The Evanston/Skokie School District 65 School Board decided Monday night to maintain three of this year’s goals for the 2004-05 year and drop two of them from the list after their completion this year.
The early planning of the 2004-05 annual goals continued with plans to keep goals for the No Child Left Behind Act and reading improvement for primary grades. The board will continue to state that the district will meet the act’s standards, which require 40 percent of all students to meet state achievement standards.
The board also plans to continue the target of adopting a budget that will provide for the district’s financial stability in the long term.
“We need to look at various programs District 65 runs to improve achievement to see if we’re getting the bang for the buck for academic programs and supplementary programs,” board member Bob Eder said.
The board also raised new issues that may appear on next year’s plans.
“I would like to see (improvement of) middle schools as a goal,” board member Julie Chernoff said.
Director of Research Paul Brinson said the budget’s stability will come from knowing what the costs will be for the district in different areas.
“We need to get a sense of what the costs are to programs,” Brinson said. “That discussion is going on, but that’s going to take some work.”
Because the board had planned to meet the reading-improvement guideline over the next three years, board members said it will probably remain an aspiration for next year.
Board member Jonathan Baum said achievement of this year’s second objective, curriculum-based assessment, will help the ongoing plan of improving primary grades’ reading levels, the third goal for 2003-04.
Brinson said the reading-improvement aspiration can benefit from different methods of assessment.
“At times, folks get focused on one type of assessment,” Brinson said. “We need to be gathering data about student learning and achievement in reading. It doesn’t have to be part of the formal assessment.”
The board plans to leave off objectives that will be completed by the academic year’s end. The goal calling for a home for the Two-Way Immersion bilingual language program will drop from next year’s goals after the board completes study of the 60-percent guideline related to District 65’s two magnet schools and finalizes a home for the Two-Way Immersion program.
“I contemplate we will finish this goal this year,” Superintendent Hardy Ray Murphy said. “I think we will first need to finish the first two discussion items and then make an effort to engage sites (for Two-Way Immersion).”
Goals for developing an assessment system based on curriculum for kindergarten through 8th grade will be dropped because the board plans to meet the goal by the year’s end.
In other business, the board received a report on the pilots for extended-day and extended-learning programs.
The programs ran as pilots last spring to help students at risk for not moving up to the next grade level. Students stayed an extra hour per day in the extended-day program or attended three hours per day in the summer for the extended-learning program.
Eder said the extended-learning program’s ability to improve the achievement of at-risk children during the previous year or during the summer also helped their classmates because teachers did not need to spend the first weeks of school on review.
“It helps the students get ready for the coming school year but it also helps the higher-achieving kids who are bored with review,” Eder said. “Children across the board will benefit from this program.”
