Action in Brief

9/25/06 School Committee Meeting

· The Committee reviewed the first standard monthly Superintendent’s Personnel Report, which showed all the activity that has occurred over the summer. It was noted that there are 120 new Unit A members and 56 staff attained professional teaching status.

· Carolyn Wyatt, Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum & Instruction, and Jonathan Bassett, History & Social Sciences Department Head at Newton North High School, presented this topic. In the summer of 2005, a group of teachers and department heads from both high schools received a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Education to design a district-based teacher licensure program – the Newton Teacher Training Institute (NTTI). NTTI was approved by the State to grant initial teaching licenses in history, English, math, and three sciences (biology, chemistry, physics). Candidates will spend a year at the school site learning to teach under the guidance of experienced Newton teachers, who will be employed by NTTI as instructors of Methods of Teaching courses. It is anticipated that NTTI will improve performance of student teachers in Newton’s classroom, recruit a high quality and diverse teaching staff for the high schools, and retain the most talented and energetic teachers who can advance themselves by teaching in the program. Newton is the first community outside of underserved urban areas to be accredited by the State to offer this kind of program. It is hoped that if this model is successful it can be expanded to other grade levels.

· The Committee heard an update from Reenie Murphy around the status of the new School Committee website. The website subcommittee has been working with the Information Technology staff in designing the site, which will be a link on the Newton Public Schools site and no longer a separate entity. It was noted that this was an opportune time for change as the Newton Public Schools’ URL will change as of January 2007 from www.newtonpublicschools.com to a single address for both sites - www.newton.k12.ma.us. They plan to contract short-term services to assist the district in designing a template for uniformity and formatting for all users. A target date of 10/15 has been set for this transition, but the old site will be accessible through the end of the year. They will also need to develop a process to upload the archived documents that exist on the old site realizing that this may take months to transition every document to the new site. Documents will be accessible during this time on CD.

· The Committee continued its discussion on elementary short-term space planning, which is geared specifically to address classroom space needs at this level for September, 2007. They reviewed and discussed the database of inventory of space at all 15 elementary schools, which was presented by Michael Cronin, Chief of Operations, and Sandra Guryan, Assistant Superintendent for Business, Finance & Planning. At the next meeting they will be reviewing actual October 1 enrollments and seeing how those numbers impact the space in each building.

· The Committee approved their calendar/docket items for the year,

including most of the recommendations for additions that were requested by members at the last meeting. It was noted that this calendar is subject to changes throughout the year as the Committee and/or Superintendent deem necessary.