By Melanie Lekocevic
Capital Region Independent Media
RAVENA-COEYMANS-SELKIRK — As part of the budget development process, RCS is looking at the needs and challenges of the district moving forward.
District officials at the board of education’s Feb. 28 meeting presented the focuses that the upcoming budget will highlight and seek to address.
“The overarching goal in moving forward in building a recommended budget… is our effort to maintain pre-pandemic staffing and resources, and provide evidence-driven and fiscally responsible recommendations for additional staffing and resources that are closely aligned to our mission, vision and goals,” said Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Jean Winkler.
Last Wednesday’s presentation did not provide budget recommendations or numbers, but rather sought to identify the needs and challenges the budget will focus on.
An area of concern to district officials are the statewide assessments that were conducted in which RCS students as a whole trailed their peers in other districts around the state.
“A challenge that we have is that RCS students are underperforming compared to students statewide and in similar schools,” Winkler said.
Test results in RCS grades 3-8, in particular, are lagging.
But there were some bright spots in the assessments, such as testing in eighth-grade science and algebra, where RCS students outperformed students statewide, she added. Regents’ results for the high school were also higher than the statewide average.
The educational impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and related shutdowns may be part of the reason for falling numbers, but those impacts were felt everywhere, Bailey said later in the meeting.
“We say student results are poor because we went through those two years, but everybody’s kids did, every school district in New York and throughout the country, and we are behind them,” Bailey said. “That is what is most concerning to us — we want to remedy that.”
One key to improving academic outcomes that would have far-reaching impacts would be improved literacy, Winkler said.
“There are a lot of ways we can address this, but I think developing student literacies through professional learning and curriculum design” will help, Winkler said, particularly as improved literacy will affect student learning across all subjects, including English Language Arts, history, science and math.
The RCS district also has a changing demographic, and teachers have to find ways to address the needs of all the students, and that is where professional development comes in, Winkler said.
“We have a changing demographic, we have kids that look different than we have ever seen before,” she said. “As an educator, it’s hard when you have a set of skills that you have been tapping into and have been successful with, and you don’t have anything to replace them.”
The district needs to make the most of what it has, Winkler added.
“We need to focus on being more efficient with the resources that we have,” she said.
In addition to addressing student learning, other district priorities in the upcoming budget discussions are expected to include improving communication and physical safety on the school campuses.
The March 27 presentation will unveil the three-part budget proposal.