Marcia Chambers Photo
School Superintendent Hamlet Hernandez (pictured) last week outlined a variety of challenges facing the Branford School district: a declining student population, increasing special education needs and the absence of an official talented and gifted program in the elementary, intermediate and high schools.
He also repeated what he told the Board of Education (BOE) at the April 24 meeting, that the state is contemplating eliminating the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) and the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT). Teachers have complained for years that they were required to teach to the test.
“No official decision has been made but rumors are that they are going away,” he said.
Hernandez presented his overview of the school district’s composition and performance to a group of town legislators and parents last week. Maryann Amore, the chair of the Representative Town Meeting (RTM) education committee, asked Hernandez to speak to the group. The RTM will vote on the school and town budget on Tuesday, May 14. Tonight the RTM education committee will hear Hernandez’s views on the school budget at a 7:30 p.m. meeting at Canoe Brook Senior Center.
The superintendent began by noting that his snapshot of the school district was based on school data more than two years old. He said the state lags that far behind in producing official data. Now in his third year as superintendent, he said the available statistics do not yet include his tenure.
He said for the school year of 2009-10, the town had 3,500 students in its five schools, a number that has dropped to 3,300 in the 2012 – 13 school year. The decline, he said, exists at the elementary, intermediate and high school levels, meaning besides fewer children living in Branford and attending local schools, some do live in Branford but attend other schools in later grades.
The district, he said, is “low” in the category of talented and gifted classes at all levels. The number is actually quite low, coming in at .3 percent. The high school does have advanced placement classes, he added.
In a subsequent interview, Hernandez explained that the school district is required to identify talented and gifted students. “There is no requirement to program for them. In lieu of a formalized program, we do enrich our children. We do need to look at how we might program for any students that are identified. It is on our radar screen,” he said. “We need to look at it.”
He said some school districts have had these programs but subsequent budget cuts have eliminated them.
Economic need, he said, is typically shown by students seeking a free lunch program at the district’s schools, a number that has risen from 18.9 percent in 2010 to 23 percent as of this school year. Food for the entire family is an issue and the Branford Early Education Collective says there is anecdotal evidence that some children hoard food to take home to their parents.
Hernandez said the percentage of students not fluent in English has risen from 2.8 percent in 2010 to 5 percent now.
He also noted that 82.9 percent of all kindergarten students have had access to some pre-school training. That means about 20 percent of all entering public school children have none, a number that concerns early childhood educators.
The special education program led to a lively discussion among the group. Hernandez said the Branford school district educates more than 500 special education students across every grade level. He said 67 of those students are “out-placed,” meaning they attend a special school with programs designed for them. They are enrolled in schools across the state. The Branford school district is mandated to pay their tuition and their transportation to these other schools.
He said the district’s autistic population is increasing but that the district now has more “internal capacity” to educate them.
Board of Education Chairman Frank Carrano attended the session. He said the 67 out-placed students are “monitored carefully.” He said funding is always iffy, because it is never certain what the state will pay. “Maybe 100 percent, maybe 50 percent. We try to budget for it but it is often an unknown.”
Changes in Formal Testing Underway
Connecticut is now one of the states in the nation that has obtained a federal waiver from the No Child Left Behind law, a law that mandated the use of the CMT and CAPT tests. The CAPT test is taken in high school. .
The CMT and the CAPT tests were used to measure a state’s progress under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the education program promulgated by former president George W. Bush in 2001. In April 2005, Richard Blumenthal, then Connecticut’s attorney general (now a U.S. senator), filed the first lawsuit in the nation against the U.S. Department of Education over the NCLB. One of his arguments was that the NCLB program required unfunded testing mandates, which he called illegal.
States may now seek waivers out of the NCLB program; Connecticut has. So it comes as no surprise that the CMT and CAPT tests may soon be phased out.
Branford is taking part in a pilot program involving a potential new state test called Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBA), which is a computerized test. Hernandez told the board he will have more information soon. The SBA test is being piloted in several states. Hernandez has been appointed to a state committee that will meet to discuss testing.
An examination of writing skills shows the district needs work, Hernandez told the audience. According to the Connecticut Mastery Test Results in 2012, 74.6 percent of all grade 8 Branford students in 2012 were writing at or above goal.
“Writing is an area we needed to improve in. Our students will be assessed more and more in writing,” Hernandez told the audience. “We have adopted the workshop model from Columbia Teachers College. We will train 55 teachers this summer, last summer 45 teachers were trained. It is a great program.”
RTM Rep. Josh Brooks (D‑Stony Creek) observed that in an age when texting has become the preferred form of communication for students, writing may well become a lost art.
“This is a societal issue; it is greater than our district. When kids use technology it makes it harder for them to be better writers. Texting is a perfect example … we communicate via the text. I would caution us and the town to not look at those numbers without comparing to the national average because I would think this is a national problem.”
Diana Stricker contributed reporting for this story.
###