Elementary Comprehensive Assessment System Introduced At School Committee Meeting

At Tuesday night’s school committee meeting, Assistant Superintendent James Erinakes and Professional Development Director Amy Anzalone presented the Elementary Comprehensive Assessment System to the school committee for the first time.

According to Erinakes, the system will evaluate students and help to prevent problems for students that seem to be at risk in areas of learning in the classroom.

“This is very different from a special education program because with that we have to wait till students show a gap in performance and there is some kind of discrepancy before we could take action,” Erinakes said.

He says they want to spend their time preventing students from having difficulties in the class by finding out and addressing potential problems for students, rather than waiting till the problem is more extensive. After it is decided that a student has a potential for future difficulties or is considered at risk, a plan of action and realistic goal is created.

Erinakes said that they want to make sure that whatever kind of intervention takes place is working and is successful.

Students are evaluated three times a year by an outside group that comes into the school specifically for the purpose of doing the screening.

This system will also be used to track students behavior and formulate behavioral data tables for the school so that teachers might possibly incorporate some of that information into their classrooms and lessons.

Another part of the new system will be to help the the principals track progress in key areas, such as in the level of student work and evidence of the learning objective.

“This is very exciting work that we are very passionate about,” Anzalone said. “I think this is definitely the right thing for our students.”

School Committee Chairperson Katherine Patenaude agreed with Anzalone and said she hopes this same kind of system can be implemented in the high school and middle schools in future years.

District Improvement Plan

Superintendent of Schools Michael L. Convery briefly explained that after the and after receiving some feedback, the changes made were mostly grammatical and didn’t affect the meaning of the text at all.

CHS Attendance Committee Update

CHS Assistant Principal and Attendance Review Committee (ARC) chairwoman, Susan Chandler, spoke to the school committee to update them on the changes being made to the .

Chandler told the committee about how in the past, students' families were not notified of a student being absent until they had about 10 absent days accrued. She believes that if they intervene after a student is absent for three or four days and find out why the student is absent so much, it will save them having to bring students to court.

“We want to find out the reasons the students are absent so much and help the family solve any problems as much as possible; we want to be supportive of these families and students,” Chandler said. “Although we currently have a fairly good attendance rate, I think we can do better in the future.”