MADISON TOWNSHIP — Shelley Hilderbrand, Madison’s superintendent, answered questions asked of her by about 150 members of the district community on Wednesday evening.
The two-hour meeting, which featured questions and answers on a bevy of topics, was not an official Madison School Board meeting.
Only two board members, President of the Board, Jeff Meyers and school board member Amy Walker, attended the meeting. Any more and a quorum would have been formed creating an official board meeting. Hilderbrand led the meeting as Meyers and Walker read questions from cards the public and submitted.
Below is a transcription of some of the questions and answers asked through the meeting. The transcription has been edited for clarity.
Q:Was the STEM curriculum voted on by the board?
A: By board policy, curriculum is not voted on by the board. The only thing that is approved are textbooks for courses … So we do not approve curriculum.
Q: Are you having STEAM or STEM implemented?
A: It’s both. You know we’re going to be having the art component incorporated into the courses. So the difference between STEM and STEAM is that when they started having the conversations between the two, they added ‘A’ and incorporated science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics.
Q: Why not Stellar or First robotics that are already here in Richland county?
A: We did not have a robotics club here in Madison, and so I think when I came here, that was one of the questions I asked because I’m very familiar with a lot of kids being very active in a robotics club. But Madison did not have one.
Q: Why do we have the highest school fees in the area?
A: I can’t speak to the highest school fees in the area. I can tell you that I looked at our school fees in great detail and wrote out exactly from what we proposed last last year and what we had this year.
What was kind of a misunderstanding was that we had, at the elementary, a $35 general fee. Well when I got here, I asked what’s that high dollar general fee spent on? Where’s it go? I didn’t really get a concrete answer. So when we go around the school fees for this next year, any school fee that we put in place, we have to be able to justify the fee.
Art was $10 last year and $10 again this year. Choir — $10 last year and $10 this year. Band $10 last year and $10 this year.
Q: You have claimed Madison has an overstaffing problem. What is your evidence that Madison is overstaffed? And what is your reasoning behind this claim? Seeing as many studies have proven that smaller class sizes are more beneficial.
A: Actually the biggest study out there is a metacognitive study with over 1 million data points. It actually claims opposite. It claims that class size does not have any impact on student achievement and there’s reasons for that. There’s reasons for that. It’s John Hattie, and you can look it up.
Q: How will the district ensure that students in the middle and high school who had an identified academic disability and have an IEP be served in all subjects? These students have a need in all subjects, not just math, reading and writing. Why cut them off and expect them to succeed without them?
A: On our IDEA, which is our law for students with special disabilities, we will follow that so we follow those laws and expectations.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Our Special Education Department, and my special education director would agree with me on this, we need to do some work. I think our teachers would even agree with that. We have excellent intervention specialists. We have an excellent special education teachers. What we need to do work on is our system and so there are consistent things that have to be done a different year for special education.
Q: The rumor is, the high school library is being cut in half, is this true?
A: I don’t know if it’s being cut in half. What was done was glass partitions were added to the library to make kind of like classrooms. They are glass partition classrooms for study areas and collaboration space for our students and that actually was a suggestion given to me by our high school principal.
He came to me with that idea and asked if we could move in that direction, and I trusted him on that decision. We looked at our operations budget. Are we losing resources in the library? No, so it’s not like we’re kicking out books or anything like that. We’re just utilizing that space differently.
Q: When will parents be allowed to see Project Lead The Way policy?
A: That PLTW is out there already on the web so anybody can see it. It’s not hidden. It’s out there on the web. So we can access that through PLTW. We have all the PLTW units are connected to Ohio — Ohio content standards. So the Ohio content standards are what we’re teaching in PLTW units.
Q: Shelby’s school STEM program, they failed and spent a lot of the money. Was this researched at all?
A: I don’t know that Shelby’s STEM programs failed. I don’t know why it failed.
Q: What exactly are the changes being made for high school special education students needing intervention specialists in each class.
A: The only difference that’s happening in high school is, we had some different classes as far as how we broke them up and so we’re doing the same thing across the board where we’re servicing reading and math goals.
I’m on the IEP because that’s what’s on the IEP. Mostly IEP goals are either reading, math or behavior, so we either have reading, math and behavior goals, so those are going to be serviced now. How they’re serviced and wherever they serve is different on each IEP and so the reading and math goals obviously have to be around content standards. Those will be serviced in the reading and math classroom and those resources will be done first. Behavior goals can be serviced in a multitude of ways and so based upon how the IEP is.
Q: What is the current equipment you plan to recommend to the Board for approval at tomorrow’s special meeting.
A: The only thing that’s on there tomorrow, a special meeting is the purchase of computers. If I remember correctly. The purpose was said equipment and curriculum, but the ‘curriculum’ part was printed in error.
Q: Are there any full-time African American employees at Madison? And so what is the ratio of student population?
A: I believe we have some African American coaches, but we do not have any current African American staff. Does that represent our student body correctly? No, we have the Asian students, we have Indian students, so we do not have representations of all that adult staff, like we do our students staff. So no, we do not have a diverse staff.
Q: Is the healthy lifestyles class for the seventh and eighth grade the same or is it or is the eighth grade year more advanced?
A: I can’t speak to that completely, but it wouldn’t be the same. Like to what degree is the difference? I don’t have specifics for you. But we would not ask a student to take the exact same class, seventh grade and eighth grade, so they will be different activities, learning outcomes.
Q: Will intervention specialsts have time during the school day (class time) be reduced in any way to take on duties or teaching.
A: Not under my directive. it’s not supposed to happen. I have said that even before to staff that they are to be working with special education students. Has that always happened? I’ll be honest with you, this last year no, and when I found out about it, I addressed it and so that’s the best I can do with that.
