Presentation of Findings: Outside Educational Experts consulting with RCSD

Event Details

Time: August 12, 2014 from 7pm to 8pm
Location: Central Office RCSD, Conference Rm 3A
Street: 131 West Broad Street
City/Town: Rochester
Website or Map: https://maps.google.com/maps?…
Phone: 585-262-8100
Event Type: meeting, review
Organized By: RCSD
Latest Activity: Aug 17, 2014

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Event Description

My apologies... I just noticed I had had failed to enter the date of the meeting as the 12th and the system defaulted to the date of posting. THIS MEETING TONIGHT.

In an effort to increase transparency and community involvement with school improvement processes, the School Board now requires the Outside Educational Experts who we hire as consultants to work with the "Integrated Intervention Teams" to summarize their district-wide findings to the community in a public meeting. The venue for this will be next week's Excellence in Student Achievement Committee meeting. Here is the Board' press release:

August 8, 2014

Education Experts to Present Findings regarding RCSD Priority and Focus Schools to the Board of Education Excellence in Student Achievement Committee

External education experts will present the findings of their diagnostic review of District priority and focus schools in the Board of Education Excellence in Student Achievement Committee meeting on Tuesday, August 12th. The meeting is scheduled to begin at approximately 7:00PM, immediately following the Community & Intergovernmental Relations Committee meeting. The Excellence in Student Achievement Committee meeting will be held in the third-floor conference room of the Central Office Building, located at 131 West Broad Street. This meeting is open to the public, and parents and community members are invited to attend.

The external education experts were retained by the District in October 2013 to perform reviews of RCSD priority and focus schools, as required by NYS Commissioner regulations.

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Comment by John Boutet on August 17, 2014 at 2:17am: I've just finished uploading a video I shot of the Tuesday meeting. Here is a link to the video: http://youtu.be/hg9BR7OLbVQ.

I was running low on battery and storage but most of the meeting is captured.

Comment by John Boutet on August 16, 2014 at 5:47pm: Yes Bill the alphabet soup was a bit confusing for most of us who don't live at Central Office. I have been spending much of my time for the past two years on school issues and I had to look those up and that takes some doing. I have yet to find a nice acronym glossary on the RCSD web site. The Board members may have had no problems following the jargon but the people who pay the taxes that pay RCSD salaries just had one more thing to be irritated about and one more reason to think twice about coming to the next meeting. A person I spoke to at another AQE/Metro Justice Education Committee meeting last night mentioned the same thing about that meeting which she also attended.

I'm going to post a video of that meeting a little later today and I did include a slide at the beginning with a few definitions. It is really too bad for the language barrier because I think there was a lot of hope to be gotten out of the things that got said in common English. Unfortunately, given human nature, the irritation of the undefined acronyms makes it doubly hard to follow what is understandable.

Comment by Bill Nichthauser on August 16, 2014 at 12:35pm: The (online) article in City Newspaper covered the proceedings pretty well, though Mr. Macaluso did not explain, or explicate on, the meanings of the acronyms used by the consultants. Their language was, to the layperson like me, "eduspeak." I had and have no idea what what are "APPR," "SCEP," to name two that I recall. The word "differentiation" seemed to be used in a way not applicable to the common sense meaning.

True, these "experts" were talking to people familiar with such terminologies, and the public--at lease I--was pretty much left in the dark.

I felt that Van White's having said that relationships were all important, and Cynthia Ellliot's sentiments about the recommendations being so complicated (if my memory serves me correctly) were on target.

My feelings, just based upon what I heard, are that the District wasted a lot of money and that much time and energy was misappropriated. Not that all parties didn't try, but like so many supposed solutions tried and trumpeted at least since the great school reform of 1987, it ain't going anywhere.

Comment by John Boutet on August 15, 2014 at 2:48am: I was very impressed by the presentation and after hearing the presentation had more confidence that the evaluations the experts provide are accurate.

This City Newspaper article By Tim Louis Macaluso does a great job of reviewing what was said at the meeting.

http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/rochester/many-city-teachers-...