School superintendent outlines goals for year




Superintendent of Schools Dr. Robert Feirsen presented the district goals for Garden City Public Schools on Wednesday, September 9 at the board’s first work session of the year. Goals have been strategically formed based on what has already taken shape in the schools, what lies ahead with curricula and demographic needs, and what the student population and their families have told school administrators in middle school and high school surveys.

What Garden City Schools are doing and what lies on its “To-Do List” maintained the bulk of Dr. Feirsen’s presentation. He says several district goals constitute an ongoing process of innovation and evolution, achieving “something meaningful and challenging to achieve.” He linked the district goals to accountability and said that “goals recognize the value of risk-taking.”

“If we stick to safe stuff we’re not going to really challenge ourselves to do better and we are not going to stay on top of the heap,” Feirsen said.

One of the keys to the new school year will be a curriculum review for health education in the district Garden City’s first move is organizing a K through 12 committee for the task, led by district Athletic Director Dawn Cerrone. The committee is charged with investigating health education programs in other districts, identifying best practices and cross-disciplinary connections, and reviewing Garden City’s current materials, scope, sequences, standards and assessments.

Staff development was identified as one area in which students’ needs were not fully met. Academic vocabulary will be a major priority for Garden City Schools going forward. The plan is for grades 5 and 6 to have a collaboration (from the administration and faculty) on social studies and academic vocabulary. This will address gaps in between the two stages, elementary and middle school. Ideas to implement the collaboration have included lunch-and-learn meetings where staff sat down with each other and read books, talking about the value of the book for each grade level and their classes. Feirsen describes these sessions as setting the tone for a transition within the schools and continuing education of the children.

In Garden City’s primary schools the vocabulary will build around math concepts and math resources, place value, listening skills, and report card standards. The Middle School calendar is frequently updated with vocabulary, lending itself for the district to try several complimentary methods of implementation at one time. Meanwhile at the high school level, vocabulary will be a renewed focus in science subjects and world languages. Another goal is centered on identifying issues for college and career vocabulary.

“One of the great keys to success in post-secondary work is having a great vocabulary. Not just for use in everyday work but with academic vocabulary in use in journals and courses at the college level. We think we all have a part in preparing our students for that, beginning in kindergarten. A lot of these initiatives work together and create an energy and accomplishment that would not be achieved if we did not come at it from several different directions at one time,” Feirsen said.

He mentioned the primary school’s all-purpose rooms (gym) which have “word walls” with themes of physical education and health activities.

College readiness will be a concentration for Garden City like never before. The district is active with LIRACHE, the Long Island Regional Advisory Committee on Higher Education which represents most area universities. The group has spawned a subcommittee called the Superintendents-College Presidents Partnership, described by its co-chair Dr. Feirsen as an attempt to bridge the gap between school districts and colleges.

“We have been working to figure out what collegeready means for Long Island. Everybody uses the term, but what does it actually mean if we looked at a student? We have several study groups looking at the question, and one is examining college completion and whether or not a student finishes in four years or not, or if they took AP courses and participated in music or sports. Another group is looking at the programs out there that are successful in helping kids make the transition from high school to college. All transitions are difficult but that one is particularly difficult and fraught with anxiety for parents and students alike,” Dr. Feirsen said. The district’s plan includes a pilot study, with focus groups of high school seniors and families this school year.

New regulations for the Affordable Care Act reporting within public school systems also creates a new goal for Garden City. The district has hired a consultant to keep up with the latest regulations as they emerge. Developing a database and expanding it for implementation of ACA reporting is a new initiative this year.

“This is a very complex, mammoth project, overwritten by the IRS,” Feirsen said.

Internal auditors are also being followed to tighten Garden City Schools’ belt, although the superintendent says there were only glowing reviews of the schools’ current operations. Payroll and its processing, a huge district activity, Garden City Schools’ transportation department were the focus and a few minor recommendations were made.

“When you think of how much of the budget payroll occupies you can imagine the scope of the activity. We got a strong report back on our internal controls and procedures. With the recommendations, presentations were made to the board’s audit committee and new focus areas will be selected this year, as we have not finished implementing their recommendations,” Feirsen said.

