By Adam Swift
The school district is looking to potentially add a half day for its elementary schools to the calendar in June.
At Monday night’s School Committee meeting, Superintendent of Schools Lisa Howard said she will be back at the next meeting with more specific information, although she said it looks like that half day could be on June 5.
“We want to add a half day for the elementary schools only to the calendar,” Howard said. “The purpose of that half day is going to be very specific training on a newly adopted ELA curriculum.”
Howard said the district has not yet chosen and adopted a new ELA and reading curriculum, but she said teachers, administrators, and staff are going through options and should soon have a presentation before the school committee on a preferred curriculum option.
In other business, Howard said the district is in the midst of continuing its PowerSchool training. The new student information software will be implemented for the 2024-25 school year, she said.
“It takes a full year to train everyone and take all of our data and get it transitioned into the new system,” said Howard.
The PowerSchool software is more powerful than the current school information system and provides more communications opportunities for families and staff, Howard said.
Later in the year, there will be training opportunities for families to learn how to use the new system, she added.
During February vacation, there was a major wifi upgrade at the Gorman Fort Banks School using federal Covid relief funds.
“We needed all new access points,” said Howard. “There is a lot of difficulty in that building because of the cement walls.”
Howard said the issues with the service didn’t have to do with the bandwidth, but with issues getting the wifi connections through certain walls in the school.
Howard said the district will also be using some of its ESSER III Covid relief funds to purchase a new server for the district.
“One of the servers that we thought was going to get us through the school year is flashing us that it will not,” said Howard.
It is anticipated that the server will be replaced during April vacation.
The superintendent noted that the next meeting of the school committee’s budget subcommittee is scheduled for March 6. Howard said the administration will have more detail on the budget and should have details on what will be required for a level-services budget for the 2024-25 school year. She said there will likely be more information about what is required for a needs-based budget at a future meeting.