District officials tweak original plan to incorporate teacher
and board member suggestions
Gilroy – Teachers laid it down bluntly: the district’s math plan simply doesn’t add up. And for math teachers, whose brains crave precise, analytical explanations, what they consider a vague proposal, lacking accountability, doesn’t suffice.
With “a bunch of math teachers going over this we want to make sure that it all adds up,” Valerie Kelly said during a telephone interview Thursday afternoon.
But the Ascencion Solorsano Middle School teacher didn’t find what she was seeking embedded in the 20-page comprehensive math plan drawn up by district officials. And Kelly, plus a handful of other educators and board members, told the district so.
At last week’s meeting the board voted to postpone approval of the plan and now, three years after they began brainstorming a fix to the substandard arithmetic scores and months of drawing up the plan, district officials are at the table again.
“I really think that regardless of what happened at that meeting that this is an opportunity to focus on the implementation of the plan,” Gilroy Unified School District Superintendent Edwin Diaz said. “It’s positive that it may be an event to get a group together to help guide the implementation, which with any program, the implementation is the key. So if individuals truly want to impact how the plan will affect students on a daily basis, there will be an opportunity for that to happen.”
On Tuesday night, a team of district officials met to begin tweaking the math plan to make room for teacher and board member suggestions. The revised plan will still heavily resemble the former but will be broken up into more digestible pieces, in response to the educator’s complaints that it was too broad-based.
Director of Curriculum and Instruction Olivia Schaad, who along with Assistant Superintendent Jacki Horejs are the lead architects of the district’s math plan, has learned from the experience. Although Schaad forwarded drafts of the plan to teachers at various points during the process, every teacher didn’t receive a copy of the final plan via e-mail.
And since she only received feedback from Wayne Scott, a Gilroy High School math teacher, she realizes now that communication needs to be improved.
“I just feel we’re learning from it,” she said. “We’re just going to have to start again and craft what is doable.”
What is “doable,” is a plan that both entities agree upon, because district officials and teachers agree that without some sort of consensus, nothing will change.
“We have, I think, a good map but if our teachers don’t work with us, it’s not going to work,” Schaad said. “We really don’t want a math plan being held hostage by people who don’t want to work with us.”
But an unwillingness to work with the district doesn’t even begin to illustrate Kelly’s frustration with the plan. The outspoken advocate of math achievement improvement has attended numerous school board meetings and the district’s math seminars to voice her opinion. Kelly’s initial reaction after first reviewing the proposal, was that it’s a good starting point.
But because the plan stated that it was a draft she thought it was “a work in progress,” and was surprised when the district placed it before the board for approval. Kelly is afraid that if the current plan is pushed through, nothing will change.
The plan doesn’t include any specifics concerning what happens to students who don’t possess basic math skills, fails to explain the definition of rigor, even though it’s sprinkled throughout the plan and is not specific enough, specifically for the elementary level.
Also, it doesn’t define student accountability or how teachers will be evaluated, Kelly said.
But Diaz said the plan is meant to be a framework and the next step is to break-down specific strategies, year-by-year. And he doesn’t agree with the assertion that the plan doesn’t include accountability.
He pointed out that the district possesses loads of data on student achievement. Students are tested by the state through the California Standards Test and given the district’s assessment three times a year
“Believe me there’s not a lack of accountability in implementing anything,” he said.
Every teacher will receive an invite via e-mail prior to the Aug. 3 board meeting, to attend a meeting to review the math plan.
