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Developmental Objectives for the 2010/2011 School Year
Introduction
For the 2010-2011 school year, the Board approved four Developmental Objectives. These are: Student Success; Organizational Sustainability; Environmental Stewardship and Communication. These have been the approved Developmental Objectives for the Board or Education (Richmond) since the Board Resolution 083/2009 was passed on March 2, 2009.
Student Success
How can we enable all our students to do their best?
For the coming year this objective will focus on two areas of activity, the action plans associated with the Inclusion Review and the creation and response to a district assessment policy that invites discussion and examination of classroom teaching and assessment practices.
As we continue to work towards student success and addressing the action plans coming from the Inclusion Review we have begun to focus on ensuring that our classrooms are inclusive in the sense that every student has the best chance for success. The components of the Inclusion Review action plan include:
The challenge is to ensure that this action plan is implemented in an effective way that is truly inclusive in that it supports the success of all students, not just those with special needs. While the components above will help us pursue this Developmental Objective, there are more general classroom implications for enhancing student success that need to be addressed. The Principles of Learning listed in the introduction of the Integrated Resource Packages for each curricular area produced by the BC Ministry of Education state:
1. Learning requires the active participation of the student.
2. Students learn in a variety of ways and at different rates.
3. Learning is both an individual and a social process.
These principles are based on decades of research on how people learn, yet they have been slow to be applied in classroom practice. While significant progress has been made in actively engaging students in learning and using both individual and group activities in classrooms, there is less opportunity for students to learn in different ways and at different rates. Much current classroom assessment practice is based on the idea that learning should occur by a particular time and in a particular way, and if this does not happen, the student has not been successful.
Most of these time constraints are driven by the need to assess student work and report out on it on a regular basis. While time frames for learning are necessary, using assessment to give students feedback as they learn and giving them the tools and opportunity to assess their own learning as they progress can help individualize student learning without requiring that the teacher develop multiple lesson plans for one class. It is also a research-proven way to improve student achievement.
The first step in addressing this is to create opportunities for staff and parents to review and respond to a draft assessment and evaluation policy to be circulated in the fall of 2010. A resource package will be developed to help schools plan and conduct these discussions in the 2010-2011 school year.
Organizational Sustainability
How can we ensure that the challenging work done by staff is sustainable for them?
The current environment of budget pressures brings a new urgency to this Developmental Objective. If organizational sustainability is not actively addressed through reviewing and restructuring what we do and why we do it, our conscientious staff will naturally attempt to keep doing what they have always done despite the fact that they have fewer resources. The result will be increased stress and lower productivity. Along with continuing to support wellness initiatives begun in previous years and create awareness around employee absenteeism, it is important to review the organization itself with a view towards creating the most optimal way of working together. This involves closer integration of business and educational goals and developing organizational structures that support this. Any organizational
reviews in finance, maintenance and operations, learning services in schools and other district departments will be addressed under the goal of organizational sustainability. The key questions in this endeavour will be: What are we trying to do? How will we know if we are succeeding? What are we going to do next?
Environmental Stewardship
How can we behave responsibly towards the natural world?
Energy management and sustainability are two key aspects of this objective. The district has been working on both of these aspects of stewardship and needs to continue to do so. In the past year, the Sustainability Committee's role has been to consolidate and integrate existing programs while establishing a solid groundwork for an expansion of its efforts and implementation of its Environmental Stewardship Policy. The Sustainability Committee's role in the future will be expanded to include representation from all stakeholder groups to ensure that the district supports and directs initiatives that meet this Developmental Objective and moves us towards meeting our carbon neutral requirements.
The Sustainability Cafe will continue to provide an opportunity for students, teachers, administrators, and support staff to discuss leadership and initiatives in environmental stewardship at the school level. The Cafe has regular meetings throughout the year.
The district works as a BC Hydro Power Smart partner to develop an annual action plan to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This will involve the hiring of a new Energy Manager funded by BC Hydro and an Energy specialist funded by Terason. These roles will be key to help us reach the goal of carbon neutrality. As part of the government Climate Action Plan, our district must be carbon neutral beginning in 2009. Annually the district must produce a Carbon Neutral Action Report on progress toward carbon neutrality.
