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Date: 1/24/2023
SOUTHAMPTON – During the Southampton Select Board’s Jan. 17 meeting, the board met with representatives from the Norris Elementary School, Hampshire Regional High School and Hampshire Regional School, District Superintendent Diana Bonneville to receive updates about the schools and district as a whole.
Norris Elementary School Principal Aliza Pluta said things were operating smoothly at the school.
“Last year our enrollment was 476 students and it’s currently at 487, so that’s good. We don’t have any staffing issues other than we have a long-term substitute special [education] position available because we have a teacher going on maternity leave for the rest of the school year. We also have a special [education] paraprofessional position open for our neuro-diverse program due to a resignation last week,” she said.
When discussing the work of the schools social-emotional learning committee, Pluta said they have three goals, “To be kind, to be responsible and to be safe.” Following an assembly about being kind, Pluta added that the school handed out 387 kindness tickets to students for being kind to others. She added that the school is planning the assemblies for being responsible.
Pluta also highlighted the success of the implementation of the Haggerty reading program in kindergarten through second grade.
“We have found that since we implemented the Haggerty program in grades K to 2 our students phonological and phonemic scores have improved significantly and we have begun using that program in preschool classrooms as well,” she said.
At the preschool level Pluta said the point of the program is to use rhymes and song to help students prepare for reading.
One point of concern Pluta brought up is that more students have missed school this year due to being sick.
“This year we gave out 56 letters, last year I think only about 24 letters went out for students that have seven or more absences so we’re finding it really difficult this year,” she said.
Pluta added that English MCAS scores dropped to 38.1 percent proficient, which was 15 percent lower than the prior year. She credited this decrease in score because of a change in the reading curriculum in the prior year that was initially supposed to be implemented in August of 2021, but the materials didn’t arrive until that November. “Teachers were scrambling,” she said.
When it came to the Hampshire Regional High School presentation, Principal Lauren Hotz highlighted the school’s parent education series, the first of which was about executive skills and the most recent one was all about anxiety.
“We have our next one this week and that’s about anxiety, and so that’s a huge issue that we see right now – mental health and anxiety – and so we’re really excited to have Lynn Lions coming for that,” she said.
For future sessions, Hotz said parents can expect seminars on social media and substance abuse, specifically regarding vaping and alcohol.
Hotz said one staffing issue revolves around the custodians and a shift to contracted cleaning.
“We’ve just been short staffed, it’s been difficult to keep reliable staff and after going through a lot of people we decided to go out to bid and see what we could find for a cleaning company, so we have contracted a cleaning company,” Hotz said. “We’ve gotten excellent feedback from teachers so far who have been frustrated with their rooms not being cleaned and so they’re very thrilled and excited about their clean floors now.”
Currently Hotz said she is posting several long-term substitute teacher positions because four teachers will be on maternity leave for the remainder of the school year.
One position that has made a difference in the district this year was the hiring of an adjustment councilor.
“That has made a huge impact on our middle school, so that position has really been a huge, school-altering position for us, it just has provided our middle school students with so much support,” she said.
Bonneville noted that Norris currently has the highest special education population in the district.
“The special [education] number is important to note, five years ago we were at 18.5 [percent] and last year we were at 27 [percent]. Some of that could be we didn’t have the neuro-diversity program in place so teachers may have been referring students more often than not to special education,” Bonneville said. “We try to be helpful to meet every student’s needs and perhaps we have more students in there than technically should be in there.”
Bonneville added that at Hampshire Regional the special education population was also above the state average.
When discussing a dip in MCAS scores, specifically with grade 8 English and math, Bonneville said the district is working on MCAS improvement plans along with implementing a new middle school math curriculum and a new English Language Arts program.
One thing Bonneville said the district is working on is aligning its crisis teams.
“Every school is kind of on a different page and I have asked Stephanie Foss, our health coordinator, to kind of run with that so we can have similar protocols in place,” she said. “Anytime we are going to have a crisis it is going to be chaotic, but at least we try to minimize the chaos wherever we can.”
Bonneville added that the district is trying to unify it’s central office to make its programs similar across the board in an attempt to save money across the district.
The Southampton Select Board next meets on Jan. 31.