Dr. Varley’s “School is Opening in One Week!” Email

Oh man.. where do we even start with this?

Dr. Varley sent an email today that residents should pay attention to carefully. The item we want to focus on right now connects to goals. 

On a positive note (depending on how you look at it), there are finally numbers and percentages people can look at in evaluating how well our District is doing. There is also some implicit recognition of the declines necessitating action plans. The problem? Or rather, the problemS?

(1) Dr. Varley and BOE appear to have no ownership of the issue – they threw it on the Building principals. This would be great if the Building Principals had the same power as the Superintendent when it came to budget priorities and District Policies that have contributed significantly to our declines. In other words, building principals are left having to figure out how to improve things without any additional power or scope.

(2) The source of data being used to measure improvement in some areas (iReady) is not the source citing a decline. We have yet to get any comparative data in connection to iReady, so we do not know whether the 80% targets are really all that meaningful.

(3) Middle School Goals are entirely focused on ELA improvement (an anemic 4%), and according to what? What data set is going to be used to determine this? Ideally, it should be the NJ proficiencies. 

(4) High School is only going to measure improvement between the first year to senior year on Math and ELA. Notice that Math is not being tracked in Middle School and that Freshman year becomes the starting point of tracking with no additional follow-through until Junior year – meaning that Math  will only be tracked in elementary school and two times in high school. Lastly, the District is accepting whatever NJ defines as proficient on the NJGPA – in other words, they appear to be using the test with the lowest standard to determine achievement and not citing the NJ Proficiencies anywhere else.  

Oh and Science?  That isn’t anywhere on the document.

(5) In her email, Dr. Varley states achieving these results (which are meager in comparison to the declines evidenced in the NJDOE reports) is going to take “multiple years”. ….. Lol.

So essentially, we have an incoherent, incomplete response to the declines that have no ownership on the part of the Superintendent or BOE with goals that don’t come near to making up for the declines we’ve experienced that will take multiple years to achieve leaving Dr. Varley with what is the predictable fallback of “well I told you it would take years”.

We hope that Building Principals, Teachers, and Parents can work with what they have and figure something out. With all the tutoring our kids got last year due to the botched BTC implementation, we might come out ok.  

We aren’t quite done with this yet but given that this email came right after BHCW published recommendations on using Data to reverse the declines, we felt the need to respond to this creative exercise today.

Link to Goals Document

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