Limestone Community School begins three-year process to improve reading, math results

    CARIBOU, Maine  —  The Eastern Aroostook RSU 39 Board of Directors met last Wednesday night to discuss some important topics including Limestone Community School’s continuing status as a Priority School, as well as the always controversial topic of harvest break.
First on the agenda was the RSU 39 audit report. The Board Finance Subcommittee reported on their review of the 2012-13 audit with news that it was clean and, “everything looks great,” agreed board member Kent Forbes. The Audit Report was accepted unanimously.
Susan White, Limestone Community School principal, was at the Dec. 18 meeting to give a presentation explaining the progress the school has made as a Title 1 school, as well as information on LCS’s status as a Priority School.
It all began last August when Maine was granted a waiver to the No Child Left Behind sanctions. The waiver includes a protocol for schools that don’t make enough yearly progress in reading and math.
“It allows growth targets to be set for individual schools rather than deciding those things on statewide level,” said White.
“However, the waiver still had to have pretty stringent protocol and we’re still expected to make adequate yearly progress,” she said.
The bottom 10 percent of Title 1 schools testing in math and reading are broken up into two groups: Focus Schools (lowest 10 percent) and Priority Schools (lowest 5 percent). This lowest 5 percent is where LCS falls on the Title 1 continuum.
“We needed a 46 percent increase in reading and math to jump to a Focus School, but we only showed a 39 percent growth. So, as you can see we still missed it by quite a bit,” said White.
Limestone Community School is the only Title 1 school in Aroostook County and they have recently started working with a web-based program called Indistar. It is a system implemented by a school district or charter school for use with school improvement teams to “inform, coach, sustain, track, and report improvement activities.”
The program allows students as well as teachers to assess where they are in the learning process and what they need to do to reach their ultimate goal. They provide indicators of evidence-based practices at the district, school, and classroom levels to improve student learning. The system is also customizable, so that the client can populate or enhance the system with its own indicators of effective practice, while also providing rubrics for assessment of the indicators.
What does this mean for The Limestone Community School in the near future? “For this year it’s a matter of deciding which indicators will be in our plan, and to achieve 15 of the 51,” said White, “this first year is a planning year. We must first deeply evaluate and assess the 15 first-year indicators. Then, create our one-year improvement plan.”
One of the other major steps the school will be taking is putting in place a leadership team. “We’ve put a Priority School Leadership Team in place, which has representation from all three levels: guidance, administration and Title 1 Special Ed. We’ve also had a Department of Education coach assigned to us, who will be our connection to the DOE,” said White.
The school will be receiving a $20,000 planning grant for this year. “That money will go towards things like travel expenses for mandatory principal meetings and trainings. Priority School principals must attend, as well as things like substitute teachers,” said White.
The Title 1 program will be broken down into a three-year plan, but when that plan officially begins, is still yet to be announced.
In other business, the school board discussed the issue of whether or not to keep harvest break and did the best they could with the results of their harvest survey. It was no surprise the students were overwhelmingly for the maintaining of harvest break, but two thirds of staff and parents were opposed to the break. As for the farmers, “only twenty of the forty-four farmers in our survey pool responded, but overall 90 percent of the farmers and students value and are in favor of harvest,” said Superintendent Frank McElwain. “Farmers say ‘we need them.’ The majority of them think students are integral to their success.”
The question of whether or not to keep potato harvest break has been a hot topic for school boards all over Aroostook County for a number of years, but many are now getting down to the crucial decision-making time. Unfortunately, the decision comes with consequences no matter what the outcome.
“Not everyone may understand that it could be saving us $30,000 to switch to a common calendar,” said Board Chairman Clifford Rhome of Limestone. “If it were that easy we’d just put it on a referendum in November.”
The consensus of the board was that the best way to keep things fair is to have a public forum open to both farmers and community members. “If we keep harvest, public opinion will say we’re swaying to the whim of the farmers, but it shouldn’t just be decided by parents and community members who may not have much involvement,” said Rhome.
Despite any worry about the outcome of the future proceedings Superintendent McElwain assured everyone, “it’s not going to be a popularity contest.”
Future discussions regarding the topic have not been set to date, but will hopefully take place sometime in January.
The Board convened to Executive Session prior to the regular meeting. During executive session the board conducted a workshop on budget planning.
The next regular meeting of the RSU board will be held Wednesday, Jan. 8 at 7 p.m. in the Superintendent’s Office in Caribou.