Curriculum and Instruction Policy Committee 6/14

The Curriculum and Instruction Policy Committee met yesterday afternoon. Directors Sundquist and Martin-Morris (chair) were present. Director Patu was absent.

The meeting began with a discussion of the idea of waivers for schools that want to use something other than the Board-adopted materials as their primary texts. Schools are free to choose supplemental materials, but they are expected to rely primarily (there is no enforcement or objective measure) on the Board-adopted materials. The only Board-adopted material currently in use are the math textbooks - although this list will grow starting next year - and there are only two schools that have a "waiver". There is no formal process for granting a waiver and no formal process for revoking one. The discussion at this meeting was to confirm that the only waivers would be for materials and then to set a timeline for drafting procedures. Dr. Enfield committed to having draft procedures ready for Board review in the fall.

Special attention was paid to the extent to which alternative schools will be expected to use the Board-adopted materials.

Next came a discussion of the 150 hours of planned instruction required by law and how the District is meeting this requirement. The people at the table all agreed that this is not an issue for them and that it should not be a priority, but that because members of the public are worked up about they should do something to emulate concern. They believe with high confidence that they are meeting the legal requirements but they would like to issue a statement that they are meeting the requirement without counting passing time or professional development time. Before they do, however, they want to check to see if it is true. They are not particularly concerned by the variety of instructional hours from school to school. They agree that when CORE 24 is adopted the 150 hour rule will be repealed, and so, since they anticipate CORE 24, they don't want to invest in the 150 hour thing.

The only thing they said about the NWEA contract is that they want to fully disclose the Superintendent's involvement with NWEA as a member of their Advisory Board - not their Board of Directors - and that she will not participate in the decision to use their product (or some such incredible nonsense).

The District has a signed contract to offer an additional Project Lead the Way class at STEM but PLTW wants Board approval of the relationship. The District doesn't require it, but PLTW does. The Board will do so via resolution since the contract is already signed.

The annual revisions to the Student Rights and Responsibilities Handbook were distributed.

Holly Ferguson distributed a draft calendar for Policy revisions which was cross-referenced by both the Policy Area, a time period for the policy to get review, and the Board committee that will review it. She had to allow for policies to need revision that had escaped notice before.

An example of such a policy is C32.00 and the accompanying procedure C32.01. No one in the District had noticed this policy until recently, for the first time in anyone's memory, someone used the policy to complain about a text. It was a book used in Language Arts in high school. That suddenly brought the policy to everyone's attention and they realized how much they didn't like the policy.

I had my whiteboard with me throughout the meeting and wrote on it from time to time, but without noticable effect.