Comments to dr king

Board of Education President James Ptucha’s Comments to Commissioner Dr. John King at the November 12, 2013 State Education Department Community Forum: We as caretakers of the educational program of the Half Hollow Hills Central School District have found the "Regents Reform Agenda" and the "Governor's Tax Levy Cap" and their interconnected and competing priorities increasingly difficult to manage - due to shrinking State and federal funds, declining enrollment, and heightened scrutiny.

We believe the "Regents Reform Agenda" has merit. In our District, we have a long standing teacher evaluation system aligned to the Danielson framework for teaching and implemented collaboratively with our teaching and administrative staff for more than a decade. We have invested significant funds into the training and materials for implementation of the common core. By significant, I mean more than five times our Race to the Top allocation of funds and we will continue to invest in our teacher’s professional development to help better prepare our students.

What is different is that we have done so without generating the widespread uncertainty and anxiety that is pervasive among all shareholders of our public school system today. We have a long history of raising the bar in preparing our students for college and careers, not by a metric applied to elementary school age children and generalized across the State.

The uncertainty and anxiety that we are left to manage at a local level is very real. Like most Districts we have received requests from parents to "opt out" of state testing, concerns regarding student data and "privacy", we have spent considerable time and resources committed to "compliance activities" in the submission, completion, scoring, and reporting requirement related to our two approved APPR plans.

Perhaps most concerning is the feeling that we have only just begun. As the common core assessments continue their roll out into the High School exams; As we move towards PARCC assessment testing in grades 3-8 and also the accompanying unfunded mandate of the required technology used for assessment purposes – All this at a time where we are saddled to a tax levy cap and reducing expenditures across the board.

We continue to comply, but be certain that the economy, the tax cap, and enrollment decline on Long Island has created immense challenges at the local level, closing schools, reducing offerings, reductions in the teaching force are real issues facing many of our school districts. The "all at once" approach of the Regents Reform Agenda and the unintended uncertainty and anxiety it has produced for students, parents, teachers and the community is something that you need to be aware of in every decision that is made in Albany, and implemented in our schools.