

Flanagan had some valuable advice for parents. "We appreciate and encourage parents' support at school with providing healthy snacks during the testing period, and at home with ensuring that their children get a good night's sleep and eat a healthy breakfast during this testing period  and throughout the year," Flanagan said.

Time for Math

Last month Truxtun Southworth, the distict's program coordinator for mathematics, presented the Math Monitoring Report to the Board of Education.  During the course of the presentation, Southworth shared some analysis that he did over middle school class time.

For Southworth, he says that "the issue around the length of a math class at the middle schools has never been about the total seat time across the full year." In fact, he explains that when one compares the middle school time to GHS the numbers actually favor the middle school.

What Southworh is concerned about are the "daily minutes of instructional time."

With Greenwich coming in at 13th out of 16 districts in his analysis with an average time of 44 minutes per day, Southworth was not surpised by the results. He conducted a similar poll two years ago of the same schools and he has found that "the length of the class periods in DRG A & B has remained pretty consistent."  The average daily class length for the combined DRG A & B districts was 47.7 minutes.


Southworth has found that the drivers for the time are

  1. beginning and ending times of the school day;
  2. the number of classes that must meet each day;
  3. lunch schedules;
  4. electives.

"Any decision around changes to the middle school class length will need to take into consideration the needs of the other curriculums," said Southworth.

 

If math is going to change, it would have a ripple effect; "All MS teachers have to work under the same constraints as the math teachers do, so this is a conversation that involves everyone effected."

To that end, when asked if there are any plans to change the middle school schedule, Southworth said he's not aware of any. "We have had productive conversations around middle school philosophy and those discussions have included adjusting the length of our middle school class periods," he added.

Keeping the Information flowing

Harris Poll and new Parent Portal to launch

The GPS is tentatively targeting the last week of March for the launch of this year’s Harris Survey with a close date of April 27. The survey is conducted every 2 years and is targeted to 5 groups of participants including parents, all staff, grade 5 students, students in grades 6-12 and community leaders. This will be the 4th time the survey has been conducted.

As in the past, the district may include some custom questions aimed at specific or timely issues, but the bulk of the questions will be consistent with the past 3 surveys in order to permit trend analysis to be conducted as well as comparison with national perceptions and other districts similar in demographics to Greenwich.

Parents should expect to receive a letter at home in mid-March which will explain the survey and also provide an “opt-out” form if a parent prefers that their child not take part in the survey. The students normally take the survey on computers located in school media centers.

Parents and staff will receive an email towards the end of the month asking them to participate through the web-based application. Community leaders will receive the survey in the mail. Survey results are to be discussed in the fall and will be used in the District’s Success System as well as for a variety of other planning purposes.

Following on successful implementation of both student and staff portals, the district is in the midst of beta-testing a new parent portal with a small group of parents.

A full launch is anticipated for the end of March/early April and parents will be notified via email which will contain forms, FAQs, login information during the week of March 26.

Similar to the other portals, the parent portal will provide access to student schedules, homework, class lists and resources and other communications.

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