School Year Initiatives for Westbrook
School ClimateCurriculum and AssessmentCapital Projects
A key focus for the Westbrook Middle School this year will be school climate. As part of this initiative, the middle school teachers will receive training from the University of Connecticut’s George Sugai in the Positive Behavioral Support (PBS) system. The PBS system of rewards and consequences includes a data collection element for school staff. The system allows the building to track progress on specific student behaviors and to track locations where specific behaviors occur in order to target intervention.
Elementary school teachers will receive PBS training in the next school year, 2012-’13 while the high school teachers will be trained in the 2013-’14 school year.
The district also plans to administer once again the Search Institute survey to students in grades 7 through 12. The survey measures student perceptions about aspects of school climate, risky behaviors, and the assets they perceive are present in their family, community, and schools that help them feel valued and involved. The anonymous survey was last administered four years ago.
The goal of this year’s survey is to measure any changes in student perceptions of their assets now compared to survey results from four years ago. This year’s survey is supported by a $9,000 United Way grant.
This year the district will begin using the STAR online assessment module from Renaissance Learning to track student progress on literacy and math skills. A comprehensive assessment using STAR would be delivered to students to develop a baseline and to identify students in need of help with specific skills. Those students receiving help (called interventions) to improve specific skills would be assessed after receiving the help to see if the intervention worked.
The district is also continues to assess and revise curriculum to align it with the grade levels specified for each of the state’s new common core standards. The new standards, which tend to shift skills students must master down one or more grade levels compared to today, will be used to assess students in state-wide testing starting in March 2013.
Part of the curriculum work also will adjust the district’s current middle and high school math sequence.
“Our goal is to have all 8th grade students take algebra I, all 9th students take geometry, and all 10th-grade students take algebra II. We are transitioning to this math model starting this year,” said Superintendent of Schools Pat Charles.
Replacement of two aging high school boilers was the focus of a town committee charged to work with the town’s grant-funded regional energy consultant Source One to develop project specifications and bid documents. The scope of the project would replace the existing oil-fired boilers in the high school with dual-fuel boilers that could run on either natural gas or oil and to replace burners in the middle school boilers that would allow them also to burn on either fuel.
The Southern Connecticut Gas company this month extended natural gas supply lines from Route One to the high school at no cost to the town in preparation for the boiler conversion project.
After bidding out the project, the town committee decided to reject the bids received and to rebid the project in February 2012. By the time the project was let out to bid, the installation window was tight, pushing up costs. The committee decided instead to re-bid the work in February 2012 for a June 2012 installation.