Marlboro schools ready to welcome back pupils
BY TALI ISRAELI
Staff Writer

MARLBORO - The carefree days of summer vacation are coming to an end with 6,200 pupils preparing to return to Marlboro schools on Sept. 6.

As the 2006-07 school year commences, Superintendent of Schools David Abbott and the administration will welcome back pupils in kindergarten through eighth grade, as well as 74.5 new employees.

Of the new staff, 67 individuals are replacements for people who resigned or retired, and 7.5 are new positions. Abbott said four of the new staff members are special education instructors and 3.5 are regular education teachers. Included in the replacement staff members, 58.5 are teachers, two are administrators and 13 are support personnel.

According to Assistant Superinten-dent Marc Gaswirth, as of Aug. 28, 6,129 students were enrolled in the district.

However, Gaswirth said the administration is predicting that between 6,200 and 6,220 students will be enrolled by the week of Sept. 7. He said that by the end of the 2006-07 school year, the district is expecting a total of 6,250 students to be enrolled.

There are currently 196 special education students enrolled in the district. Abbott said this number, which is expected to rise to between 225 and 250 students, only pertains to self-contained special education students.

One of Abbott's primary goals for the 2006-07 school year is to create a system in which all of the district's databases correlate with one another in order to track the students' success rates. According to the superintendent, there are various programs used by the district which provide the administration with particular student information.

The programs include SASI, a database which provides grades and absentee information on each student; Test Wiz, a web-based program that shows standardized test scores over a three-year period; and state testing databases, which track scores for NJ ASK and GEPA testing. Abbott added that report cards are a way to track classroom improvement over time.

Another program Abbott mentioned is a personnel database, which provides a list of what types of teachers a student has had over the years; highly qualified, experienced or new teachers. The superintendent said this may be a factor in terms of student achievement.

Abbott said he would like to implement a system that would combine all of the databases together to track which variables of these programs contributed to a student's success and those that did not.

"This is the next step to success to make the data seamless. This program will allow us to see the history of a student over time," Abbott said.

Other goals for the year include increasing student achievement throughout the district, focusing on special education and basic skills students, and ensuring that the Board of Education's recent decision to outsource the custodial staff works within the district.

In regard to the new custodial staff, Abbott said he is still confident the outsourcing will work.

"There's no doubt in my mind that the system will work. Like all new things there are issues to deal with," he added.

As for increasing student achievement, Abbott said the ERB standardized test is used as a way to benchmark improvement district-wide.

The ERB test is given to other wealthy suburban districts similar to Marlboro, Abbott said. The scores are used to determine where the Marlboro K-8 district falls short and where the district can work harder. The goal of the test is to help the district achieve more, Abbott said.

"This test is an apples to apples comparison," he added.

In the upcoming year, administrators are looking to implement new programs within the basic skills instruction (BSI). According to Abbott, students who are in the BSI program are not classified as special education students, but they do need extra assistance in language arts and math.

Due to their success rate, the district is planning to integrate two prescriptive programs into BSI that are currently being used by special education pupils. Prescriptive programs are scripted and provide teachers with several manuals to follow while teaching. Project Read and Moving with Math are two programs that have proved to be very effective in special education, Abbott said.

The goal is to increase time on task with students in kindergarten and first grade, which Abbott said could reduce the number of BSI students by second grade.

"The older the student gets, the less effective intervention is," he explained. "These kids need special intervention."

According to Abbott, Moving with Math is a program that starts students at the beginning and gives them the basic skills of math in order for them to move on to the next level. Study Island is an Internet program that Abbott said is also highly successful in teaching math.

"It is a self-driven, highly motivated math program," he added.

Although these programs will not be used in every classroom in the district, Abbott said it is a goal to train every kindergarten, first grade and second grade teacher in these programs.

The superintendent said there seems to be a real excitement from the teaching staff to learn these programs. The district has a good benchmark to know that these programs work, the superintendent added.

As for curriculum changes, Abbott said the state has altered the way English as a Second Language (ESL) is formatted. The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has driven the whole nation to teach ESL students the language of the core subjects in order for them to understand the content of social studies, math, science and language arts, Abbott said.

The tolerance curriculum, which is now called the prejudice reduction curriculum, will incorporate lessons on the Holocaust, genocides, the study of African-American history and conflict resolution.

In a related issue, Abbott said due to the district becoming more diverse, a character education curriculum will be implemented in the district to help students be more understanding of the diversity of the student body.

New textbooks and a new curriculum will be implemented in first through fourth grades and in eighth grade in the general music program. Abbott said administrators are concerned that music is not exciting for students.

A world music drumming program, funded by the Marlboro Educational Foundation over a three-year period of time, will be implemented this year. The program will use percussion instruments to teach rhythm, sound and music to the students; it will also teach students the impact music has on different cultures.

Abbott said this is a wonderful program which will involve the students who are not interested in performance music.