About to enter his second full academic year at the helm of the Haddonfield School District, Superintendent Larry Mussoline offered a preview of what borough residents can expect from the district in the 2019-20 school year, which is set to begin with the first day of classes on Tuesday, Sept. 3.
“Getting our QSAC (Quality Single Accountability Continuum) scores up, and addressing that,” he said bluntly during a lengthy conversation on Aug. 19.
“That’s a major focus this year, to get our curriculum written properly and make sure we have our mandated trainings. We spend a lot of time on strategic planning and there are our three goals: cultural competence, social and emotional well-being, along with a flexible 21st-century teaching and learning mindset.”
Haddonfield’s QSAC scores, released at the end of the previous academic year, placed the district well below the state average score of 80 in all five of its evaluative criteria; it scored 63 for Instruction and Program.
To that end, the district will attempt to correct those issues with implementation of a computer math program into sixth-grade curriculum to see why students are not achieving higher at that grade level than district QSAC test scores indicated.
“When we get that next assessment, we’ll see how it is having a program which is an adaptive personalized computer math program based on the standards of what students are to know and be able to do in sixth-grade math. The program adapts to the student’s pace of learning, guiding the student through on grade-level content alongside the teacher,” Mussoline explained.
Also at the middle school will be a new mode of scheduling, called the “Bulldawg Block” that is intended to align the school week with the working week rather than a “tutorial” model of six-day rotations based on a 180-day school year. At the high-school level, similar block scheduling, along with a split between traditional class periods and expanded time frames, is expected to be in place.
“Part of this ‘Bulldawg Block’ at the middle school, and what we’re going to do in high school, is to provide flexible learning environments. It helps us remediate, helps us in the social/emotional goal and what Tammy’s (principal McHale) proposing in the high school is flexibility in learning where students are able to get to a block of time to get to a teacher to get small-group help. Maybe we have longer blocks of time in a subject area instead of those 40-minute periods, moving bell-to-bell-to-bell. That’s really not the world, nobody works that way. That’s Henry Ford. That’s the way the factories were set up,” Mussoline stated.
Also under the umbrella of social and emotional learning, Mussoline revealed he’ll be looking into altering the traditional class-rank system so as to eliminate the competitive nature of singular valedictorian and salutatorian selections for future graduating classes.
Mussoline additionally weighed in on the proposed – and still pending – land swap between the board and the borough regarding a portion of the Bancroft Hall lot. The parties reached a memorandum of understanding last October, and former commissioner for public works John Moscatelli said completion of the process could take “months,” given various forms of bureaucratic maneuvering.
“We’ve got this Radnor Field parcel that we want to swap for the Hopkins parcel. We’ve finally filed with the state Board of Education to allow that plan to go forward, that was done about two to three weeks ago. We really hope to make this happen during this school year. I know the borough is trying to do something with Green Acres funding. But we have filed and we are moving forward, so the swap, we hope, will occur soon,” he added.
One matter of interest a little bit farther on the horizon is the state of the district teachers’ contract, which has one year remaining.
“We may talk to the union about extending that a year. It does expire at the end of this coming school year, at the end of August. (The contract’s length is based on) school years, where typically the fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30, but teacher contracts sometimes roll from September through August and I think ours does,” Mussoline said.
Also on the short list of events to come for the district: the introduction of a new school resource officer at the high school – a retired member of the force who reached the level of detective before retirement, who will be armed while on duty; the official dedication of the new, handicapped-accessible playground at J.F. Tatem Elementary School, as well as the impending construction of security vestibules installed at both Tatem and Elizabeth Haddon elementaries.
For more information about school-related happenings throughout the year, visit the district’s website at: https://haddonfieldschools.org/. Monthly district missives can be found at: https://haddonfieldschools.org/district-newsletters/.
