Superintendent Proposes Adding 9.9 Teacher Positions, Latin

With a zero increase negotiated for next year’s teacher contract, the school superintendent proposed repairing some of the losses from previous years’ staffing cuts and looking ahead to changing state standards.

Since 2008, the district has cut the equivalent of 24 full-time teaching positions, with only a slight decrease in enrollment. The district and the students are feeling the effects, staff and board members agreed when they met Monday night to discuss the superintendent’s staffing plan for 2012-2013.

Problems

A reduction in music staff that this year has forced teachers to travel between buildings has been particularly difficult, Assistant Superintendent Mike Galluzzo said.

“It’s been a mess, particularly at West Woods, where we have five teachers teaching band,” he said.

Instruction has been disjointed and has impacted learning, both in regular subjects and in music lessons, staff members acknowledged. Because music teachers’ schedules are so limited and stretched across buildings, they no longer have the flexibility to rotate private lesson and ensemble times throughout the day. This means students are pulled out of the same class every week and miss out on learning, Galluzzo said.

Board member Paula O’Brien said one music teacher told her he expects this year’s eighth-grade class to be the last that will be play at such a high level because instruction for younger players has suffered.

Galluzzo said a plan will likely be in place next year to correct the worst of the problems and Chairman Mary Grace Reed said that other specials teachers had coped with similar arrangements in the past until the board was able to restore funding. A .2 music position at West Woods is included in the staffing plan.

For those students not taking a music elective at the middle school, there is no other option, since the Latin program was eliminated two years ago.

Fewer electives are being offered at the high school too, where there are waiting lists for classes like art and business. Students are left to sit in study halls, even as early as seventh grade. Superintendent Kathleen Greider proposed bringing back Latin at IAR for next year and at Farmington High School possibly the following year.

Cuts have also resulted in larger class sizes and decreased support for students needing reading intervention, Galluzzo said.

Changing standards, changing curriculum

In 2014, students will begin taking rigorous new standardized tests, based on the Common Core State Standards initiative, adopted by the state of Connecticut in 2010. The content of the tests is significantly different from what students now see on the Connecticut Mastery Tests and, to some extent, from what Farmington students are learning, Greider said.

“It raises expectations for students in Farmington,” Galluzzo said. “It’s going to stretch our abilities to deliver unless we really support teaching and learning by helping teachers develop skills for achievement.”

Teachers studying the Common Core initiative have said that in some grades, 70 percent of Farmington’s core materials won’t be relevant to the test, Greider said.

Connecticut will also be rolling out new standards in science. Though the final standards have not been released, Farmington has been working on developing a curriculum based on initial frameworks.

To support teachers in the transition to the new standards and new curriculum, Greider included support positions in her proposal.

Numbers

Superintendent Kathleen Greider’s initial proposal for 2012-2013 staffing is a starting point for the budget discussion, she said. In it are the equivalent of 9.9 new teaching positions.

“We tried to be very strategic in what we brought back … we thought this was a modest start,” Galluzzo said.

Board member Bill Beckert was worried.

“We can’t just go ahead and backfill everything that was lost,” he said at one point. During a long discussion on whether Latin should be reintroduced at IAR or at the high school, Beckert again expressed his concerns.

“Before I see the whole budget book, I don’t want to commit to anything … we’re talking like it’s already decided."

Business Administrator Mike Ryan estimated the teachers' salaries would total about $553,835.

Others reminded him that it is still early in the budget process, when many options are discussed.