Post by fiberisgoodforyou on Oct 3, 2007 7:28:26 GMT -5
Any of our council candidates been down to Trenton, with a yellow shirt, to fight for Through and Efficient Funding for our children, had met with the State Assembly Budget Committee Chairmen Greenwald asking for more money for our childrens education, so while New Brunswick received $4 Mill, FB received $500K or the $550K promised.
Which candidate sat in on both the Senate and Assembly Budget hearings, and has asked Education commissioner Davies why she does she support increased Abbotts and Rim districts, yet Freehold Boro gets NOTHING?
At a minimum, having a through and efficient pubic school system is quality of life issue worth fighting for!
This is great news below!!!
Pupils' test scores show improvement
Freehold Borough admin. pleased with progress made on 2006-07 exams
BY CLARE MARIE CELANO Staff Writer
There is some good news for the Freehold Borough K-8 School District: student scores on standardized tests that were taken in 2006-07 showed improvement over the previous school year.
Administrators said pupils have improved their performance on the NJASK (third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh grades) and GEPA (eighth grade) tests, and those results are a bonus for administrators.
Freehold Borough Superintendent of Schools Elizabeth O'Connell said she can attribute the rise in scores to a couple of factors, among them the implementation of the Initiative for the Development of Early Achievement in Literacy (IDEAL) two-year grant and the efforts of teachers and supervisors who have worked hard to make the grant work for their students.
O'Connell said schools are scored on certain indicators that must be met in order to become a school that is considered to be making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the guidelines of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
According to Director of Technology and Assessment Thomas Tramaglini, there are two categories for AYP.
"You must have 95 percent attendance of students in grades three to five for the elementary school participating in the test, as well as 95 percent of students in all of the subgroups participating," he said.
The subgroups include students with disabilities; students with limited English proficiency; white, Asian, African-American, Asian Pacific, American Indian and Hispanic students; and economically disadvantaged students.
The other category for AYP is student performance. In order to reach AYP classification, according to Tramaglini, the students as a group must meet benchmarks set by the state. Information provided by Tramaglini indicates that for 2005, 2006 and 2007, 75 percent of the students taking the test must pass it in order for the school to make AYP. The graph increases the percentage each year to reach the final goal of having 100 percent of students in the country realizing AYP status.
A school is given a certain amount of time to bring all students up to 100 percent AYP, which will be the mandatory standard by 2014. Going into the 2008 school year, the state is expecting 82 percent of students to meet AYP requirements in language arts and literacy and 76 percent in mathematics. The percentage of students expected to meet AYP increases each year until it reaches 100 percent in 2014.
The Freehold Intermediate School, which houses students in sixth, seventh and eighth grade, met the indicators for the 2005-06 school year and has met those requirements for the 2006-07 school year. Meeting the indicators for AYP for a sec- ond consecutive year has removed the school from a list that denoted it as a school in need of improvement. There are no more sanctions against the intermediate school, according to O'Connell.
Park Avenue Elementary School students, although scoring significantly better than they fared in the 2005-06 school year when they did not meet AYP, still did not quite make the grade. Students met 39 out of the 40 indicators necessary to meet AYP. Therefore, the school will need to go around again to meet 40 out of 40 indicators for two consecutive years before it will be considered an AYP school.
According to Tramaglini, the indicator the school missed had to do with the performance of special education students who took the standardized tests. Tramaglini said many of the special education students do pass the test, but other youngsters have real difficulty. He said there needs to be more flexibility for students with disabilities.
In other words, not enough of the special education students who took the test passed it for the school to pass that particular indicator.
"We're hoping that new reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act will have multiple measures and multiple tests to allow more flexibility for special education students," Tramaglini said.
Congress is expected to consider the reauthorization of the act this year.
The Freehold Learning Center elementary school, which did not make AYP in the 2005-06 school year, did make the grade in the 2006-07 school year, which means it will need one more year of achieving 40 out of 40 indicators to come off the list of schools in need of improvement.
Heading up the implementation of the IDEAL grant are Tramaglini, and Ronnie Dougherty, the director of curriculum/language arts supervisor, according to O'Connell.
"Last year was the first year of the initiative that allowed teachers to become better versed in what the instructional model looks like," O'Connell said. "We have been following the IDEAL literacy model, which provides for 90-minute literacy blocks."
The superintendent explained that students read in a large group for a certain period of time and then break up into smaller groups based on their reading levels.
According to Dougherty, with the implementation of IDEAL, teachers now have a better focus on delivering the curriculum to students. She said the curriculum creates scope and sequences to ensure that all of New Jersey's Core Curriculum Standards are included.
"Our teachers did an amazing amount of work on behalf of the students," Dougherty said. "They implemented the new assessment provided through Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA). This is a comprehensive reading inventory for students in grades K-8. Teachers use this DRA along with data to inform and drive their instruction. It is a credit to the teachers that they have learned to do this."
According to Dougherty, Tramaglini has also been integral in helping to implement working with the DRA.
"He has worked to disaggregate data and worked with teachers to help them understand how to use that data," she said.
Dougherty also said that last year Patricia Rizzo, who was the district's math supervisor (a position no longer in existence), worked with teachers to create scope and sequences for addressing the new curriculum. Rizzo is now the district's director of special education.
Dougherty explained that this method instructs teachers how to pace their teaching, and essentially teaches when to teach what, in order to be certain to cover everything in the curriculum within the school year.
