At last Tuesday night’s Board Of Education (BOE) meeting, Director of Curriculum Frances Kenny presented the BOE with the 2010-2011 Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) Status Under “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) Accountability Requirements.
“We exceeded those expectations in all grade levels,” Mrs. Kenny started out in her report, referring to the benchmarks that New Jersey has for various grade levels to meet AYP.
Patrick Spagnoletti, the school superintendent, asked Mrs. Kenny “In looking to grow and move forward, what areas have you identified that are going to be your areas of focus in trying to stay ahead and maintian, or improve upon, these results?
In response, Mrs. Kenny stated that her department will be looking to find ways to move more students to Advanced Proficient levels, utilizing the services of Schillinger Educational Consultants, and working with the special education population, “It’s a tall order, as I said, so that’s where we’re working very hard.”
The discussion from the BOE touched upon additional Math and English being given to students in the Middle School. Mrs. Kenny stated, “That’s paid off very well.”
During the presentation, Mrs. Kenny stated that Roselle Park was only one of six school districts in the county that had all their schools reach AYP or Safe Harbor – those districts being Garwood, Mountainside, Union County Vocational Vocational, and Winfield. The remaining two schools that met Safe Harbor status were Roselle Park, with two (2) schools, and Springfield which had one (1) school.
Records from the NJ Department Of Education (DOE) show that all of Roselle Park’s surrounding neighbors had, at least, one (1) of their schools fail to meet AYP – Cranford (3 schools), Elizabeth (23 schools), Kenilworth (2 schools), Roselle (4 schools), and Union Township (7 schools).
“Safe Harbor” is designated when AYP benchmarks were not met but there was a 10% increase over the previous year’s score in a school’s population. It places that school on “Early Warning” until it fails a 10% increase in scores or it achieves AYP two (2) years in a row. Robert Gordon has been on “Early Warning” for the third year now while the Roselle Park Middle School achieved AYP for the 2008-2009 school year, but returned to “Early Warning” the 2009-2010 school year. It should be noted that both schools did not reach AYP benchmark levels for the “Students With Disabilities” indicator only – Robert Gordon for Language Arts and the Middle School for both Language Arts and Math.
Both schools will need to reached AYP through 2012 in order to be removed from “Early Warning”.