Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 6/26/2023
WARE — The Ware School Committee’s June 21 meeting began with a presentation of the Ware Public Schools Strategic Plan by project lead Julie Houle along with her colleagues Casey Handfield and Paul Livingston.
They were commissioned by the Ware Public Schools to come up with a new plan that would help drive the schools forward as a collective in the next three to five years.
The presentation captured where the schools are now and provided direction for how to enhance the positive things the schools already doing. The presentation also outlined three areas of focus: curriculum and instruction, social emotional learning and engagement in the mission.
For curriculum and instruction, the goal is to establish a common language for best instructional practice for engaging students that would be known by all and used by all by the end of 2024. There are several frameworks out there for best instructional practices with real descriptions about how they look inside the classroom. The strategies and actions the team designed help define what that is and make sure everybody understands what it is so that the administration can calibrate their options of instructional practice and how they give feedback to teachers to be able to improve instruction.
For social emotional learning, the team surveyed the community and brought in focus groups. The survey ranked challenging student behaviors and asked about social/emotional concerns within the top five challenges perspective and which ones did people feel that the district was facing the most. The focus groups confirmed that more supports are needed and impacts of challenging behaviors on all students in a classroom was an area of particular interest. Out of that, the team’s goal is to ensure students have the social and emotional skills to access learning in the classroom. This plan represents input from all across the community. For engagement in the mission, their goal is to develop a standard operating procedure for engaging families in the education of their students by June of 2025. They want to make sure that the communication methods that are in place across school buildings are appropriate and to the extent possible can be streamlined for ease of use for families forging the partnership between school and home.
School Committee Chair Christopher Desjardins said, “This is certainly going to be a very helpful tool going forward as we work to align with this plan.”
Toward the end of the meeting, the committee discussed renewing their search for a Special Education Director. Desjardins opened the floor for the rest of the committee members to see what their thoughts on in terms of salary if they’d like to adjust that. At this point in time Desjardins said it’s probably something they would need to take a look at. The salary range for the special education director position is $95,000 to $105,000, which Desjardins stated is pretty valid for a district their size. After deliberating, the committee decided to keep the salary range as it is and will work on forming a committee again to see how they can fill the special education director position this summer.