When it came time to outline the wish list of goals for the year, a chief consideration was the use and strategies for the funding reserve established along with the budget vote in May.

“We have an aging physical plant and the youngest of our buildings is now approaching 60 years or so, and things were never designed with current-day security levels and issues in mind,” Feirsen said as he discussed security initiatives Garden City Schools have undertaken.

A goal for the year is developing an RFP for a district architect, which was planned to be brought before the school board at its Wednesday, September 16 meeting. The plans this year include developing a list of capital projects and developing “priorities for first projects.”

The fund is scheduled to last eight years, so a stepby step vision will be attempted.

Another goal was related to the approval of a leasepurchase agreement for 1,000 iPads and Chromebooks at the board’s August 7 meeting, as a “next phase” of technology initiatives will come to Garden City Schools. During summer staff members participated in district workshops, led by a new staff developer who also worked to train new teachers. A technical support staffer was also hired to work with Dr. Rita Melikian, the district’s technology director. The position is responsible for “frontline break-fix things and to be a help desk” to receive calls for technical support and provide immediate solutions.

Under the umbrella of technology, Feirsen says the district made strides by outfitting the first classroom for the Project Lead the Way Engineering course at the high school. The high school has doubled up its bandwidth this year as well.

“We keep gobbling up bandwidth because the applications get more and more intense, using video and things like that,” Feirsen said.

On the list for the year was “one to one deployment of devices.” Feirsen says the BYOD (bring your own device) experiment last school year at Garden City High proved the hypothesis of being a cost-efficient way to address school district technology needs. However there were mixed results, and with devices not standardized (iPhones of all models) it was very hard to manage the various Apple products. Feirsen says equipment using Microsoft Windows was much easier to manage but there are many different Android devices. Another caveat with the BYOD system became ensuring student security through the internet. The district does have a contract with a cyber security vendor that meets state standards for student privacy protection.

“When you can manage stuff from only one platform, you control what data gets sent to phones and access and what is recorded. Many of these apps, whether you realize it or not, ask for identifying information. When everybody brings their own device and each has its own apps, we are not sure what’s on it and when they are using it or not, that security issue looms large,” Dr. Feirsen explained.

He says BYOD has a place in the district with students in 10th grade or above, but no one younger. The plan now is to set aside the 1,000 new devices the district acquired for in-school use only.

“We are proposing to shift gear to recommend one to one deployment, although the kids won’t go home with devices, we will have them there for everyone. It’s a better arrangement security-wise and managementwise,” he said.

That plan translates to the further use of Google apps and Google Classroom, which Feirsen says are controllable. “Common apps” are also in the district’s technology plans. Feirsen says so many apps are developed by ordinary people each day, and selecting prevalent apps will be a way to avoid the lack of standardization and management for each, without limitations of different devices.

Board member Tom Pinou asked Dr. Feirsen about the continued use of the flipped classroom techniques in the district, as first reported in January 2014 with a presentation by Garden City Schools’ technology task force, specifically teachers Michael Stano (science) and Allison Moss (special education). Feirsen replied that in addition to those subjects, 2015-’16 will see flipped classroom methods used for math and world languages.

A big announcement at the work session was related to technology, as Dr. Feirsen later said that there would be a high school robotics team formed this school year.

After the presentation, new school board member William Holub said that the district goals were very ambitious but he cautioned that it may be too high of a reach to get each started.

“It is a very extensive list for the administration to set out on. My only concern is the idea of overpromising. The ability to achieve is just as important as setting the goals,” Holub said.

To that assertion, Dr. Feirsen replied that the risktaking is a goal in itself.

“The good thing about this is that it gets to organization to stretch, become even better, and it builds capacity. The corollary of that is we are dealing with the same group of people (staff) to do all this stuff. It’s not like we can be like MLB rosters in September and reach down in the minor leagues for more players to help us along.”

“What we have now is what we will deal with for the rest of the year, but the danger in that is if something else major comes along it adds to an already full plate. I do reserve the right to come back to the board and say we may not be able to do some things, and we can either table it entirely or label it a “doing” item that will take more than one year to do,” Feirsen said.



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