The other article is titled, Promoting AYP for Students with Disabilities through Planning, Resources and Support. Both articles should be on the Superintendent Timothy Steinhauer's reading list since Mt. Lebanon School District has been issued a warning. In fact, it should be required reading for the assistant superintendents, as well as the school board president who feel that the legislation is ridiculous.
Update September 12, 2012 11:06 PM In today's Almanac, Avalanche of testing looms for Mt. Lebo students (saved in Google Docs)
"I think this is one of the more ridiculous pieces of legislation districts in the Commonwealth must abide by," said board president Jo Posti. "I would challenge legislators to find a district that serves these subgroups better than Mt. Lebanon."Contact elected officials, as in elected school board officials, Josephine? Did the School District appeal? Or did they miss the deadline? Does MTLSD ever take responsibility or is it always someone else's fault in Harrisburg?
She added that she had spoken with state Rep. Matt Smith (D-Mt. Lebanon) regarding the issue on several occasions, and urged concerned community members to contact elected officials as well.
Update September 13, 2012 12:27 PM Today's PG has a great article written by Molly Born with Mary Niederberger. PSSA results come up short in Mt. Lebanon, Bethel Park
6 comments:
This was emailed to me and the person would like to remain anonymous.
Elaine
The District has a well-earned reputation for failing students with special needs. There are pockets of individuals that take their job seriously but too often their opinions and recommendations are overridden by central office staff. Parents of these children are already overburdened and rarely have the energy or the financial means to legally challenge decisions made by staff.
I wish I could say I am shocked at these results but I am not. My family once had a principal who had no idea what it meant when I said my child was entitled to a "free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment possible". The laws on the books regarding special needs kids are quite strong but the District rolls the dice and often tries to reduce needed services when it serves the District.
Like I said, it is not the school staff (principals are the most powerful people in the process and special needs teachers and specialists are a close second) but it all comes from the culture permeating through central office staff and the role they think they should play in the process. Central office can legitimately and without consultation with parents deny services.
Quite honestly, this culture, this AYP failure, should immediately be placed as Dr. Tim's top goal for this school year. Investigate why this happened and replace (don't remediate) the person or people responsible.
Elaine, do you remember the blog where the lady was having problems with staff? She posted some of the most outrageous stories about this stuff and I, for one, had many similar experiences.
"Ridiculous"
What is ridiculous ... is that the report received this reaction at all.
How about reaffirming the District's commitment to "To Provide the Best Education Possible for Each and Every Student" as reported on its website?
It can't be that the Board first saw the results that evening during the presentation, spontaneity is not in their vocabulary. Mrs. Posti presumably had ample time to prepare her sound bite(s).
If it was their first glimmer -- a more appropriate response after reaffirming as above, would have been to say: "Dr. Steinhauer, please take a post-it and report back to the Community with your plan."
While none of my three daughters had special needs, in the 37 years during which I have lived in Mt. Lebanon I have had conversations with neighbors who did have kids attending District schools on IEP's (Individual Educational Plans). I also taught one year at Parkway West (out of my 23 years of teaching), where I encountered one or two kids from Mt. Lebanon who were special needs kids and placed in Parkway on IEP's. Based on these experiences, the best I can say about the District's attention to kids with special needs is that it is mixed, at best. However, there is another dynamic at work here.
The Board's reaction to any criticism of the District is to "circle the wagons" - as one might expect bureaucrats to do when their agency is under investigation. But the Board is NOT a bureaucracy. They are supposed to be a governing body OVER the District, and not a cheer leading section for it. Just as a Federal Grand Jury is not supposed to help the government make a case against someone, but rather see if the government has the evidence to bring charges, the Board's job is to see to it that the District "behaves itself" and provides education to the youth of Mt. Lebanon.
Mrs. Posti may not like the new testing rules, but her job is to see to it that the District complies with them; she can "go political" the next time she runs for office.
One hundred percent compliance with NCLB tests is an impossible goal for schools to meet for several reasons.
1) Some courses are not as interesting to individual students as others. In my case, biology was not that interesting and I didn’t have the enthusiasm for it that I did for other science and math classes. If I caught a fish I would gut it and clean it but cutting frogs just didn’t interest me.
2) The scoring for NCLB was rigged for schools to fail. If you are a student who doesn’t score well on tests you are one mark against the score. If the same student is also an ESL student you are counted as two marks against the score. If that student is a member of another scored group he/she count as three marks against the 100% score.
In other words, the scoring was set initially for schools to fail, so it was obvious from the beginning that a 2014 goal of 100% proficient would begin to fall apart about 2012. But don’t just take my word for it because I raised this question with Dr. Sable before she left in 2004 and she gave me the same answer eight years ago,
As a former board member I congratulate our faculty and staff for scoring for preparing our students to score as well as they did; it is an outstanding achievement and we should all be glad our children get a ML education because in my opinion our staff cares about our children.
Will the District disclose to the public the specific plan to achieve AYP for high school students with special needs ?
Bill Lewis
John,
My only correction would be to congratulate the staff on preparing our "regular" students for the tests. Yes, 100% proficiency was always a joke no matter what school district you are in.
However, based on Jo's comment and Tim's comment ("We had 44 students where if we had only 40 we wouldn't have had to subgroup them) they are looking at this all wrong.
Next year they will figure out a way to get rid of four of the students from the subgroup and therefore group them in with the "normal" kids. Of course, that may bring down the proficiency numbers.
Lest anyone wonder if this is an issue, why don't you look around to our neighboring school districts and see if they couldn't make AYP for this "subgroup". I don't recall USC getting this same warning, the only question is whether they had more than 40 students that qualified to be subgrouped.
And yes, my stomach turns everytime I write that word. Let's treat every kid the same, well, until we have to subgroup them.
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