NUSD Superintendent's Update

Dear Novato Community,

As I mentioned in my message at the beginning of the school year, I am very excited to be back in Novato as the Superintendent of NUSD. The past six months have been filled with meeting with principals, teachers, classified staff, parents, and students as well as community groups and members to learn what is working at NUSD and what can be improved. We have either begun new initiatives or continued ones from last year to ensure our students, your children, are getting the best education possible.

Graduate Profile – Education today is more than learning the basics of math facts and writing reports. I met with various local employers last fall and they shared that the employees they’re looking for need to be able to communicate (written and verbal), work with others, and be able to problem solve. I also met with students from our middle and high schools and they expressed wanting to learn how to manage their time, be more financial literate (how to balance a checkbook, etc.), and how to better communicate (public speaking, business communication, etc.) are a few of the skills they shared.

With this information, we began developing a Graduate Profile with the help of the newly formed District Advisory Committee (comprised of teachers, principals, parents, students and community members). After 3 day-long meetings, a Graduate Profile was developed which we call the 6 C’s:

Collaboration, Communication and Critical Thinking – Skills that will be taught and assessed by our teachers. These are 21st Century Skills that are linked to California State Standards and the curriculum associated with those standards.

Cultural Competence, Character and Conscientious Learner (self-management) – Skills that will not be assessed but will be the responsibility of each school to integrate into their school plan.

Many of these skills are already taught in our schools, however, we want to ensure that our students graduate from the Novato Unified School District with these skills so they are college and career ready.

Facilities – To support our students, we need to further update our classrooms, labs and learning technology to support the 6 C’s and 21st Century learning. NUSD is undertaking a comprehensive education facilities master plan to understand the needs of our schools and district. The completed master plan will outline the specific facility improvements needed at each of our schools to fully enable NUSD to provide our students with a rigorous and engaging education. All of the schools will be meeting with the WLC Architects twice to understand the needs of the schools. More information can be found on the Education Facility Master Plan webpage.

NUSD has recently contracted with Solar City to install solar panels at many of our schools. The process to install solar panels at our schools began last fall with the engagement of Sage Renewables to perform a feasibility study and provide a recommendation of options for installing solar systems at all or some of District’s sites. Community meetings were held to hear community input and the determination of the final locations of the solar systems are currently underway.

English Learner Development – NUSD began working with Kevin Clark Consulting (KCC) in the summer of 2015 with staff for the Newcomer Program at Novato High School. KCC specializes in supporting schools and districts with training and implementation coaching in the areas of language development, literacy and performance-based classroom coaching.

In addition, Melissa Diaz is NUSD’s English Learner Coordinator providing support to the teaching staff in the implementation of strategies in direct interaction with students to ensure improved student achievement. Among her many responsibilities, Ms. Diaz will oversee the CELDT (California English Development Test) implementation, staff development for English Language Development (ELD), the Newcomer Program at Novato High School, and the implementation of ELD curriculum from Kevin Clark Consulting.

1:1 Technology Pilot Program - The dramatic increase in digital devices and the Internet has provided students with continuous access to a variety of resources that allows them to create multimedia content, communicate with people from around the world, and access information instantaneously. We recognize the need for a digital transformation in our classrooms that provides our students with the skills that allow them to be a successful member of this digital, global community.

The purpose of the 1:1 technology pilot is to explore and understand how a full 1:1 technology implementation might work. This 1:1 technology pilot is for a select group of teachers at each school level (elementary, middle and high school) who have been chosen through an application process. It also includes a teacher who primarily works with English learners to evaluate the impact of technology on our EL students’ language and academic progress. The teachers in this pilot were selected based on their current level of effective technology use in the classroom and their willingness to innovate and learn by having one-to-one access to student technology. The teachers had the choice of technology: chrome books, Surface, or iPads. Through the course of the pilot we will provide support to the teachers in the integration of the technology through the use of collaborative teacher meetings, on-site technical support, and other professional learning experiences.

New Websites: Responding to information received from staff and the community regarding our websites, NUSD has contracted with Entropic Studio in San Rafael to redesign and develop a new district website and websites for all schools to better engage our parents, students and the community. The new websites will ‘go live’ on July 1, 2016.

Jim Hogeboom