The rest of Tuesday night's meeting:
Asst. Supt. for Teaching and Learning Dr. Margaret Adams spoke to the curriculum budget (including professional development). She will be bringing forward her annual professional development plan soon. Teachers have been working hard on ELA and math instruction, and will be adding more focus around science practices in the coming year in anticipation of new science standards coming from the state.
Supt. Taymore spoke to gifted services, indicating that students who are already identified will not re-identify (i.e. retake the assessment). She also clarified that Melrose does not have a discrete gifted program, but that flexible grouping is applied in ways like clustering and implementation of the workshop model in order to ensure that students are receiving the right level of instruction to master content with appropriate rigor. The middle school has more opportunities for movement according to ability (with the variety of electives), and the high school has individual course selection. An Elementary Curriculum administrator (recommended in the Supt's preferred budget) would be tasked with focusing more efforts on gifted education.
The budget timeline has been updated and posted in our packet for the evening.
We agreed to offer a salary range of $105K-$115K to the successful Middle School Principal candidate.
Next meeting is Tuesday (3/25) at 7:00 at which time we will discuss the special education budget, a revised budget draft, and a variety of new policies. Please take a look and tell us what you think!
