The meeting included end of the year reports presented by various curriculum supervisors. In particular, it marked the last appearance before the board of outgoing Campbell School Principal Robert Gugliara, who has been succeeded by Edgar Middle School Administrative Assistant Florence Carter as principal.
New Elective Courses
Two new electives will be offered at Metuchen High School this year, according to Director of Curriculum Paul Pinero. They are “Speech and Communication,” to be taught by Scott Gallagher, and “Poetry of Song,” to be taught by Adam Levy. Both Gallagher and Levy are listed as members of the English Department, according to the school district’s website.
“Speech and Communication will be offered to 10th, 11th, and 12th graders,” Pinero said. “It will include a modern type of approach with daily classroom Twitters. Both classes will include podcasting and SMART boards. Speech and Communication has run in the past but it is a totally remodeled version that doesn’t reflect the older traditional courses. It is not just public speaking, as it is about the study of speech and communication as it includes the study of media and how media is delivered.”
“Poetry of Song is geared towards project based learning for 11th and 12th graders. The hook is the song part as teenagers exist in song. It is poetry analysis disguised as an understanding music course. When you look closely at the curriculum there is a lot of analysis going on. In the same way that you might analyze a novel, you will analyze music. There is a lot of historical significance to it as well, as it is not just contemporary music.”
There will be two sections of Poetry of Song and one section of Speech and Communication. Class sizes are expected to be 22 students and higher. Course outlines will be posted on the school district’s website.
Improved Textbook Inventory
“Through QSAC, it is required that we have an accurate count of all textbooks… and to make them publicly available,” said Pinero. “The point of QSAC monitoring textbook inventory is so that the public can be aware of the textbooks that we are using in the classroom. We have developed this inventory and fine-tuned it to make it 100 percent accurate over the course of a year starting last summer. We are proud of this document – it was a great effort by the supervisors to put it together, and we continue to look for ways to make the data more useful.”
“One added feature of it is that there is a column for “rationale” as to why a book might be older than five years. In some cases it is perfectly acceptable for a book to be more than five years old. So to make that clear, I have asked the supervisors to… indicate if the text being used is still appropriate according to content standards or it could be… a novel, as novels don’t get revised or re-written. For example, it could be a 20-year-old novel if it is in good shape. It is an efficient and effective way to track that and to anticipate questions from the public and from the board as to why an older book is still being used.”
Full Day vs. Half Day Kindergarten
The issue is being examined by the ad-hoc kindergarten committee, which hopes to put a report out to the community by January 2010. If you are interested in joining, please contact Jackie Gibson or schools superintendent Terri Sinatra by Sept. 17, 2009
“We had a meeting last week and discussed the three main areas that the committee will look at regarding the impact for full day versus half day for kindergarten,” said board member Jackie Gibson. “There are the pedagogical issues, meaning educationally what would be the value to the students. Next is facilities, meaning where we would put everyone. And third is finances, which is how we would pay for setting things up, the extra teachers that would be required, and also the extra space needed including renovations and renting of board of education offices.”
Kindergarten is currently half-day in Metuchen, with a morning and afternoon session. According to Gibson, there are four total morning classes and four total afternoon classes, for a total of eight sessions. The number of sessions was increased from six (three morning and three afternoon) for the 2009-10 school year as a result of the increased enrollment for this year.
“There are in the neighborhood of 170 kindergarten students for the 2009-10 school year,” Gibson said after the meeting. “In the past few years that number has been in the vicinity of 130-135 kindergarten students. It is not known exactly why the number of kindergarten students went up so much in one year. Sometimes things can happen where you have a bubble class where you have more kids in one class than in the year before or year after. Or it could be the economy, where parents are sending their kids to public school instead of private school.”
“Though the increase in kindergarten students for this year was not initially projected by the district, we are being proactive about it and have teachers in place for kindergarten,” Gibson said. “We had three kindergarten teachers last year, and this year we have four.”
Edison township has full day kindergarten, but this change happened recently, Gibson said.
“Approximately seven districts, or about a third, have half day kindergarten in Middlesex County, but we have to decide what’s right for Metuchen,” she said after the meeting. “We would have to look at many things, such as providing lunch service at the school, which is currently not provided for kindergarten.”
Sept. 17 will be the final date that borough residents can request to serve on the all-volunteer committee. However, so far, board member Terry Kohl said that the ad-hoc committee looks to be “very representative” of the community.
“It is a variety of parents, as they are not all young parents whose children are of preschool age,” Kohl said at the meeting. “There are parents who have children in the district, and there are also grandparents on the committee. I am not sure how many are ultimately on the committee, but I remember there were 10 there in the first meeting of the summer. I know it will get larger as time goes by.”
Federal Stimulus Money
“The finance committee met on Aug. 18,” said board member Devra Golbe. “As we do every month, we discussed the bill list and the budget transfers. It was more fun to discuss the potential uses for the $560,000 we have been awarded in stimulus funds. Of that we expect to expect to spend $285,000 on a new special education program which was discussed at the Aug. 11 meeting. Forty thousand dollars will be used to cover the cost of a home health aide for an Edgar School student, as that would cover two years of those expenses. And approximately $80,000 [will be spent] on technology, and the remainder for whatever unanticipated expenses are eligible.”
