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Friday's Internet Edition, November 21, 2008.
Elementary school board approves budget and key focus areas
By Kymm Griffin
Staff Writer
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“It’s pretty stormy weather,” began Assistant Superintendent Jim Bauler, as he reported about the school budget to the Galt Joint Union School District Board during the June meeting.
The combined factors of a declining economy and declining enrollment were reflected in the final budget numbers. Using the Governor’s May revised budget to guide their numbers, the district passed the $32.5 million budget and will use $427,000 of reserve funds to close the gap. The budget takes into account the reduction of classified employees by 3.5 full time employees and a reduction 22 certified employees that resulted from the district wide reconfiguration.
The district is anticipating 4,106 students next year, which is 132 students less than last year.
Donna Whitlock, English Learner program specialist and Fairsite principal, also updated the board about the English Learner program. Whitlock reported that many English Learner students were making large gains in their English proficiency during kindergarten, first and second grade, but as students progressed to the higher grades, the gains in proficiency started to level off.
According to Whitlock, one of the trends within the district is the “majority of E(nglish) L(earners) in third through eighth grade are still at the intermediate level of English proficiency after 4+ years in the district.”
Whitlock would like to see more students increase their English proficiency until they are no longer classified as English Learners. To this end, Whitlock has proposed four action points:
“All teachers need to use the California ELD (English Language Development) standards to guide ELD instruction; English Learner resource teachers focus on monitoring English Learners at the intermediate level to advance proficiency; importance of continuing to serve early advanced and advanced levels to move them to reclassification; focus on vocabulary development, comprehension and writing in ELD at grades 4-8.”
Superintendent Karen Schauer reported an update for 2008-2009 Strategic Focus Areas. The focus areas are the result of several meetings with the District Advisory Committee, which includes administrators, teachers, parents and students. The committee began by reviewing last year’s focus areas and making adjustments for the coming year.
Schauer said that the new focus areas do not include “dramatic changes” from last year’s focus areas, but “look at what we could do to better emphasize our focus areas.”
Schauer added that she hopes to develop a district wide action plan based on the following focus areas:
“Every school will use student performance data each trimester to support all student subgroups meeting or exceeding a 60 percent proficiency target.
All classrooms will implement direct instruction practices for equitable and engaging student learning. Practices include wait time, multiple approaches to monitor student understanding, meta-cognition (self-talk), higher order questioning, and random response strategies.
All classrooms will implement English Learner modifications through Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE) strategies to reduce linguistic demands. Strategies include: comprehensible input, contextual clues, supplementary materials use, materials adaptations, and vocabulary development.
All English Learners will consistently receive quality English Language Development.
All K-5 teachers will teach reading and word analysis by using Systematic Instruction in Phoneme Awareness, Phonices and Sight Words (SIPPS).
All grade levels will participate in at least one service learning experience with school wide participation in character education, emphasizing the Eight Great Traits (caring, honesty, integrity, responsibility, respect for others, citizenship, planning and decision making, and problem solving).
All teachers will implement the adopted mathematics instructional materials while continuing implementation of the science resources adopted the previous year.”
The next school board meeting is scheduled for July 23.
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