School officials look at changes on using plans

By Adam Swift

School officials are looking to change how they create and use school improvement plans in order to tie them in more closely with the budget process.

Monday night, the School Committee approved the school improvement plans for the 2023-24 school year.

At the meeting, Assistant Superintendent Lori Gallivan said that next year, the school improvement plans will likely be presented to the School Committee in January or February. She said this will allow the schools to more tightly analyze and tie in the goals in the plan to budget needs for the following year.

Gallivan said the new timeline for school improvement plans could also help to address some of the questions raised by School Committee member Suzanne Swope.

“When I read the plans, I see a lot of process work, but I don’t see how we can evaluate whether the work specifically is making a difference,” said Swope.

Gallivan said that when the schools and district evaluate the goals and programs in the school improvement plans, it generally uses data points such as MCAS scores, early literacy screenings, along with teachers evaluating the data.

“What we want to see is once we feel that we are implementing this program with fidelity, we want to see if we are seeing those scores rise,” said Gallivan.

Swope said she understood the process, but said she would like to see more data benchmarks included in the plans.

Gallivan said that in revisiting the timeline, the school improvement plans could include more data points to tie into whether there need to be budget adjustments for different programs.

The goal of the new process is to make it more systematic so that the schools can justify budget requests for different programs, Gallivan said.

“Here is our assessment of how we did since last year’s improvement plan, this is where we are falling short, and this is what we need based on the data,” said Gallivan. “It will be tied to the budget to try to drive these goals. That’s why Superintendent (Lisa) Howard and I started to talk about revamping the schedule and looking at how to tie the school improvement plans into the budget work.”

In other business on Monday night, Gallivan said the district is still looking to hire several positions for the fall, including a speech and language pathologist, an ELA teacher at the middle school, a special education teacher and a special education chairperson at the Arthur T. Cummings School, special education ESP positions, and crossing guards.

The School Committee also held a moment of silence in honor of Diane Montgomery, who started working in the school district in 1988 as a secretary and retired in 2014 as the accounts payable clerk in the business office.