Coalition for Glen Cove

Glen Cove School District Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction, Technology, and Grants, Shari Camhi, was the invited speaker at the December meeting of the Coalition for Glen Cove.

Dr. Camhi said that one of the goals of the administration was to make school a place where students want to come to learn and where the things they learn are useful in today’s society. She, together with Superintendent of Schools Laurence Aronstein, have met with all the members of the central administration, building principals and assistant principals, teachers, Parent Teacher Associations and PTA leaders to discuss teaching and learning and how to improve the operation of the schools.

One of the questions being asked is why standardized test grades, especially in mathematics, drop sharply between the third and eighth grades. One of the answers may be that third-grade tests require only basic manipulation, that is, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, while eight-grade tests require logical thinking that starts with the ability to read English carefully and understand how mathematics is used. Teachers in all grades are emphasizing careful reading and logical deduction. The new state-required tests in third through eighth grades will allow students, parents, and teachers to evaluate the progress students are making each year.

Tracy Worthy has joined the district as a student attendance supervisor. She is using a new attendance and student monitoring system as well as calls to parents and home visits to track which students come to school each day and attend every class, which students actually live in the district, and which students have moved to other districts or have dropped out of school. Some numbers that are reported to New York State, such as the fraction of students in a grade who have taken the required standardized test for that grade, have in the past been distorted by counting students who were never actually in school. To maintain accurate numbers every student will reregister early in 2006.

Dr. Camhi is responsible for a new website for the Glen Cove schools that will be in operation in a few weeks and will include more information for parents, teachers, and students, such as course outlines, homework assignments, school board meeting announcements and minutes, and links to useful educational and community websites.

The school district has arranged for a SAT test review program to be available on the internet to every student. Since the SAT tests and the Preliminary SAT tests are used by college admission offices to make admission and scholarship award decisions they are important to students in ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. The test preparation programs are free to students; the administration and guidance office encourage their use.

Glen Cove teachers are saying this year that the staff development program is the most useful they have seen, they feel they are listened to and are valued, and they enjoy coming to work. Teachers who are new this year had a development program during the summer and will have a fifteen hour course during this school year. The district hopes to be able to send teachers to see other districts similar to Glen Cove that have developed new programs that work exceptionally well. Teachers are receptive to new ways of doing things.

Susan Breen, English coordinator for the Glen Cove School District, was the guest speaker at the Coalition for Glen Cove November 2005 meeting. Mrs. Breen, who is retiring at the end of December after thirty years of teaching and administration (including three years in Glen Cove), spoke about Glen Cove’s progress in English teaching in the past three years, about excellent students and teachers, and about what still needs to be done.

Through the Nassau County Board of Cooperative Educational Services data warehouse, teachers can now see state test results by subject, class, and student. Lists of wrong answers and the probable reasons for them are also on line.

Teachers have prepared course outlines for middle- and high-school English classes based on New York State standards and on standardized tests. There is increased teaching of reading comprehension and vocabulary, and, in seventh to twelfth grades, increased teaching of how to write as well as practice in writing. Although it takes a surprisingly long time to change attitudes and procedures in a school system, when school leaders respect teachers, teachers accept suggestions and accept change.

Through interdisciplinary efforts between social studies and English classes, students, now are seeing the interconnectedness of these discipline areas. More of such interdisciplinary work is planned for other departments as well. Students are coming to realize that it is not enough to know the material but that it is also necessary to understand and use it outside the classroom.

Glen Cove has been helped by teaching consultants in the middle school provided by the Nassau Board of Cooperative Educational Services. An excellent consultant in the high school raised the test scores of many students from failing to passing in just a few weeks. Unfortunately, the voters’ rejection of the Glen Cove school budget has forced the district to reduce the number of days that consultant worked in Glen Cove from sixty days a year to fifteen.

When Mrs. Breen arrived in Glen Cove several years ago the combined budget for textbooks and workbooks for both the middle and high school was $20 thousand and there was a severe shortage of books. That budget has now been increased to $82 thousand and includes test preparation books for the mandatory state assessments as well as a wide variety of trade books, vocabulary books, and classroom readers for grades five to twelve.

Unfortunately, although the libraries are becoming more student and teacher friendly, the school and classroom libraries still do not have some of the materials that students need and teachers would like to assign. The school libraries would benefit from modernization to include new teacher and student workstations and video screens for use by the librarians in teaching library and research lessons.

English as a Second Language courses are taught at three levels and most students go from the third level directly into regular English courses. There are many brilliant students who start in English as a Second Language courses, continue to do well in the rest of their school career, and go on to college and to leadership positions.