LVUSD united under single plan





By John Loesing
Acorn Staff Writer


All California schools, including the 13 campuses of Las Virgenes Unified School District, unveiled a new planning document last month called the Single Plan for Student Achievement.


The California Department of Education says the Single Plan not only will lead to better student performance, but also will help schools meet their state and federal funding requirements.


Former state Sen. Jack O’Connell, who’s now the state Superintendent of Public Instruction, introduced the Single Plan legislation in 2001. It went into effect this year.


"This is not a final product, this is a work in progress," said Joe Nardo, Las Virgenes Assistant Superintendent for Education. "Our final product will be whether student achievement improves."


The three-inch thick document pertaining to Las Virgenes schools included a sweeping overview of teachers and their educational practices, and suggested ways to improve classroom instruction for both mainstream and under-performing students.


Teachers and administrators studied a variety of student data to determine whether state content standards were being achieved in math, writing and language arts.


"We did some writing in the beginning of the year, middle of the year and the end of the year to determine growth," said Sheila Grady, principal of Bay Laurel Elementary School in Calabasas. "What we saw is that our students had to have other experiences in writing."


The Bay Laurel students used labs and unit study groups to improve both reading and writing. A computerized program called Reading Academy was especially helpful. In it, students must show ability is specific areas. "Maybe it’s prefixes, maybe it’s suffixes or something else," Grady said.


One of the goals of the Single Plan is to improve results of the annual Academic Performance Index (API), the cornerstone of the state’s public school accountability system.


Sumac Elementary School in Agoura Hills, which last year recorded the best API improvement in the district, has set a goal in improved writing. School officials said Sumac’s third-grade students need to learn more vocabulary and to better recognize the difference between declarative, interrogative and exclamatory sentences.


Lupin Hill Elementary School in Calabasas utilized a full-time speech language program, an English Learners’ program, a reading lab and a computer lab.


Steve Rosentsweig, the first-year principal at A.E. Wright Middle School in Calabasas, said more reading proficiency was needed at his school as well.


"If they can’t do well in the English content standards, they’re going to struggle in everything," Rosentsweig said.


In math, the A.E. Wright students benefited by having access to new textbooks.


"We believe the total child is not just English, it’s math," he said. Grady said her math students often had more trouble with word problems than computation problems.


"Children who are very talented in math, they get to the answer, but they don’t always know how they got there," she said. "Sometimes it helps when they know how a problem is solved."


The Las Virgenes Board of Education approved the new Single Plan at its Jan. 28 meeting.


"We’ve tried to make this document, instead of sitting on the shelf, to make it come alive," said Superintendent John Fitzpatrick.



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