October Meeting - Data and Development Plans

School Report - October 2016
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School Development Plan - Clapping for Assessment Demonstration
Ms. Holford led a demonstration of how Formative Assessment works to improve learning. The activity had 4 volunteers to illustrate how clear criteria, feedback, goal setting and repeated opportunities to learn greatly improve student performance. Formative Assessment is the focus of our School Development Plan for 2016 - 17. More information about details of our SDP will be presented at the November meeting.
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PAT Results
Ms. Holford and Ms. El-Guebaly presented slides describing how our Grade 6’s performed on Provincial Achievement Tests (PAT’s) in the spring of last year. She highlighted the complexity of this particular cohort of grade 6’s compared to the province, previous year and the current year and explained. She further explained how the statistical impact of several children not writing the exam has made interpreting the results difficult. In order to meaningfully provide direction for school improvement, scores for PAT’s were reported only for students who actually wrote the exams. The following observations were offered:

• Belfast students demonstrated very good achievement in Language Arts, with better results in Reading than in Writing
• In reading, acceptable scores and excellence scores were higher than the provincial average
• In writing, we score better in Narrative than in Expository writing and use of vocabulary is a strength.
• Math - scores were within 4% of the province though there was a wider spread in the excellence category. Students scored consistently across all 4 mathematical strands.
• Science - the most significant gap between the province and Belfast students 10% lower than the provincial average.
  • Most significant difficulty “identifying”/“recalling”
• Social Studies - within 4% of the provincial marks
  • Questions based on recall and other lower level thinking skills our students tended to do poorly on (names, dates, facts)
  • Questions based on higher order thinking skills (evaluation, analysis, synthesis of ideas) our students tended to do well on, often better than the provincial average.

Budget
CBE Resource Allocation Budgets came out last week. Our budget has room to purchase additional school personnel. Ms. Holford reviewed plans for utilizing the additional funds. An additional 0.4 teaching position will be created. It is hoped that we will be able to find a music teacher who will also support release time for Learning Leaders. Two Learning leader positions will be created and filled with existing staff members. Our bookkeeper, Irene Foote, will be retained one day a week to support our new Administrative Secretary in the office as she adapts to her role. Finally, a 20 hour EA position is being considered to support special needs learners in our school.
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Community Engagement - Impacted Schools
Information about the process of deciding about future accommodations in Area 2 schools was shared. This information will be further explored October 25th at a Community Engagement meeting for parents at Colonel MacLeod School at 6:30 pm. Belfast parents are encouraged to attend as decisions made may impact some of our students down the road. The timeline for staff and community engagement was presented as well as the 3 scenarios being considered by the board. Ms. Holford and Ms. El-Guebaly will be attending the meeting tomorrow night as well.