Dougherty also cited Erika Jiminez, reading coach for students in K-5, and Janet Morales, bilingual English as a Second Language and home school liaison, who were also part of the team that helped to bring up the pupils scores.
Which candidate sat in on both the Senate and Assembly Budget hearings, and has asked Education commissioner Davies why she does she support increased Abbotts and Rim districts, yet Freehold Boro gets NOTHING?
At a minimum, having a through and efficient pubic school system is quality of life issue worth fighting for!
This is great news below!!!
Pupils' test scores show improvement
Freehold Borough admin. pleased with progress made on 2006-07 exams
BY CLARE MARIE CELANO Staff Writer
There is some good news for the Freehold Borough K-8 School District: student scores on standardized tests that were taken in 2006-07 showed improvement over the previous school year.
Administrators said pupils have improved their performance on the NJASK (third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh grades) and GEPA (eighth grade) tests, and those results are a bonus for administrators.
Freehold Borough Superintendent of Schools Elizabeth O'Connell said she can attribute the rise in scores to a couple of factors, among them the implementation of the Initiative for the Development of Early Achievement in Literacy (IDEAL) two-year grant and the efforts of teachers and supervisors who have worked hard to make the grant work for their students.
O'Connell said schools are scored on certain indicators that must be met in order to become a school that is considered to be making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the guidelines of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
According to Director of Technology and Assessment Thomas Tramaglini, there are two categories for AYP.
"You must have 95 percent attendance of students in grades three to five for the elementary school participating in the test, as well as 95 percent of students in all of the subgroups participating," he said.
The subgroups include students with disabilities; students with limited English proficiency; white, Asian, African-American, Asian Pacific, American Indian and Hispanic students; and economically disadvantaged students.
The other category for AYP is student performance. In order to reach AYP classification, according to Tramaglini, the students as a group must meet benchmarks set by the state. Information provided by Tramaglini indicates that for 2005, 2006 and 2007, 75 percent of the students taking the test must pass it in order for the school to make AYP. The graph increases the percentage each year to reach the final goal of having 100 percent of students in the country realizing AYP status.
A school is given a certain amount of time to bring all students up to 100 percent AYP, which will be the mandatory standard by 2014. Going into the 2008 school year, the state is expecting 82 percent of students to meet AYP requirements in language arts and literacy and 76 percent in mathematics. The percentage of students expected to meet AYP increases each year until it reaches 100 percent in 2014.
The Freehold Intermediate School, which houses students in sixth, seventh and eighth grade, met the indicators for the 2005-06 school year and has met those requirements for the 2006-07 school year. Meeting the indicators for AYP for a sec- ond consecutive year has removed the school from a list that denoted it as a school in need of improvement. There are no more sanctions against the intermediate school, according to O'Connell.
Park Avenue Elementary School students, although scoring significantly better than they fared in the 2005-06 school year when they did not meet AYP, still did not quite make the grade. Students met 39 out of the 40 indicators necessary to meet AYP. Therefore, the school will need to go around again to meet 40 out of 40 indicators for two consecutive years before it will be considered an AYP school.
According to Tramaglini, the indicator the school missed had to do with the performance of special education students who took the standardized tests. Tramaglini said many of the special education students do pass the test, but other youngsters have real difficulty. He said there needs to be more flexibility for students with disabilities.
In other words, not enough of the special education students who took the test passed it for the school to pass that particular indicator.
"We're hoping that new reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act will have multiple measures and multiple tests to allow more flexibility for special education students," Tramaglini said.
Congress is expected to consider the reauthorization of the act this year.
The Freehold Learning Center elementary school, which did not make AYP in the 2005-06 school year, did make the grade in the 2006-07 school year, which means it will need one more year of achieving 40 out of 40 indicators to come off the list of schools in need of improvement.
Heading up the implementation of the IDEAL grant are Tramaglini, and Ronnie Dougherty, the director of curriculum/language arts supervisor, according to O'Connell.
"Last year was the first year of the initiative that allowed teachers to become better versed in what the instructional model looks like," O'Connell said. "We have been following the IDEAL literacy model, which provides for 90-minute literacy blocks."
The superintendent explained that students read in a large group for a certain period of time and then break up into smaller groups based on their reading levels.
According to Dougherty, with the implementation of IDEAL, teachers now have a better focus on delivering the curriculum to students. She said the curriculum creates scope and sequences to ensure that all of New Jersey's Core Curriculum Standards are included.
"Our teachers did an amazing amount of work on behalf of the students," Dougherty said. "They implemented the new assessment provided through Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA). This is a comprehensive reading inventory for students in grades K-8. Teachers use this DRA along with data to inform and drive their instruction. It is a credit to the teachers that they have learned to do this."
According to Dougherty, Tramaglini has also been integral in helping to implement working with the DRA.
"He has worked to disaggregate data and worked with teachers to help them understand how to use that data," she said.
Dougherty also said that last year Patricia Rizzo, who was the district's math supervisor (a position no longer in existence), worked with teachers to create scope and sequences for addressing the new curriculum. Rizzo is now the district's director of special education.
Dougherty explained that this method instructs teachers how to pace their teaching, and essentially teaches when to teach what, in order to be certain to cover everything in the curriculum within the school year.
Dougherty also cited Erika Jiminez, reading coach for students in K-5, and Janet Morales, bilingual English as a Second Language and home school liaison, who were also part of the team that helped to bring up the pupils scores.