School Committee Discusses Green Repairs, Curriculum Standardization

The Wrentham School Committee discussed, among other things, the need of certain repairs to school buildings at their meeting Tuesday night.

Committee members went over the possible inclusion of Wrentham in the Green Repair Program, a program that gives federal money to schools to repair boilers, roofs and windows in order to make school buildings more energy efficient.

The Massachusetts School Building Authority opened the process up to state schools in August, and requested that school organizations interested in taking advantage of the funds submit a statement of interest to the organization. The Wrentham School Committee submitted a SOI last year to the MSBA, but it was before the program was enacted.

The request did "roll-over" to the GRP, but Superintendent Jeffrey Marsden said that it would help the process for Wrentham if the committee were to revote their support on the issue. He said an updated SOI with the support from the committee would speed up the process of obtaining those funds. All members voted to approve the repairs.

"Anything we can do to move that process along, I'd like to do," Marsden said.

He added that the Delaney-Vogel School would be the most likely candidate for the GRP, as the roof has not been replaced since the school's construction in 1937, making it 73 years old.

Marsden also discussed the current situation with the Race to the Top Grant Program, which is a federal grant designed to help curriculum alignment with the state standard in public schools. The main focus of the program for Wrentham right now is to align the curriculum of the elementary schools of Wrentham, Norfolk and Plainville, so that there are no gaps in base knowledge and educational experience when students go to King Philip Regional Middle School.

Marsden said that the plan is to get a full integration of the three schools' curriculum by the end of a three-year period. Mathematics will be the first subject that the three school districts will work on.

"The project that we're going to look at is doing a unified pre-K through [grade] six curriculum in both mathematics and language arts," he said. "So that all three towns have a similar learning experience, not so much in terms of locking step in programs, but that we all have the same expectations, exiting benchmarks and standards in the three districts so that when the kids go into King Philip they'll have similar experiences."

Marsden said he has already begun the process of math curriculum alignment with the principals and superintendents of Norfolk and Plainville in a meeting last week. He added that Wrentham will be receiving $57,000 in federal funds, most of which will be going to teachers to facilitate the curriculum standardization.

Marsden and Chairwoman Kim Carr also informed the committee of their recent visit to a joint conference held by the Massachusetts Association of School Committees and the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents in Hyannis. One of the main issues discussed at the conference was that of cyber bullying and how different school districts are dealing with the problem all over the commonwealth.

"Everyone's dealing with this in different ways," Marsden said. "I think we're right on target with what we're doing."

Wrentham will have training sessions for parents concerning bullying and cyber bullying, the first of which is scheduled for early winter. Carr pointed out that, while a large portion of bullying and cyber bullying cases occur on the high school level, it can be useful to start in the lower grades.

"We think it's more of a high school, junior high issue, but it certainly starts here," she said.

In other news, the committee started the process of creating a request for proposals for a replacement of most of the Delaney School sprinkler system. There have already been six leaks in the school, which, on average, are costing a few thousand dollars each to repair. The school committee estimated that they will have a company ready to repair the system and start work in July. The current estimate for the repairs is $62,000.

The committee also discussed the movement of parent-teacher conferences to night meetings, which they said had been requested by parents over the past few years. Marsden warned that patience was necessary for this rescheduling to show its usefulness, as the demand for night meetings shifts with every year. He said that one year when he was teaching fourth grade, he received about 18 requests for night meetings from parents, and the next he received four.

"It takes a couple of years sometimes to get a true sense… of the need for night conferences," he said.