Curriculum Improvements BOE’s Top Priority for 2013-14 School Year

The Englewood Board of Education made its state of the district presentation to a packed room Thursday night, laying out curriculum improvement as a priority in a proposed 2013-14 budget that would represent a 1.1 percent increase over this year.

Reflecting on the challenges facing the district since he took the post in 2011, Superintendent Donald Carlisle cited failures of the curriculum to bring students up to state standards as one of the top issues facing the district.

“We had an incomplete and random curriculum,” he said, referring to the state of the district when he came to Englewood. “We still do, to a degree, but we made some gains.”

The district has taken steps to improve the curriculum, he said, most notably by centralizing the decision-making to prevent overlap, hiring an assistant superintendent for curriculum, and establishing a Curriculum and Instruction Department.

With the budget proposed Thursday night, Board President Stephen Brown said, a key challenge was operating under fiscal constraints without backtracking on these gains.

“We’re having to do a lot more with a lot less,” he said. “And when we looked around and surveyed other districts over the past 18 months on how they were handling these challenges, what we saw is that they were doing the obvious...cutting student programs and enlarging class sizes.”

Measures, he asserted, that have been avoided with the board’s proposed budget.

The budget, Brown said, will help the district bring students up to core curriculum standards by supplementing state standardized tests with local assessments. Tests will be performed three times a year—more often for students performing below grade level—to help teachers prepare students for the state tests such as NJ ASK and the HSPA.

“Part of this budget focuses on bringing in a system of diagnostics that will allow administrators and teachers, in a much quicker time frame than waiting on state testing or federal testing, to understand and address where the deficits are,” Brown said.

“If we test our children on a regular basis in house, and mock the state test, when they sit down for a state test, whether it’s with a pencil or a computer, they’ll feel comfortable,” added Carlisle.

The initiative is reflected in increased expenditures for staff training and improvement of instruction services, up a combined total to $1,410,046, from $499,351 this year.

The district is also moving toward a centralized system for the collection of student data, from which administrators would be able to develop individual academic plans for students.

“Teacher teams will meet on a regular basis to review and analyze data to plan lessons and ground instruction,” Carlisle said.

Brown claimed that the proposed budget is essentially flat, except for contractual increases in salaries and benefits.

“We got our act together in finance,” Carlisle said, citing fiscal problems that had persisted in the last three years, leading to a budget freeze late last year.

The board also closed a $4 million budget gap in 2012 through cuts to district staff, and could pay as much as $2 million in unemployment contributions this year, according to business administrator Maria Engeleit.

Nonetheless, the proposed budget would require a 2 percent increase in the board’s tax levy on the city, the maximum allowed under state law.

If approved, the owner of an average Englewood home, assessed at $458,000, would pay $5,239 in fiscal year 2014—$73 more than 2013.

Brown said that the budget would meet the goals laid out for curriculum improvement without cutting funding to any student programs or extra-curricular activities.

“I’m happy to say that, consistent with what we did, where this budget is going for 2013/2014 is that we’ve given the mandate...that we do not want to see cuts in our very robust programs, or increases in class sizes,” he said.

The budget will be put to referendum in a vote April 16.