ABERDEEN — Reforming curriculum and improving test scores is the goal for the Matawan-Aberdeen Regional School District (MARSD) for the 2010-11 academic year, emphasizing a focus on student achievement despite a $2.9 million reduction in state aid.
The district welcomed 3,918 students on Sept. 2.
According to Superintendent Richard O’Malley, the district is focusing on three academic areas in need of improvement: mathematics at Matawan Regional High School (MRHS), social studies at Matawan Aberdeen Middle School (MAMS), and reading and writing at the elementary levels from kindergarten through fifth grade.
“Student achievement remains and always will be our center focus,” O’Malley said in an interview on Sept. 7. “It [the three areas] is where we see we could use some improvement. They are also areas we want to continue to update.”
To achieve these goals, the district is working with a New Jersey-based company called Standards Solutions, Washington Township, which helps public school districts increase standardized test scores with child-centered instruction. O’Malley said the company will be working with high school mathematics teachers to help bring partially proficient students to the proficient level on the state-mandated High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA) test.
On the 2009 HSPA exam, district data shows that 72.1 percent of students at MRHS were proficient in mathematics, up 0.3 percent from 2008. The 2009 state average for HSPA math scores was 72.7 percent, according to the New Jersey Department of Education (DOE), which closely aligns with the student performance at the high school.
But O’Malley wants the proficiency numbers to increase significantly in 2010- 11.
“The high school is still a struggle for us, so that’s what we are really focusing on this year,” O’Malley said. “Half of our district is advanced proficient in math. We have come a long way. We really see it as a high school area to fix.”
For the middle and elementary schools, the district also purchased new social studies textbooks for middle school students and is in the process of re-writing the curriculum for language arts at Cliffwood, Ravine Drive, Strathmore and Lloyd Road elementary schools.
“We are really focusing on our writing skills in the elementary levels,” said O’Malley, who wants to see more advanced proficiency on the New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge (NJ ASK) exam, a multi-grade assessment that students take each year from third to eighth grade.
“It is pretty amazing: math scores say [grade] 3 through 8 have been pretty significant,” he said. “We’ve shown pretty large advancements in student achievement.”
Following earlier goals set by administrators and the Board of Education, the district is expanding its in-house special education programs and infusing technology across each academic building.
During the 2009-10 school year, MARSD was awarded $1.7 million in federal stimulus money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which has played a role in new special education initiatives. This year, five new special education classes were added at the pre-kindergarten and elementary levels, including programs for students with autism.
“When we received our stimulus money, we actually held onto a majority of that money for the ensuing school year, which is the year we are in,” O’Malley said. “We’ve used a lot of it because we knew that money would not be there, but we knew this year would be the year we would have to utilize it.
“We’ve used it in places where, in essence, [there is] nonrecurring revenue, like technology, to start infrastructure for new special-ed programs. We did hire a behaviorist and a literacy coach, which will eventually have to come back to the local budget. We actually did not use a large portion of that money in the beginning. We saved it for the back end, which is really the strategy that we have, which really helped put us in a better financial position this year.”
Over the summer, the district used a technology grant to purchase 38 interactive Promethean boards, which were installed during the week of Aug. 2. The boards connect to the district’s computer server, where teachers can access academic resources, interactive software, video clips and lesson plans.
“Everything they [students] do in the classroom, they can do on the boards,” said Greg Farley, the district’s director of technology, adding that the new boards require a pedagogical approach in addition to computer training. “You have this tool here, but this technology does not improve learning … teachers do. Our teachers implementing this are what make this successful. Just putting a board in a new classroom not going to do it.”
Farley said the technology staff performed summer computer maintenance throughout July and August, including the installation of small compact individual computers that connect to a large server network, monitored by the district’s systems manager, Kevin Dugal.
“It saves us maintenance time because we can maintain it [the server] from here, and there are [fewer] things that break,” Farley said.
Additionally, teachers, principals and secretaries received summer training in the district’s content management system for attendance and grading. The design of the program, Farley explained, creates greater accountability for both student progress and teacher performance.
“Grading and progress reports are now done electronically, so it’s really brought us into the 21st century,” he said. “It’s not done by hand and it’s not done on a spreadsheet. It is all clicked, and now it is all gathered and we have all that data available so we know where every student is.”
Moving forward, O’Malley said the district is fiscally and academically stable under its 2010-11 $59 million spending plan.
On average, O’Malley said, the district budget raised taxes only 1.33 percent over the last three years. The 2008-09 school year budget had a 1 percent tax increase, and the 2009-10 budget had a zero percent increase, and this year, a 2 percent tax increase, or $304,067 tax levy.
After the 2010-11 budget failed at the polls, the district budget was cut by an additional $571,000 by the Aberdeen Township and Matawan Borough councils. Based on the reductions in state aid, approximately 80 teachers and 32 janitorial staff members were laid off.
“I think, ultimately, we all talked about developing this budget, but I think living within the budget is much harder than developing it,” O’Malley said. “It’s much harder, given the cuts that were made, to live within the budget than to develop the budget.”
However, O’Malley is optimistic that the state’s multibillion-dollar budget deficit will not affect the district’s goals for academic improvements and reforms. MARSD was designated as a “high performing district” by the state Department of Education in April, and the administration hopes to continue the upward trend.
“I think what most people realize is that school districts are pretty resilient,” O’Malley said. “We know at the end of the day we still have a job of educating students, so teachers know despite the attacks on the profession and despite all that’s going on, we have a staff here that every day come to work and continue to work hard to educate our kids.”