Staff
Entering his fourth year as District 55 School Board chairman, Jason Redick says the list of things to do for Sweet Home schools includes working this year to adjust to national Common Core Standards, evaluating the impacts of the four-day school week and revisiting swimming pool funding.
“This year will be the year we push (Common Core) fully,” Redick said. It’s a controversial topic, but he said he believes it’s largely misunderstood.
It’s not a nationalized curriculum, Redick said. “It’s a standard that’s even across the board. In some areas we’re going to have to push a little harder because the Oregon standard wasn’t up to the Common Core standard.”
A total of 48 states, including Oregon, have agreed to participate in Common Core Standards for English language arts and mathematics, which are designed to help ensure that students are adequately advanced in those subjects to be prepared for college or careers when they graduate from high school.
The district is already doing a good job getting to those standards, Redick said. At Sweet Home Junior High, eighth-grade students are already taking first-year algebra. They have the option of keeping their score from junior high and moving on or taking the class again in high school.
Pushing further into math in high school gives them more options to get ahead by taking more electives or starting college-level coursework early, he said.
The changes are a big deal, Redick said. “It’s going to take a kindergarten-up realignment, which is the difficult part of it because education builds on itself.”
Students are already at some level in the system, he said. “It’s like running a race, and they move the finish line and you’re halfway through.”
The student may have planned on a five-mile run while the new finish line is set at seven miles, Redick said. Implementing the standards isn’t going to be an easy task.
But it can be done, he said. The knowledge doesn’t change. What changes is how and when it is delivered to the students.
Redick said the district will focus less on the budget cuts that have been a high priority for the board in recent years and will be “more focused on the education end of it.”
With the local option levy that voters passed to fund the swimming pool expiring after this school year, board members will need to address that as well. The good news is that, with funding secure through this year, the district can focus on implementation of the Common Core curriculum.
The high school’s Access College Today program, now in its second year, is growing, Redick said. It now has more than 50 students, who were able to defer their high school diplomas and attend Linn-Benton Community College, with the district receiving state funding for each and paying the students’ tuition.
Sweet Home Online is entering its first full year after starting during the spring, he said. That program is an opportunity for certain students and perhaps draw students to the School District from home schooling and other programs outside the district.
“I kind of have mixed emotions about how society is going, less face-to-face interaction,” he said. “I think there are some kids that will benefit. It’s just one more option that parents have to provide a quality education for their kids.”
These efforts, among others, appear to be working, resulting in more students moving on to higher education, he said. Redick doesn’t think Sweet Home’s had the same numbers committing to higher education, military or other programs as it did with last year’s seniors.
“We haven’t seen this many kids with a plan coming out of high school,” he said.
Although funding is better, and some cuts have been restored, Redick said, the budget still looms high on his mind.
“I’m always going to be wary about the economy,” he said. “The things I see outside the School District look positive, but being one that tends to be more conservative fiscally, positive signs don’t always relate to positive changes in revenue either.”
The state has set funding for the next two school years, but if revenue doesn’t come in as projected, any shortfalls will trickle down to the district in 2014-15.
And the district is still dealing with the fallout of previous cuts.
The local option levy funding the swimming pool ends on June 30.
The board is going to have to look it, Redick said. The city will need to look at how it affects law enforcement funding and decide if it’s willing to let a permanent district go to a vote. If not, the board will have to consider other options.
Among those options, the board could ask district voters to approve a levy renewal.
The most dramatic effect of budget cuts was, perhaps, the four-day school week, and the board will look at how well it’s working again this school year. The shift from five to four days was supposed to save an estimated $400,000 to $430,000, while the district has projected a cost of $300,000 to return to a five-day week.
The district is really just starting to get data back about the first year of four-day weeks and how it affected students, Redick said. The data are still preliminary, and the district is collecting information from three or four different sources.State test scores will be available later this fall.
“So far, everything looks good – no real ups or downs from where we were,” he said. Things may be a little better in some areas, although it’s difficult to identify the cause with different efforts underway to improve scores.
“This last year, it was really too early to figure out if it was a good bad or indifferent,” he said.
The decision to go to a four-day week was financial for several board members, the best of bad options. The move allowed the district to keep many programs that it would have had to cut, he said.
“To me, the financial picture was the biggest part of it,” Redick said. The question was, “How do you make the cuts without impacting the students?”