Thursday, February 25, 2010

Here's some reassuring news

Here's a few quotes from Dr. Mulqueen tonight around school reorganization:
amending community meetings for March and April: is it timely? what are we meeting about?potentially dealing with budget gap of $6 million
"don't have the same amount of urgency around some of these issues"
"To start fresh...introduce the concepts of change...not going to shift the whole system next year"
phasing in some secondary shifts, bring more focus to the courses offered, flexible use of staff, maybe turning South into innovation quadrant, certainly Level 4 schools

WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT YEAR:
  • Level 4 schools
  • innovation at South High
  • secondary issues around the districts in course shifts
"more time to take community input...want everyone to be on board"

2 comments:

T-Traveler said...

Level 4 schools
innovation at South High

can you explain what this means, and does innovation at South High
actually refer to the corner of the city that includes South High Community School?

Tracy Novick said...

Yes, I will here, and I'll add a post, too (these are just my notes).

The state is coming out with the list of which schools are Level 5 and Level 4 (which is the latest terminology for underperforming schools) next week. Those schools are the ones that will be looked at in terms of possible reorganization (would they, for example, work better, if they were split differently by grade?).

The South High Quadrant is being looked at (it sounds as though the administration is indeed planning on it) for an innovation quadrant. This would be a larger version of the innovation schools that the Governor asked for and got in the Ed Reform bill. I expect we'll be hearing a great deal more about that.