The overall outcome we are looking for is a change in practices and a reduction of energy use that become standard practice for the school district as an organization. The intent is to reorganize the districtÃs energy, sustainability and environmental stewardship initiatives in order to take advantage of the BC Hydro Energy Manager and other programs, to integrate environmental stewardship and sustainability into all aspects of the organization, and deliver environmental and financial savings. In addition, this will be the starting point to providing more clarity in the development of the five-year plan. The recommended actions will result in alignment of district actions with existing policy, regulation and law.
Communication
How can we communicate in a clear, timely and inclusive manner?
Communication continues to be a priority for the district ensuring the public is aware of our student successes, budget challenges, services and programs. Communication can always be improved by ensuring that staff, students, parents and community members have timely access to the information they need in a manner that is readily available and is responsive to their needs. This includes a well-maintained district website that is easy to navigate, provides notices of events, program offerings, as well as provides the public to respond to survey questions regarding current issues/concerns. In addition, it is expected that schools will also maintain their own websites with information that is reflective of their school community. We are on our way in terms of hosting websites that provide clear and easily accessed
information, but there is still much work to be done in this area.
We will continue to focus on how to best communicate the importance of public education, the value of neighbourhood schools, the importance of choice and offering a rich array of learning opportunities and again, how best to share student successes with our entire community.
Complementary Objectives for 2010/2011
The Executive Team has also proposed four complementary objectives for 2010-2011. Complementary Objectives, while they are important and sometimes urgent, do not have the same priority because they are either episodic or simply beyond the capacity of the district to support in as complete a manner as the Developmental Objectives. These objectives are prepared by staff for Board information but are not officially endorsed by resolution. These Complementary Objectives are:
Aboriginal Enhancement Agreement
The Aboriginal Enhancement Agreement (AEA) for School District 38 has been under development for the last few years, and considerable progress has been made in the last two years. The AEA Committee is led by a teacher consultant and consists of district stakeholder representation, as well as representation from a variety of community partners (i.e. Pathways, Richmond Museum, Vancouver Coastal Health). The AEA Committee has engaged in wide consultation and communication with Aboriginal representatives and other community partners, and this consultation has been integral to the process. While consultation will continue, at this point in the process a smaller writing committee has been established to begin to analyze in detail all the data collected to date. We anticipate that writing will begin in the 2010-2011 school year. Updates
on progress towards developing our Aboriginal Enhancement Agreement will be provided on a regular basis.
Information Management
The implementation of our student information management and finance and human resources systems (BCeSIS and Navision respectively) is well underway. Because requirements and the need for reporting in both education and business areas are continually increasing, in the coming year the Management of Information Systems (MIS) department will be turning their focus on producing pre-defined and user-created reports from these systems that will be easily accessible. These reports will help our staff by providing useful information to assist in planning and decision-making. MIS will be looking at methods to appropriately incorporate both business and educational data.
Central Registration
The school district centralized registration for choice programs such as French Immersion and Montessori in 2009-2010 to good effect. The centralization kept the process and criteria for registration in these programs consistent. This contributes to a perception that the registration process is fair and equitable. We are working towards centralizing all registrations in the school district to improve consistency and create a more welcoming process for those who are registering for the first time. Many of these families are new Canadians and currently can experience a confusing array and sites and processes as they register. This will also help to lighten the workload in school offices and avoid redundant practices.
Elementary Report Cards
Currently the report cards produced for elementary students involve hours of writing for many elementary teachers as they try to comment in a way that best reflects the progress that students are making in their learning. At the same time, these comments are often difficult for parents to understand due to second language challenges or simply lack of familiarity with educational jargon. The goal is to produce Elementary Report Cards that are clear and communicative for parents. At the same time it is important to make the workload for teachers more reasonable and keep the focus on reporting on student progress in terms of prescribed learning outcomes.
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