During the April 9th CASD
School Board Committee Meetings there was discussion about the soon-to-be
adopted CASD Comprehensive Plan. A school director commented sarcastically that
only three people responded to the request for public comment that were due
Friday, April 5th.
FYI: the Comprehensive Plan is in a format required by PA Dept. of
Education. IT IS DIFFICULT TO READ and UNDERSTAND. A period of public review is
required. I tip my hat to the three who waded through the document and
responded. I also read the soon-to-be adopted CASD plan. I compared it to the
CASD plan currently in use. I also read the plans of other Chester County
school districts and compared them to CASD’s plan. I typed up my notes and
entered them into the web site link before the deadline and became the fourth
responder.
The following are the comments
and observations that I provided to the district on April 12th with some minor
edits for readability:
In an interest of full disclosure, while I was employed by the Coatesville Area School District, I led the development and delivery of the district’s Strategic Plan (now called Comprehensive Plan). Therefore, I am very familiar with the process of developing and delivering district plans following PDE’s guidelines and using PDE’s online applications.
The process that I followed as I reviewed was to first read the beginning section of the plan to understand CASD positioning as described by the district’s vision, mission, and shared values. There are eight shared values described in the plan along with the district’s mission and vision. Rather than type them all here, I hoped to refer you to the CASD web site. Sadly, the district’s mission, vision and shared values are not shared with the CASD community on the web site. Check my Facebook Page: AmeliaMill4CASD where I will post them for you to read.
Next, I did a quick read of the Core Foundations section. The information in found on pages 8 through 77 is mostly boiler-plate-fill-in-the-charts and add some narrative text. Its intent is to capture details about what the district is doing. For example, for the topic of Safe and Supportive Schools: Programs, Strategies and Actions, CASD provides this narrative:
The Coatesville Area School District places a high priority on ensuring that our schools provide a safe and caring environment for students. The district has implemented school wide positive behavior support programs in the elementary, middle schools, and 9/10 Center. The district currently provides safety and violence programming through various supports. These include work with the (ADL) Anti-Defamation League, Crime Victims, Rotary Club Safe Texting programs, NOPE, Safe Schools Summit, Youth Mental Health First Aid, Safe2Say Something, MindUP, Student Problem Identification and Resolutions of Issues Together (S.P.l.R.l.T), Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium/Center for Education Equity. PA Office of the Attorney General and other organizations that provide instruction on safety and violence in schools.
Unfortunately, there is no informative/supporting data provided with the narratives for the topics of Standards, Curriculum, Instruction, Assessments, Safe and Supportive Schools, Materials / Resources, Professional Education and Special Education. Without data to show success or lack of success; progress or lack of progress, one might assume that because it is written, “all is good”. Or, one might assume “all is not good” after wading through seventy pages.
I believe the most critical information in a district’s Comprehensive Plan is in the District Level Plan: Actions Plans and the Goals. It is in this section that one finds the key initiatives of the district. Unfortunately, the PDE template does not request this information until late in the template for CASD’s plan and that is on page 131.
In CASD’s 2019 Comprehensive Plan there are two Goals:
Goal #1: Establish a district system that fully ensures specially designed instruction is provided to meet the unique learning needs of children with disabilities at no cost to a parent.
Goal #2: Establish a district system that fully ensures the consistent implementation of effective instructional practices across classrooms in each school.
For Goal #1 I noted one observation and question:
Behavior Support. “The Coatesville Area School District will look to expand the School-Wide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS).”
Question/s: Has data been captured and published on the success of PBIS to date to determine if expansion is merited?
For Goal #2 I noted several observations:
Data Analysis Procedures, Data-Informed Instruction, Data Teams & Data Warehousing. The plan quotes a commonly referenced IES document.
Observation: there are no specifics detailing how CASD has implemented this process of data analysis, data-informed instruction, data teams and data warehousing.
Professional Learning Communities. The plan quotes a well-known Senge excerpt.
Observation: Again, there is no clear description of how CASD has implemented PLCs, other than K-12 curriculum and instructional committee.
Curriculum & Instructional Committee.
Questions: Do all teachers participate? Or is this a designated subgroup? Are these regularly scheduled, if so what is the frequency? Goal #2 indicates that it “provides professional development in word work “ all elementary, middle, and high school English teachers. “ Why is there no mention of the rest of the teachers, one might assume that the district is only focusing on “word work.”
Note: it was not my intent to go through the whole plan and note every point about which I find problematic. If you are curious about all my points, please reach out to me.
Rather, my intent was to get a perspective on how the district was moving forward on their identified goals and strategies. I went back and checked CASD’s previous plan, 07/01/2016 – 06/30/2019, and I was surprised to see they were the exactly same goals.
