As ESSAA’s Regents Liaison, Paul Scampini attends the monthly meetings of the Board of Regents. Following is a summary meetings held on January 9th and 10th
- The January 2017 meeting of the Board of Regents began with Commissioner Elia providing a progress summary on NYSED’s development of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plan. The Commissioner focused most of her discussion on the High Concept Ideas associated withSupports and Improvements for Schools. She discussed the needs and challenges associated with how to best provide resources and support, within the ESSA guidelines, to schools that are identified as low performing.
She emphasized that three of the basic ESSA mandated indicators for identifying low performing schools will be:
- High Schools that have less than a 67% graduation rate
- The lowest 5% of performing schools across the state
- Schools that have specific low performing subgroups
With regard to the federal guidelines for providing resources and support, she feels ESSA offers schools/districts many more options and much more flexibility with intervention models than existed with NCLB. The Commissioner also stressed, however, that an effective diagnostic needs assessment tool is crucial for schools to effectively assess where to focus their improvement efforts.
Finally, as a follow-up to the discussion that occurred at the December meeting, Commissioner Elia revisited the concept of adding a School Quality and/or Student Success Indicator to the school accountability formula as an additional school performance measure.
While acknowledging the challenges associated with quantifying what is most often very subjective data, Commissioner Elia proposed sending out a survey to the field on January 16th. The survey will ask for feedback on an extensive list of proposed school quality and student success indicators that have been brought up in ESSA work groups. After a February 8th submission deadline, the survey results will be collected for presentation to the Board of Regents at their February meeting. Additional stakeholder meetings, organized by district superintendents, will also be held across the state in the coming weeks to gather additional feedback. The information from these meetings will be reviewed along with the survey Board of Regents data and the Commissioner hopes to present a set of recommendations to the Board of Regents at their March meeting.
Below are the links to:
- The summary of the Commissioner’s presentation
https://www.regents.nysed.gov/
- A list of proposed ideas from the ESSA work groups and stakeholder meetings relating to the Supports and Improvements for Schools concept
- A draft copy of the School Quality Indicator survey that will be going out to the field.
- On Tuesday morning, the Board of Regents met with Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond to continue the discussion of integrating additional school quality and student success indicators into the school accountability formula.Dr. Darling-Hammond is currently working with several states across the country to assist them in developing their ESSA plans.Drawing on many of the lessons learned from the shortfalls of NCLB, she reviewed some of the models being developed by other states that incorporate multiple indicators, highlighted some of the specific indicators that might be added to the NYS accountability formula, and gave examples of how she feels they can be quantifiably measured.
- A presentation was made by a panel of experts from across the State to advance the discussion about how state agencies, including the State Education Department, can move forward in successfully addressing the growing opiod and heroin epidemic.The presentation included an overview of NYSED’s current policies and provided updates on current prevention/intervention programs that are emerging.Currently, 211 schools across the state have registered with the Department of Health to participate in Opiod Overdose Prevention Program which includes having staff members onsite who are trained in administering Naloxone.
https://www.regents.nysed.gov/
- A presentation was made updating the Board on the progress that has been made in the area of Career and Technical Education (CTE) since the implementation of the Multiple Pathways in 2016.Discussion focused on the sixteen national and state career clusters and the CTE program approval process.
- The Early Childhood Work Group presented a proposal to the Board recommending that the Legislature and the Governor’s Office take action to align the seven separate and distinct Prekindergarten programs that are currently administered in the state to eliminate inconsistency among programs and the fragmented funding structure.
- As part of the consent agenda, the Board adopted the previously proposed amendment that every public school post the child abuse hotline telephone number and provide directions to access the NYS Office of Children and Family Services website to go into effect January 25, 2017.
- Also as part of the consent agenda, the Board formally adopted the three pathway options for individuals to obtain the Transitional A certificate to teach a career and technical education subject. This increases opportunities for schools to hire individuals who possess significant requisite occupational experience to teach in the area of CTE.
https://www.regents.nysed.gov/
