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School superintendent, Annette Castiglione, stated that despite delays, the Early Childhood Center will be ready for students on November 9.
Castiglione said at last week’s Board of Education (BOE) meeting that she recently did a walk-through of the center and the furniture is in and the custodians have been cleaning the rooms.
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“The siding should be going up soon and the roof is on,” she said.
Castiglione and the district’s administrators gave a presentation on the district’s annual report. The report is available online on the Bellmawr Schools’ homepage
The superintendent also commented on the preliminary results of PARCC test. She said, “I received a 14-page PowerPoint on the PARCC Results, but we will not have the district results until late November.”
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Once the district’s full results are received, they will be rolled out to the parents.
Speaking preliminarily about the results, Castiglione stated, “As we expected, the PARCC results certainly show that our performance is less than what was the case on the NJ-ASK. But for those of you who have been in education as long as I have, the NJ-ASK results the first year were significantly lower than what we call the GEPA (Grade Eight Proficiency Assessment).
She continued by saying, “Every time we change a standardized test, the results do shift dramatically and so we will expect that. We are expecting that statewide.”
She indicated that the results show statewide that Belllmawr’s students did not do as well in the PARCC as they did in the NJ-ASK.
“They did a little better in Language Arts than they did in Math, but in any case, they did what we expected them to do,” Castiglione said.
She further explained, “What this test is telling us is that we really have to keep ramping it up and going to the higher order thinking skills. That doesn’t mean teachers aren’t teaching and that the students aren’t learning. They are. There is no need for alarm. There is no need for opting out. There’s just a need to keep doing what we are doing.”
During the business portion of the meeting, all matters brought before the BOE were passed.
The BOE approved Anthony Sciarrillo as labor negotiator at the rate of $160.00 per hour because 2015-16 is the third and final year of the teachers’ contract.
The annual percentage increase for the teachers’ contract over the past three years is broken down as: 2.74% for 2013-14; 3.4% for 2014-15, and 3.97% for 2015-16.
The BOE voted to approve a $2,500 grant from GHA Technologies, Inc. to be used for technology equipment (Chrome Books) at Bellmawr Park School.
The BOE also voted to approve an agreement with Delta-T Group, Inc. for a learning disability teacher consultant (LDTC) not to exceed 10 hours weekly for the 2015-16 school year at a rate of $55.00 an hour.
The BOE will meet again on Wednesday, November 18 at 5:00 pm for its work session and the regular meeting will follow at 6:00 pm in the Bell Oaks Media Center.