Turns out, PDE requested that Phase 1 school districts, of which CASD is one, rollover their previous goals completed in 2018-19 into this new plan.
Observations/questions: if the district has the same goals one might assume that if there was true progress on those goals from the previous plan that there would be data published to validate that progress. Also, one would hope that the district would provide details on how it will build on that progress during the period of the 2020-2023.
In particular, I wonder where is the data on the success of the district for goal #1 “meeting specially designed instruction… to meet the unique learning needs of children with disabilities” 07/01/2016 – 06/30/2019?
If PDE does not require data and action plans in this boilerplate application how and where does CASD make this information available to the CASD community?
There is a time-honored adage: “What gets monitored gets done!”
My perspective: Regarding CASD’s comprehensive plan, I believe that the two goals that CASD has and will have in place from 2016-2023 is too narrow of a focus for the district.
For example, I was surprised that the district did not address as a goal closing the achievement gap, which is particularly important if CASD desires to encourage students to return from charters on the academic merit of the district. Unfortunately, the number of AP courses offered is not a useful metric to determine the academic success of our students.
Sadly, CASD rates poorly on SchoolDigger, a website that publishes achievement information on schools and districts across the United Sates. On SchoolDigger our district is rated at 480 out of 603 (some charters are included). We are rated below Bethlehem, Norristown, Pittsburg and Pottstown.
In addition, ESSA now requires states to designate low performing schools as receiving TSI: Targeted Support and Improvement on an annual basis beginning fall 2019. Click HERE to see PDE’s School Improvement and Accountability page. At the bottom of the page you will see a link to a spreadsheet showing all Pennsylvania schools that identified for improvement. CASD has five schools listed as TSI. CASH, North Brandywine, South Brandywine, Rainbow and Reeceville.
I asked myself, “How can this be?” “What are other school districts doing that we are not?”
To gain additional perspective, I read the comprehensive plans of other school districts and I validated my perspective that perhaps CASD has too narrow of a focus. Perhaps this narrow focus has partly influenced our charter school flight.
CASD Goals
Goal #1: Establish a district system that fully ensures specially designed instruction is provided to meet the unique learning needs of children with disabilities at no cost to a parent. Basically, this is CASD’s co-teaching model.
Goal #2: Establish a district system that fully ensures the consistent implementation of effective instructional practices across classrooms in each school. This, too, is to support CASD’s co-teaching model along with the new instructional programs brought into the district in the last few years.
Example #1 from a Chester County School District
This district had six goals. Two of the goals were areas CASD does not target: Excellence All Children and Effective, Consistent Communication and Collaboration.
Goal #1: Allocate Resources to Foster Excellence for All Students.
Goal #2: Promote Employee Growth and Effectiveness
Goal #3: Provide High Quality Education
Goal #4: Provide High Quality Instruction
Goal #5: Implement Effective, Consistent Communication and Collaboration
Goal #6: The Board expects the daily tasks of managing the school district, with the emphasis on the buildings, grounds, transportation, and student safety, fiscal responsibility all to be integral parts of the overall supervision of the school district.
This district also publishes a useful shorter document to communicate in summary form their Strategic Plan Goals noting in chart form short-term goals, long-term goals and measurement for each goal.
Example #2 from another Chester County School District
The district publishes a glossy overview document of their plan for the public. It details their goals, strategies to achieve each goal along with the action plans. Again I noted that Communication & Community Engagement was a priority for the district.
Goal #1: Increase Learning Opportunities for Staff and Students in order to foster a learning environment where all members will be exceptionally well-prepared to succeed and lead full and meaningful lives.
Goal #2: Define Systems Approach across the District to ensure that we are functioning in cohesion and in support of our educational mission.
Goal #3: Increase Communication & Community Engagement to ensure positive stakeholder participation in the educational process.
Example #3 School District in Another County
The district’s strategic plan goals and targets related to the following six key areas. Again I noted Community Engagement is a priority for this district.
1. Leadership
2. Community Engagement
3. Facilities & Business, Operations
4. Teaching & Learning
5. Team Member Engagement
6. Technology & Processes
In summary, I believe that once the Comprehensive Plan is submitted to PDE that CASD should consider creating a more comprehensive and strategic plan that addresses some of the areas addressed by the successful districts I have noted here. The planning process should include school district leadership, teachers and staff, parents and/or family members and community members.
This process could be
implemented with a very formal process such as the Baldridge Excellence
Framework for Education. Or CASD could adopt the tried-and-true method of
establishing S.M.A.R.T. Goals. Specific, Measurable, Achievable/Attainable,
Relevant and Time-Bound. 2023 is a long way off. We could lose more students and families. We could have even higher taxes. We could continue to scare-off developers. We could continue to go backwards in our rating as a district. Now is the time to stop going backwards and change direction.
-Amelia Mills
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