Q: Why isn’t STEM voluntary?
A: I don’t know how to explain this, to be honest with you because when it comes to scheduling, there are just so many seats to go around and schedule. If you had 10 people and gave them two options, you can pretty much disperse the group evenly. If you take those 10 people and have them between those two options, maybe you have a good amount of people in both of those options to be able to make it work and make it viable to have those two people working with 10 people. But if you take 10 people and get eight options, then you disperse it to where somebody might only have one person in that group to work with.
That doesn’t necessarily make it a viable fiscal option.
Q: Why did we hire a new middle school principal from our district with no experience? What was the purpose of interviewing teachers who used to work here? Are we going to continue to do that, from outside the district and not promote from within?
A: We will always hire the best candidate.
Q: Does the board have to approve the money spent for STEM courses, and if so, have they already approved the courses after start from this school year 2018?
A: The board has to approve anything over the amount of $15,000. So if we have a contract or if we had a purchase over the amount of $15,000, the board has to approve that. So when we buy materials, textbooks, things like that, if that equates to over $15,000, they have to for that.
Anytime we have a contract that equates to over that, they have to approve that. Is there a project Lead the Way contract? Yes, there is a Leader In Me contract and those contracts include things like professional development and all those things.
Q: Why aren’t our students able to take more physical education?
A: We meet the state requirements for what we have to offer are those courses and so we make sure we meet the state guidelines for how much of that has to be offered and that’s what we’re doing now. There’s other ways to be physically fit through opportunities, have recess for opportunities of extracurricular co-curricular, things like that. But we we adhere to the state guidelines on course offerings and time has to be allowed for them.
Q: At last month’s board meeting, preschool staff attended and said they had 53 percent of students graduated in 2018. They also stated that only 60 percent of preschool grads stay within the Madison district, post graduation. Why are we considering displacing Mifflin students to accommodate kids who won’t eventually, end up going on to our district?
A: Okay, so let me clear up the inaccuracy in that question. First of all, preschool did not present last month. It was the Jesse Beer early childhood that presented.
We have our South preschool and that is the special education and typical preschool that we offer here through Madison local schools. And we also have a partnership with Jesse Beer who for whatever reason, they were a preschool that existed prior to the mandate that Ohio put on schools to have a preschool with special education and typical students, not special education students. And so when that happened years ago, they did not disband Jesse Beer, they let Jesse Beer continue. It operated as a preschool, but its fiscal agent, as far as housing its money not paying for it was Madison. Just kind of holding its money.
There’s no conversation about selling Mifflin.
Mifflin is a great site to put another new elementary and so it could potentially be a site for a brand new build of an elementary and we would then have schools on the ends of our district for busing and transportation needs. Okay. It was some future thinking, some future planning. So it wasn’t in that to be longterm and it was a suggestion, it was never too close Mifflin. it was to look at our resources that we have now and use them to the best of our advantage.
Q: Have you, Ms. Hilderbrand been trained in Project Lead the Way?
A: No.
Q: What about the dress code for High School and Middle School?
A: I’ll address dress code. Dress is totally a personal opinion. You know, we could probably stand up and probably have a couple of us even in this room tonight, walk through the hallways at the high school and some of those teachers probably say your dress is inappropriate for the dress code at the high school. Shorts might be too short. We have a dress code in our handbook. I was a high school administrator and I’ll be honest with you, they hated me when it came to dress code. They hated me because I was on them because I said, you dress the way you behave. And I pushed that and I said, dress like you respect yourself and dress like you’re going to work everyday.
Q: What was the need for bus time change as changing has cost me $300 plus per month.
A: The reason, honestly, was bus efficiency. The cost for you for daycare, I’m truly sorry about that. The reason really was efficiency.
Q: An IEP student who has a math goal doesn’t have an in0class IEP Teacher. How is that OK?
A: It is. We have to meet the accommodations to be met so that they can have access to the curriculum. That does not necessarily mean a person. There’s a continuum of services and so what does that look like? Do some people need that? Yes.
So what is it? Is it an aid? Is it an instructional aid? Or is it a teacher? Because the gen ed teacher is responsible for the curriculum.
Q: Almost every STEM job requires an associate degree. How does implementing STEM help my child get a job if he or she doesn’t want to attend the college?
A: Not all of them do require an associate’s degree. I mean talk to our CT teachers. We have our kids going out and straight to our CT classes into the workforce with a credential and some of those are considered STEM-like jobs.
Q: You said STEM as an elective was not feasible, but it was voluntary before, why does it no longer work?
A: The only options we have for our kindergarten through grade six kids, is where P.E., music, library, tech. And the tech was our media center person running a program and giving it to students once a week.
By putting in a STEM rotation into that option or just putting in another thing for them to do and their specials rotation. So we would need more staff.
So why didn’t we choose art? Because that requires staffing. Art is this specialized license to teach. We don’t have money for that. We just don’t.
Q: Are you planning any changes to the role high school (plays), if so what?
A: We’re always looking for improvement everywhere. Safety is a big concern. If you haven’t seen it yet. We showed you at the last board meeting where we’re working on a secure entrance kind of area at the high school to better that. We’re constantly working on this.
As far as changes at the high school, am I planning anything? I don’t have any great plans.
It’s about working together and looking at it again through that strategic planning process. What do we want? You know, what do we want more? We want some different career tech programs. Do we need some other opportunities?
I mean, I just saw Pioneer offered phlebotomy and medical assisting. Is that something that our Madison kids have a high interest in? Is that something that direction we should go?
