New focus on math, school transitions and boosting STEM just some of the planned upgrades
By Kim Chiomento, Staff Writer, The Times
Kennett Consolidated School District Superintendent Barry Tomasetti (center) speaks with local residents, Monday night, immediately following the Board of Education meeting.
KENNETT – Dr. Barry Tomasetti, Superintendent of the Kennett Consolidated School District (KCSD), presented an overview of KCSD’s new six-year strategic plan, meeting with key PTO officers, district administrators, building principals and parents this week.
The six-year plan includes an enhanced focus on the district’s math curriculum to help even more effectively transition both fifth grade and eight grade students to the middle and high schools, respectively. This process includes the development of a new Connected Math-3 curriculum for eighth graders and increased focus on common core standards in the lower grades.
To assist with this process, KCSD has partnered and contracted with University Of Delaware professors who are educational experts. The partnership’s key goals are to enhance KCSD teacher’s professional development and strengthen teaching strategies for all types of learners.
“We are looking for our kids to be able to synthesize math problems, better multi-task and have a strong conceptual understanding, going beyond just successfully completing math problems. Our goal is for students to be confident in their interactions with difficult math concepts. Strong conceptual understanding is a very important for algebra and advanced math classes,” says Tomasetti, “We want all of our students to be strong math ‘thinkers.’ ”
The district will also continue to grow its very popular STEM (Science Technology Engineering & Math) program through additional instruction time and increased class offerings at both the high school and middle school levels. The District is currently finalizing details for a summer 2015 STEM fee-based program at the elementary levels.
The KCSD School Board held it monthly meeting Monday evening, hosted by Greenwood Elementary School and its PTO. The minutes from the September 2014 Board, Curriculum and Finance Committee meetings approved. Second readings on policies related to Employee Overtime and Community Participation in School Board Meetings occurred; and, both sections were approved as read.
Highlights from this week’s School Board meeting also included a KHS Student Council update, recognition of the District’s seven 2015 National Merit Scholarship Semi-Finalists (ranked in the top ½ of 1% of their academic peers nationally): Richard Doty, Jonathan Baumel, P.J. O’Sullivan, Liam Bonnage, Katie Gallivan, Dave Lavin and Nichol Brown.
KCSD also had 11 students who are National Merit Commended students (ranked in the top 5% of their academic peers nationally): Stepehn Doroba, Annabelle Schmitt, Jessica Rosenau, Phoebe Hertler, Arshia Faghri, Matthew Bunke, Kavya Shetty, Hali Jiang, Zixuan Shen and Laura Elliott. Also, recognized was Jacob Ettinger, who is currently attending the University of Southern California. Over 1.4 million students entered the highly competitive 2015 National Merit Scholarship competition by taking the 2013 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.
For a detailed summary of this week’s meeting minutes, future meeting dates and to learn more about KCSD, please visit www.kcsd.org