General Budgeting
“We also reviewed the draft of an energy audit prepared by Concord Engineering, but there are still some questions on that before we go forward with any work,” Golbe said. “Also, there is about $80,000 remaining in referendum funds. There is some work on the fields that we will do in the fall, and we are clearing up some odds and ends like the air conditioner in the library. We hope that we will have funds left to do some work on the science labs in the high school and maybe some other things. We are also going to solicit proposals from banking services which is a routine thing we should do every so often to reduce our costs. We are also doing a telephone audit to see if we can reduce our cost there. It isn’t costing us anything because the company that does the audit gets paid by taking a fraction of the first year’s savings.”
Courtesy Busing
“We also discussed the fact that there was a waiting list for courtesy busing which is unfortunate,” Golbe said. “At this point we had 20 kids on the waiting list. Only seven or eight of them are new to the district and could not have been expected to sign up on time. But at this point, a new bus [route] would cost us $25,000 and the finance committee is not recommending that we add buses. We are hoping that some parents who sign their kids up for busing will realize they won’t need it and will withdraw, so we can give those places to kids on the waiting list. But at this time an additional bus [route] does not seem reasonable.”
Business Administrator Michael Harvier also noted that the amount of $25,000 per additional bus route is a “low number” that represents a “minimum” estimate.
Information about state school busing requirements can be found here.
Special Education:
Introduction
“Once again I am very proud of the special ed department,” said Director of Special Services Robert Capra in his end of the year report. “Metuchen continues to be on the forefront of the inclusive education movement, and we continue to make strives in the number of offerings to allow students of varying disabilities to attend school within their community. Our primary goal is to offer a free and appropriate education to most children right here in the public schools. There are some students though because of generally low incidence disabilities we are not able to educate within the public schools.”
Costs
“Excluding summer and community nursery placements, at the beginning of the 2008-09 school year, we had 36 out-of-district students, and we ended the year with 35 out-of-district students. In 2007-08, the year before, the out-of-district budget was $1.8 million. For 2008-09 we had an out-of-district budget of about $1.9 million, which is a 6 percent increase.”
“One area where we have made strides in is the area of transportation costs. Every year I have to thank Terrie Entrup, our transportation coordinator, who makes extraordinary efforts to combine our transportation runs with other districts and other regional educational commission services, saving the district hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. At the end of this past school year, just about all of our out-of-district bus routes were shared with a neighboring school district or regional education service commission.”
Preschool & Autism
“For the past several years, the largest percentage of student growth in special education was in preschool. We began the 2007-08 school year with 36 students, which is a 100 percent increase from the previous school year. But it seems that is leveling off now. We began the 2008-09 year with 24 preschool students. During the year, the child study team evaluated 20 preschool students, and seven qualified for special education.”
“In response to the state mandate requiring a certain percentage of preschool students to attend schools with typical peers, last year the Board of Education entered into an agreement with Community Nursery School. For the 2008-09 school year, we had four students attend Community two days a week, and then our program three days per week. I have been very happy with our association with Community Nursery School.”
“At Edgar School, we continue to expand on our social skills program for students on the autism spectrum. Dr. Michael Selbst, an acknowledged authority in social skills and education, will remain a consultant to us to our learning center class, which is designed to teach social skills on the spectrum.”
“The department continues to make efforts to offer appropriate programming within the district. This past year, we continued our relationship with the Eden Institute, which is a premier program in New Jersey to provide consultation in our preschool program to educate autistic youngsters. Our consultant has also assisted us with several students at Edgar School.”
New Programs
“There are several exciting new programs and associations we look forward to in the coming year. Most of it has been made possible by the substantial federal grant by American Reinvestment and Recovery Act: these funds will be used to provide foundations based on the Wilson reading program for grades K-3. We are also purchasing the Rigby Reading Intervention program to be used in our resource room classes at Campbell School. Rigby is being used by the regular education program and our hope is that students who don’t need individualized reading will be able to move more easily into the mainstream because they are more familiar with the reading program we are using in the resource room.”
“Another exciting development is an alternative high school program using online instruction. Our goal is to improve attendance, academic standing, behavior, and social skills for students who haven’t responded to the traditional types of teaching methods. Included in the program will be community service or work study option, nutritional counseling, and therapeutic interventions. These are also funded by the ARRA funds as a two-year pilot.”
“Because we had identified the need for additional counseling and crisis intervention services at high school and Edgar School…. We are going to have two full-time psychologists, one at Edgar School and one at the high school. These changes will allow additional counseling intervention at both the high school and middle school without an increase in personnel [due to retirements and reassignments].”
“For those students ages 18-21 who have met their high school requirements but by law continue to require services, we have initiated a relationship with Community Options to provide practical job placements and career counseling. Two students will work in the Community Options program, and this is at a very significant reduction in cost when compared to programs we have been using at JFK Hospital or at the Middlesex Educational Services Commission.
