- Ohio Valley Educational Service Center Superintendent Dalton Summers talked to the Marietta City Schools Board of Education Monday night about the Opportunity School. (Photo by Douglass Huxley)
- Marietta City Schools Director of Curriculum Timothy Fleming spoke to the Board of Education Monday night about the new curriculum the district adopted three years ago. Fleming said the curriculum is working and that the district needs to make sure it continues to do so. (Photo by Douglass Huxley)
Ohio Valley Educational Service Center Superintendent Dalton Summers talked to the Marietta City Schools Board of Education Monday night about the Opportunity School. (Photo by Douglass Huxley)
Marietta is headed in the right direction with new curriculum, a school official said.
“What we’re doing is working,” Director of Curriculum Timothy Fleming told the Marietta City Schools Board of Education about the curriculum change the district is undergoing during its regular meeting Monday night.
“It’s just got to be widespread, we got to push it, we got to support it and keep it going.”
Fleming said the district is seeing promising results from recent efforts to improve curriculum consistency and data-driven instruction in all subjects after adopting a new approach three years ago.
He said at that time there was a “hodgepodge” of different lessons being taught and each classroom was using a different method to teach those lessons.
Marietta City Schools Director of Curriculum Timothy Fleming spoke to the Board of Education Monday night about the new curriculum the district adopted three years ago. Fleming said the curriculum is working and that the district needs to make sure it continues to do so. (Photo by Douglass Huxley)
“The consistency piece wasn’t there,” Fleming said. “You had four different elementary schools where you walk across the hall and the teacher at Putnam would be doing some completely different lesson than the teacher across from them.”
He said consistency was important because all of these students would eventually end up in the same classroom but would be at different levels of understanding after being exposed to completely different learning materials.
“We eventually did a curriculum audit, just on language arts, (and) by the time they got to seventh grade, there were more than 120 different materials that students received,” Fleming said. “So during that audit, we cut it down to five or six.”
He said although there was some pushback at first, the data is showing growth in student performance, particularly in math and English, and he highlighted areas where test scores exceeded state averages. He also noted double-digit gains in some grade levels and subject areas from the previous year.
“This was the first time I’ve seen in the last eight or nine years that our percent of students proficient in algebra is above the state average,” boardmember Russ Garrison said.
“We’re consistently 10-15% below that.”
Fleming said accountability is very important and the district needs to make sure the curriculum is being followed.
“There has to be a through-line in what we’re doing, what I’m doing in kindergarten, basically makes an impact on what they’re doing in 11th grade,” Fleming said.
“It’s critical that we see that.”
Ohio Valley Educational Service Center Superintendent Dalton Summers also gave the board an update on how the first year of the Opportunity School went.
He said overall, the first year appears to have demonstrated the value of this cooperative approach to serving students with special needs locally rather than costly out-of-district placements or suspensions.
He said educators and families now have an innovative new resource to help students succeed.
“All in all, we had a pretty good year,” Summers said.
He discussed the challenges of starting a new school from the ground up, including renovating a vacant building, hiring qualified staff, and ironing out operational details.
He said despite initial setbacks, the school met enrollment targets and provided specialized classrooms and support services for students throughout the year.
“Our numbers were about where we wanted to be,” Summers said.
He said the Opportunity School portion focuses on students with intensive needs, keeping class sizes small at five to seven students per class.
The Alternative School is designed to offer education alternatives to suspension or expulsion for students with behavioral issues, hosting up to 25 students in a more general classroom setting.
He said the goal is to get students back into their regular classrooms as quickly as they can.
“Say you have that 70-day expulsion student, and you might bring that student’s mom and dad in and you say, ‘I’ve expelled you for 70 days, however, you can go down to the alternative school for 30 days.
And you do your work, and you stay current, and you show up and you do everything, we will put the other 40 days in abeyance and send you back,'” Summers said.
“That’s definitely the goal for the alternative school.”
He reported high satisfaction from participating districts and a growing waitlist indicating demand for more program slots.
He asked the board to vote on adding another room for more students.
The board approved this during the new business portion of the meeting.
Everything the board approved can be found in the online version of this story.
The next regular meeting of the board is scheduled for July 22 at 6 p.m. in the board offices located at 111 Academy Drive.
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