JENNIFER GUSTAVSON FILE PHOTO | Anthony Claudio enters the federal courthouse in Central Islip in October.
More than three years after he was fired from Mattituck High School, Anthony Claudio learned Oct. 22 he’d receive one more paycheck from the district. (more…)
TIM KELLY FILE PHOTO | District representatives who spoke at the Sept. 20 school board meeting said administrators will have to spend much more time doing teacher observations this year.
The Mattituck-Cutchogue School District is struggling this year to live up to new state-mandated standards for teacher evaluations.
District representatives who spoke at the Sept. 20 school board meeting said administrators will have to spend much more time doing teacher observations this year due to new teacher annual professional performance reviews, known as APPR, which impose far more stringent measures of whether teachers are effectively doing their jobs.
The district is also creating and implementing new tests, known as student growth assessments, which students will take at the beginning and end of the school year, to measure the improvement in their ability to grasp the material over the course of the year. Teachers are to be graded by the state on their students’ ability to learn the material in the classroom. Mattituck and other districts were charged by the state with coming up with their own methods to measure student improvement over the course of the school year.
School districts throughout the state spent most of last school year fighting the requirements, which officials said were bound to be a drain on their districts’ financial and human resources.
Superintendent Jim McKenna said principals and assistant principals at district schools will need to spend eight to 10 weeks of the 40-week school year observing teachers and writing up reports to send to the state.
“We know it’s going to be a drain. We’re trying to stick with it,” he said.
Mattituck High School principal Shawn Petretti told the board that his school plans to spend $2,000 on Scantron forms alone for the new student growth assessments.
He said teachers have already begun giving the tests, which are designed to show how much the students learn over the course of the year. Ideally, he said, their scores would improve 30 percent between September and June.
“This way, every teacher gets a true rating on student growth,” he said.
The assessments must be scored by other teachers within the district.
Mr. Petretti added that the district is still trying to figure out how to create assessments for performance-based subjects like art and music.
“This is pie-in-the-sky stuff in Albany,” he said.
Board members said they agree with the administration that the new regulations are onerous.
“The amount of time and the amount of effort and money we and other districts are spending on this just seems a little ridiculous,” said board president Jerry Diffley.
Students in the Mattituck and Greenport school districts will take part in a survey on diversity issues next month as the schools seek to understand how to best address the needs of their increasingly diverse populations.
Mattituck-Cutchogue Superintendant Jim McKenna announced the plan at a Mattituck school board meeting last Thursday, Oct. 21, as he discussed his district’s attempts to answer charges last year that the school was not doing as much as it should to accommodate people with different backgrounds.
The survey will be conducted by the Stony Brook School of Social Welfare in conjunction with Southold Town, he said, adding that the Southold School District declined to participate.
Nearly 90 percent of Mattituck’s students are white, according to the district’s research as part of the diversity initiative, Mr. McKenna said. The limited racial mix heightens the need to be sensitive to students who may lack role models with backgrounds similar to their own, he added.
The district began posting job openings on multicultural websites in February, and plans to make it a priority to recruit candidates from organizations ranging from the Long Island Latino Teachers Association to the Long Island Black Educators Association to the Shinnecock Nation, the Urban League and the National Coalition of Black Women, according to Mr. McKenna.
“This is something we’re particularly proud of. We’ve had our eyes open to a bigger pool of candidates,” said Mr. McKenna, who added that the district had so far hired one African-American student teacher from Dowling College through the expanded candidate search.
The district also has revised its mission statement to reflect its goal of inclusion, he reported. The statement is slated to be adopted at the school board’s Nov. 18 meeting. Being circulated both in Spanish and in English, it describes the district as “dedicated to providing a welcoming and safe environment where diversity, interdependence and self-discovery are valued.” It outlines four goals, including nurturing passion for life and learning, fostering collaboration, creativity and critical thinking, encouraging a range of perspectives and promoting and practicing personal integrity, according to Mr. McKenna.
The statement adds that “as a result, students develop academic excellence, confidence and resiliency to face future challenges in order to contribute to and inspire positive change in the local and global community.”
The district, Mr. McKenna reported, is participating in several local and county programs to promote diversity, including Southold Town’s Anti-Bias Day and Suffolk County Unity Day. The district also sent several students to the county’s African-American Advisory Board College and Career Fair in Hauppauge earlier this fall.
District administrators have been taking part in workshops run by Roberta Richin, executive director of the Council for Prejudice Reduction.
“She kept looking at it as getting kids to take a look at the bigger picture,” said Mr. McKenna. “You are a part of the world and the world is a part of you … A world-class school demonstrates a vision of the world.”
Also on Thursday, the school board appointed music teacher Jacob Fowle and English teacher Anne Gilvarry to be advisers for a school musical this winter. The district has not held a musical production for more than a decade.
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