The Ansonia Board of Education this month approved a three-year plan that outlines how the district will improve so it meets No Child Left Behind standards.
The plan focuses on getting low-income students to catch up to their peers on state standardized tests.
The three-year “District Improvement Plan” is required by districts with schools that failed to meet federal testing guidelines for four consecutive years. The plan, which was unanimously approved by the Board of Education Oct. 7, still needs state Department of Education approval before it is official.
“To put something like this together visualizing to 2012 is amazing,” said Board of Education president John Lawlor. “It gives us a guide on how we can hold people accountable.”
Goals
The district wants to increase by 15 percent the number of low-income students (those identified as qualifying for free or reduced price meals) who reach proficient levels on state math and reading exams by 2012.
The proficient level is the lowest benchmark that students are expected to reach on the tests.
The district chose to focus on students eligible for free-and-reduced price meals because the category overlaps other sub-categories that also need to improve, said Diane Conway, the assistant superintendent leading the development of the plan.
The goal is intended to help close achievement gaps between those subgroups and the other students.
About 58 percent of the students in Ansonia are eligible for free or reduced price meals, according to the report.
They don’t perform as well on the tests as their peers, data shows.
For example, on 2009 tests, 54 percent of low-income fifth graders met the proficient level on the Connecticut Mastery Tests, compared to 69 percent of all fifth-graders across the district.
Action Plan Detailed
The District Improvement Plan’s meat is in the how.
To meet the goals, school officials outlined several steps, which include creating new curriculum in Language Arts and math, strengthening professional development for teachers and creating district-wide rubrics that will help track students’ progress.
For each step, the District Improvement Plan outlines which staff member is in charge, which staff members are responsible for the day-to-day oversight, and who else is accountable for the task.
The plan also outlines the timeline, results indicators, projected cost and funding source for each step.
Read the plan below.
Costs
Some steps are expected to be expensive – specifically steps to revamp the district’s data maintenance.
The District Improvement Plan suggests purchasing a new system to track student information for $70,000.
A separate program, called AIMSweb, will help staff evaluate how students are responding to intervention. That program is expected to cost $18,000, according to the District Improvement Plan.
Maintenance of the two programs is projected to cost $33,000 a year.
The plan indicates those programs will be paid for with federal grant money.
Other steps require little or no money to implement, according to the plan.
“It really communicates to the community what it takes and what it costs,” Conway said of the plan. “It takes commitment from the people around this table and this town to be able to do this.”
