By Sarah Hall

Editor

Students in Liverpool and North Syracuse are hopefully settling into their new routines after heading back to school last week. While kids are adjusting to the rigors of homework and classwork and adapting to new bedtime and morning rituals, districts are adopting changes of their own. Read on to find out what’s new in your district.

Liverpool

The most important changes in Liverpool are happening, of course, in the classroom.

Among the new initiatives is an increased focus on project-based learning. Also known as problem-based learning, it’s a technique where students identify a real-world problem and learn by working to solve it. The focus is on the whole journey rather than just the end result.

Liverpool Central School District Superintendent Mark Potter said he’s long been a fan of project-based learning (PBL).

“Not all students can provide evidence of their knowledge acquisition through a pen-and-paper exam or state assessment,” he said. “PBL provides an avenue for students to learn and deliver evidence of their learning through projects or expeditionary learning. PBL utilizes real-life experiences. Students will explore problems occurring in real life, research those issues and provide solutions through presentations.”

Helping students to achieve those goals will be new technology the district is integrating into its classrooms. Last year, Liverpool started a 1:1 device initiative to give students access to either an iPad, a Chromebook or a laptop for instructional use. Potter said the district is at about 75 percent for that program and should be at 100 percent by the end of the year. All classrooms also have interactive whiteboards for teachers and students to use.

“Our hope, is with technology integration, we will better meet the needs of all students’ learning styles and also prepare all students for their future,” Potter said.

Meanwhile, Liverpool’s staff are learning to collaborate to better serve their students through professional learning communities (PLCs). Potter said it’s a new district-wide initiative launched this year focused on expectations for student achievement.

“Essentially PLCs are collaborative learning models where staff are brought together for a common goal,” he said. “Not all PLCs look alike, but our desire is to kick off the initiative. Several of the LCSD buildings have already begun the process.”

Potter said PLCs are designed around four common intents: common teaching standards (curriculum), common formative assessments, a common culture for learning and common (or shared) planning/collaborative time together.

Outside the classroom, Liverpool is also launching a new Communication Committee that will seek to affirm the district’s mission within the community. Part of that committee’s job will be to come up with a branding video to represent the district.

“[The video] will represent the district as “This is Liverpool,’” Potter said. “It’s supposed to be an extension of the district’s mission and vision”

The video will be presented during community events as a ready reminder of the district’s identity. Potter said he hopes to have the video completed by late September or early October.

Also part of the district’s rebranding will be new signs to replace the old wooden ones that have pointed to the schools for so long.

“I’ve been in Liverpool now going on 10 years,” Potter said. “One of the things that I think (and have believed for some time) is the district needs a ‘facelift’ in some respects.  The district signage is unfortunately old and in most cases in poor condition.”

Potter said he’d like to see the signs replaced with some of a similar size, but in the district’s blue and orange colors.

For more information about what’s new in Liverpool and at your child’s school, visit liverpool.k12.ny.us.

North Syracuse

North Syracuse’s students will be learning to read and write differently, thanks to a new approach called balanced literacy — but it’s actually not so new, according to Assistant Superintendent for Instruction Dawn Wilczynski.

“We did this back in the ‘80s,” she said. “Now it’s just going right back, saying ‘Those are the good elements to literacy instruction, let’s get back to that and create that within our classrooms.’”

Balanced literacy, Wilczynski said, offers students multiple opportunities to read, write and engage with material. The goal is to increase their comprehension, improve their ability to read for longer periods of time and help them become better readers and writers in general. Teachers district-wide underwent training in balanced literacy over the summer. The approach incorporates both a reader’s workshop and a writer’s workshop and utilizes a variety of reading materials, including tradebooks, to engage students.

“We’re pretty excited about this one, because we really do believe this is the way children learn to read and write,” said Superintendent Annette Speach.

“All balanced literacy is, is providing multiple opportunities for students to be engaged in reading and writing with authentic texts,” Wilczynski said. “It’s giving them more time to read, more time to interact with authentic reading and writing opportunities. We’re really excited about that, but it’s going to be a learning curve.”

The NSCSD is also going back to its roots for its special education students. North Syracuse was a pioneer in integrated education back in the mid-1980s when students with special needs were first “mainstreamed,” or moved from special schools into their neighborhood schools.

Speach came to the district as a special education intern in 1985.

“North Syracuse was known for being on the cutting edge,” she said. “We need to bring that back.”

In the intervening years, budget cuts and other concerns have meant that special needs students have ended up where the services are instead of the other way around. Integrated classrooms have been limited to a few buildings, and students end up pulled out of instructional time to receive necessary therapies. Now, with the changes the district is implementing, those students will receive those services in their “home” school. They’ll receive more “push-in” services within the classroom, creating fewer interruptions to their day.

The district began examining changes to its special education program two years ago after feedback from parents and the community. The administration hosted listening forums, worked with consultants Dr. Julie Causton and Dr. George Theoharis from the School of Education at Syracuse University and formed a district-wide Special Education Committee made of parents, teachers, administrators and community members to determine how to improve the district’s programming.

The most important conclusion to come out of the committee was that students needed to be educated in their home schools. So at the start of the 2016-17 school year, the majority of the district’s special needs population K-7 are in their own schools.

Speach said there are some exceptions.

“Parents might say, ‘My child is going from third to fourth grade, and I don’t him to go to a new school for fourth grade and then a new school for the following year,’” she said. “So we’ve made some adjustments and there’s some provisions where students were able to finish out in the school that they had been in. We do also have some students with more significant needs who are still not in their home school and still receiving instruction in special class settings because at this point we think that’s best meeting [their] needs.”

Speach said the district was able to use its existing staff to manage the shift, though some additional hiring was necessary.

“Many of our classrooms now look different,” she said. “The main focus of this is the difference and delivery of services — less of students being pulled out, but more of help and support from special ed teachers and therapists going in to classrooms and supporting and working with the regular classroom teacher as a team. The research shows that that is more effective for the students.”

She said it made much more sense to provide push-in services than to pull kids out to provide things like speech and occupational therapy and reading help.

“When you think about it, it really doesn’t make sense that we take students that have the most difficult time transitioning and focusing, and pull them out,” Speach said. “There were studies done that they lose an incredible amount of instructional time.”

Speach said she expected there might be some bumps along the way this year as the schools, students and staff adjusted to the changes. But she believed things would smooth out on the future.

“We’re further ahead in better meeting the needs of students than we were a year ago,” she said. “And I’m anticipating that after we learn and work through this for a whole year we will be in an even stronger place in terms of meeting students’ needs a year from now.”

Both efforts, which were made possible in part thanks to grant money from Assemblyman Al Stirpe’s office, are aimed at helping students of varying abilities reach their potential, Wilczynski said.

“I think the thread between both of them is just very solid, tier-one instruction and that we have to know how to differentiate between all types of learners,” she said.

Speach said that instruction will require teachers to change their way of thinking.

“When we talk about professional development and consistency, the question that needs to be asked is not, ‘What do I teach?’” she said. “It’s, ‘What do the students need to learn?’ It’s about the learning.”

To learn more about what’s new in North Syracuse or in your child’s school, visit nscsd.org.