Harvard -Student enrollment expected to decrease in Harvard

Harvard — From- http://www.wickedlocal.com

The School Committee submitted its five-year capital plan to the Capital Planning and Investment Committee on Monday.

The plan, put together by the Harvard Public Schools administrative staff, identified more than $2 million in capital projects and other major purchases that, in their opinion, will be required over the next five years from fiscal 2013 to fiscal 2017. Interim Superintendent Joseph Connelly presented the plan at the Oct. 24 School Committee meeting and answered the committee’s questions with the help of Facilities Manager Mark Force.

The purpose of the plan, Connelly said, is to assess the schools’ total needs and spread them out over a five-year period to avoid “peaks and valleys” in funding.

The plan is divided into four parts: Major building repairs, grounds work, technology improvements, and major curriculum initiatives. Each line item indicates how much a project or item will cost and when it is expected that the money will have to be spent.

Major building repairs include upgrading the phone system and the fire alarm at Hildreth Elementary School. Grounds work includes repaving the Pod Road area by the Bromfield School. Technology improvements include installing a fiber optic connection at Hildreth and wireless LAN internet at Bromfield.

The final category, major curriculum initiatives, is a bit different. These are primarily textbook purchases, such as 100 new Algebra 1 texts for Bromfield.

“These are actually major textbook adaptations,” Connelly said.

He added that in many cases they could mean a change in the curriculum and the way it is taught.

Connelly said that state assessments ultimately test how well teachers teach the required curriculum, and that the schools ought to provide them with necessary materials. He also added that many of the more expensive curriculum line items had never been in a budget.

“Many times they keep getting bumped by greater needs,” he said.

All told, there are 86 line items on the five-year plan, ranging in cost from a few hundred dollars to more than $100K.

Many of the items put forward, Connolly said, had been in the previous five-year plan, and all of them must pass through scrutiny in the Capital Planning Committee before finding their way onto a ballot to be considered by voters at a Town Meeting.

“Just because we develop a five-year capital plan,” said Connelly, “does not mean these projects get funded.”

But, as School Committee Chairman Keith Cheveralls pointed out, “If it’s not on here, it doesn’t stand a chance of getting done.”

Connelly also delivered the schools’ Enrollment and Capacity Report for 2012–2021. This report predicts school enrollment numbers in order to determine future staffing and supply needs.

The basic assumption of the report, said Connelly, is that “a trend that’s occurred in the past 10 years is a predictor of what’s to come in the next 10 years.”

As such, the report calculates the “survival rates” of each class going back to 2002, by dividing the number of students in a particular grade level by the number of students in the previous grade level the year before.

For example, in 2002, 67 students enrolled in kindergarten. The next year, 71 students enrolled in first grade. This results in a survival rate of 106 percent.

By doing this calculation over a long period of time –– while taking into account local birth rates ––school administrators can predict with a significant degree of accuracy the chance of a class size increasing or decreasing, and by how much.

The report also takes into account the impact of school choice students and students from Devens. In the case of Devens, the report calculates three-year/five-year trends to reflect what has occurred since Devens students first started attending school in Harvard. Connelly considers these findings to be the most accurate predictors of future enrollment numbers.

In summary, the report paints a picture of a school population that has remained remarkably consistent. Over the past 10 years, Harvard’s K-12 enrollment increased by only 60 students, with 59 of those coming from Devens.

Total enrollment is expected to drop slightly from the 2011-2012 numbers of 1,239 students, to 1,223 in 2012-2013 and to 1,208 in 2013-2014, according to “survival rate” and birth rate projections.

“Our department heads and principals have to look closely at these numbers,” Connelly said.

Bullying prevention

Bromfield Principal James O’Shea and Hildreth Elementary School Principal Dr. Linda Dwight updated the board on the schools’ bullying prevention plans.

Dwight discussed the “Steps to Respect” program, which includes 22 lessons throughout the year about recognizing bullying and building friendships. O’Shea talked about the “World of Difference” program, under which older “peer advisors” meet with younger students and discuss themes like accepting differences and communication.

Both principals believe their programs have been successful. O’Shea said the Hildreth program seems to carry over well to Bromfield.

Both programs, Connelly said, comply with Massachusetts anti-bullying mandates signed into law in 2010, which provided a framework for schools to deal with bullying.

In other business

Dawn-Marie Ayles’s second-grade class, showed the School Committee a class video based on the book “How Full Is Your Bucket?”

“We have been actively using this theory in class,” said Ayles. “Just like a cup that runneth over, you have a bucket on your head.”

Students are taught to fill each other’s invisible “buckets” with positive comments, she said, and to avoid emptying the buckets with negative comments. After the video, the second-graders passed out paper “drops” to the members of the School Committee with positive messages written on them.