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School district seeks improvement
Doug Flanagan/reporter@qvpr.com
Mountain View Elementary School kindergarten teacher Jody Stadelman helps student Edgar Guzman find his locker during the first day of school on Tuesday.
The 2010-11 Quincy School District year started on Tuesday as hundreds of students flocked to their classrooms for the first time. The Post-Register recently talked with superintendent Burton Dickerson about his outlook for the upcoming school year.
QVPR: How excited are you about the start of the school year?
BD: For educators, it’s pretty universal. I think it happens with kids, too. Around the school cycle there’s a tradition where we have a break in the summer, and it seems like toward the end of the school year everybody’s getting a little worn out, tired and ready for a break, but come this time of year, there is kind of an excitement that begins to build up. I always feel it, too; I was a teacher for years, but even as a district administrator, there’s always the hope and the newness of the year and plans that you have to try to do things better or find better ways to be effective. It is an exciting time.
QVPR: What are some of the changes the district has in store for this school year, and what are some of the broad goals you hope to accomplish?
BD: It’s a continuation of our efforts to improve our school system. Everyone’s looking at their test scores, whether it be state assessments or other assessments, and here in Quincy we know that we have our work cut out for us just in terms of trying to be more effective in having higher levels of student academic achievement.
We’re going to continue the implementation of our district improvement plan because we think it’s important to not be jumping around from one thing to another. We think there’s some really important things to stay on task there with, and within that we now also have some grant resources that were made available to us from the state. We already had in mind the focus on instruction. There’s a lot of evidence to support the idea that the quality of teaching is probably the greatest single factor where we can work on to make the biggest difference. A lot of things we try to do to try to improve, that’s probably the most important and probably the highest leverage one that we can do, so we’re going to use those resources to develop a shared understanding of what good teaching really looks like so that everybody’s on the same page. We have a common frame of reference, a vocabulary, a language about what good teaching looks like. We’re going to use that to work collaboratively as teams to strengthen our own individual techniques and abilities to help others.
New for this year, we’re actually going to launch a school grade span committee. It will probably be pretty much a school year-long effort to gather information, study the options and prepare some recommendations as to whether we stay the way we are or make some difference in the way we organize our grade spans.
Also coming back around this year is the school levy election. The last time we passed a three-year levy, and it’s been so significant. This fall we’ll put back together our advisory committee, which (needs) broad based community involvement. Out of that will come a recommendation for what the levy proposal will look like.
We’ll make a final decision, and then it will be our job to communicate effectively about what that’s all about. Even though our levy amount has gone up quite a bit in this last cycle, the cost to the voters has actually gone down because the burden of the amount that was approved has been spread over more businesses and new construction and taxpayers, so now those rates have declined. We’ll be sharing that information with the committee, kind of where we stand in comparison with other school districts like we did before in our region and around the state.
The reason we scaled up our levy as much as we did in the last proposal was because the advisory committee felt that they wanted to be on the record as saying we don’t want Quincy to be at the bottom of the barrel compared to other districts around us in terms of support we’re willing to provide from our local community to help our schools. We really appreciate that support, and we’ll be going through all that and developing a proposal in that area.
The highly capable program that we’ve been working on will have some new and expanded options this year. We’re going to continue to focus on that. We’ve been able to expand the Academy program. So that’s an exciting and important area for us.
And then we really spent quite a bit of time just kind of trying to better understand how we can be more effective in connecting and building relationships and connections with parents and our community.
QVPR: Besides increasing student academic acheivement, what are some of the challenges the district will face this year, and how does it plan to tackle them?
BD: Just about everything else that we do and have on our list can relate to that, at least indirectly. We’re going to continue to build the district-wide PBIS focus and try to keep that alive and build and improve that and develop that across the district this year as well. It’s not directly related to student academic acheivement, but an orderly, positive climate in the schools just makes us able to focus on learning.
Same thing with facilities. We’re going to be forming back our facilities advisory committee in October and reviewing the status of our facilities’ needs and updating our understanding of what the environment looks like in terms of potential for being able to get state-matching funds at some point in the future for school construction.
At some point we’re going to need to build more classroom space. In the meantime, we’ve added another portable classroom at George, and we have money set aside in our budget in anticipation of potentially needing to do more on our other campuses, possibly the high school as well. Facilities management is right there, too.
QVPR: Two of the main issues the district had to deal with last year were the junior high being identified as a low performing school, applying for an assistance grant and being denied the grant, and the depletion of funds from the high school’s Associated Student Body funds. Can you provide an update of where those two issues stand now and where you see them heading in the future?
BD: It was because we did apply for that, that we now have those state resources that I was talking about to help us as a district on behalf of the junior high and Monument, which is now a Step 5 school in that system of labeling.
As we did at that time, we continue to see this not as a single school issue, but as a district-wide responsibility that we have. (The student achievement goals that I mentioned earlier) are related to and probably in some ways an outgrowth of conversations and the work that we did around the junior high grant process. That will continue.
As far as the high school ASB, we have come up with a plan for implementing some specific steps that we’re taking. We’re certainly keeping a close eye on expenditures going forward. We’re looking for ways to build a better revenue stream. We’ve done some upgrades to the process for accounting. The high school now has an automated, computer-based accounting system which it didn’t have before, which I think is going to make for better communication, better access to at-the-moment status information about ASB finances.
We’ve already taken some good steps there and have a plan in place where we’ll be monitoring that carefully. We were never in trouble district-wide in terms of the overall ASB. It was just a matter of getting the high school process and accounting a little more dialed in to the realities of where they were with that. I think we’re on track and in a good position there.
It will take some time to bring all those accounts to the spot where they need to be, but we have a plan that gets us there.
QVPR: The private school system in Quincy continues to grow. How would you classify the school district’s relationship with the private schools?
BD: In terms of my involvement here, as the leader of the district, my perspective has always been that we’re not at odds, we’re not in competition (with them). We want to work collaboratively with other educational institutions in our community. Our private school here in Quincy is filling a need that people perceive.
Opportunities may arise in the future that we can look at. The bottom line is that if there are ways that we can help them or vice versa, I think the door’s open for that.
I don’t think there’s a lot of things that bring us together formally to the table, there are things, even the idea of providing transportation for private school students on the buses basically came up with a question raised by one of the parents that either has had or plans to have students attending the private school.
We researched it and came up with what we thought was a viable way to approach it with the guidelines that our state has established for private school-public school transportation.
