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>> Rochelle: Hello. I'm Rochelle Cassella welcoming you to 1999's first edition of "New York Learns, Teacher to Teacher." I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday break and you're back in the swing of things in the classroom.

This week, of course, 4th graders across the state are taking the new English language arts assessment and soon schools will be involved in regional scoring of those tests. In our February "Teacher to Teacher," we'll give you some ideas of how those assessments and scoring sessions went, but right now we're here to talk with you about Comprehensive District Education Plans, or C.D.E.P. for short.

We'll take you to the State Education Department's C.D.E.P. orientation session and show you two school districts who submitted good plans. Then we'll talk with Barb Flynn and Dick Jones at the State Education Department about the process and introduce you to school representatives for a more in-depth discussion of what they encountered as they developed their plans.

Keep in mind that the primary goal of a Comprehensive District Education Plan is to help students meet the new standards, and we'll show you how that works.

The New York State Education Department first began talking about Comprehensive District Education Plans in 1992 as part of the Compact for Learning. But the timing wasn't quite right for the plans to go into place then. But in 1996, representatives from the Staff, Curriculum and Development Network, made up of BOCES members, told Department officials that they thought Comprehensive District Education Plans were a vital element in helping students succeed in the new standards. While State Ed isn't yet requiring school districts to participate in the C.D.E.P. process, it is providing interested districts with information, training and even partners within the department to encourage participation.

The first step for a district often is to send representatives to an orientation session for an overview of the Comprehensive District Plan's goals, objectives and way in which the process can be approached. We attended one such orientation session with our video cameras and we offer you this composite of what that day looked like.

>> The purpose of today is not to teach you how to do comprehensive planning; rather it's to provide an overview...

>> If you go up to where it says "activities" here and you click on New York State Regents statement, what you'll get immediately printed out for you is the New York Mission and Vision Statement.

>> If you are going to go through with the software pilot, it's strongly recommended that you take two people to the software training sessions.

>> It was said, if you don't have data, you're just a person with an opinion.

>> We have reviewed the 34 completed plans that we received from the districts that did comprehensive planning in the spring. I should say that half of them were very good and we're not asking for any changes and, in fact, they would not have to do amendments as part of their update. The other districts will get some feedback from us and will be asked to either provide some more information or to do things a little differently for their update for next year.

And now we would like to show you the tape of Jim Kadamus and then we'll move into the panel session.

>> Jim Kadamus: We see the comprehensive plan as having a benefit of improved student achievement. It brings the focus to student achievement, looking at the data and what needs to be done to get the students to meet the State standards in the elementary schools, middle schools and high school level. It allows us to really focus on the use of resources. I always define planning as matching needs and resources. The needs are defined by the data and by the community input. The resources, you know what they are in terms of your resources that you have from the state level, local level, federal level.

We hope that it reduces both plan and reporting duplication. Our goal is to consolidate requirements for 25-plus plans into a single comprehensive plan and then to have a single comprehensive reporting process so that we do not have to have you continuously doing more and more paperwork.

Also, better collaboration and coordination across the district and allows clear interpretation of your goals and your progress to the community. Those are the benefits that we see as part of the Comprehensive District Education Plan.

>> I think we'll begin with the flow chart. I suggest you actually start with a vision. Second, you look at the factors that influence your district. What constraints do we operate under? You'll see that defined in various ways in the folder, the green folder you've got, in the district profiles or the district statement, et cetera. You sit down and reflect what are the pressures on us as a community to deliver quality education to our students? It says, "Would you like to check out your vision statement?" If I say yes, it immediately gives me a ten-part question against which I can test out the district's statement.

>> I can tell you that we used a subcommittee off of our Part 100.11 team. The subcommittee was made up of the administrators and the superintendents in the building, and we met every Friday from about the middle of March until the end of the year to work on this plan and then the Part 100.11 team met once a month to review what we were doing as well as we got information out to our school improvement teams who also reviewed and got information back to us so that we could work through this to have it ready to hand in in July.

>> We're going to put a new one in. That's new at the top of the screen there. Type yourself in.

>> What we want to get to is "X" number of students up to "Y" standard. So you start within here a mini-flowchart which helps us make those decisions. Written into the philosophy of comprehensive planning is talking with the whole stakeholder community. Who is our stakeholder community? Who do we have to talk to? What lines of communication exist within the district to get a response from parents, local industries, community leaders?

>> I've been in education in New York State for 36 years. I've been a teacher of social studies, high school assistant principal, high school principal. I spent 25 years in a small city district. I was Superintendent of Schools and now am superintendent of a small BOCES.

In all of those experiences, I have not seen where school districts have used data the way we intend it to be used in a comprehensive plan. The comprehensive plan is meant to bring the parts of a school system -- Title I, special education, regular ed, youth at risk, drug-free schools, you name it -- and focus on the linkages, the communications and the focus of those parts toward the goal of the school. To me, that's the central concept.

So this piece is meant to stop us, to put a brake on us from jumping from that problem-to-solution issue.

I would add on a section that starts off with where you are and who you are. It's a golden opportunity to summarize all of the good things that are going on in your district and use that as a communication tool.

>> The planning process provided the impetus for us to focus on the standards, and the conversation became a standards-based conversation and the different audiences have begun to look at how it is that the activities in the district and the plans that the district develops are attempts to meet and to help students meet the new learning standards from the state.

>> Could you describe the costs that were involved with each of your processes?

>> If there's a cost, it has to do with the standards; it doesn't have to do with the C.D.E.P. process.

>> I'm curious, though, how much voice were your parents allowed to have in the decision-making in the process?

>> Any stakeholder, I think they saw that they all, you know, had an equal voice and that's what facilitators were trying to do, to make sure everyone had the ability to participate.

>> The next step in this process, I think, is to refine the process -- we're trying to do that with the next districts -- and then for the state to really look back and say: Should we make everybody do this? Is it that important? Or should we only really make the poor-performing districts do it? I would argue even the highest-performing districts can always do better.

>> Rochelle: Deputy Commissioner Jim Kadamus, seen in that videotape, couldn't be with us today, but he sent two people who have worked closely on the program since its inception: Barb Flynn and Dick Jones are from the Offices of Regional School Services and Innovative Programs.

Welcome to both of you. Thank you very much for joining us today.

The video provided us with a quick look at the orientation session, but we're going to take a closer look at the comprehensive plan.

Dick, repeat first the goals and the objectives and how the process is designed to help schools to get to those goals.

>> Dr. Richard D. Jones: Well, Rochelle, there really is several purposes of what we're trying to do in Comprehensive District Education Planning.

The bottom line, of course, is reiterating their own intention of increased student achievement. But in getting there, this is one strategy that schools can use and there's a couple of things we're trying to accomplish with this.

We are trying to come up with a better process that schools can use and really build on the things that we've done in schools perhaps not as productively, some because of state requirements and some of the traditions within schools, to really share some ideas of a better planning process.

Planning, of course, is not unique. We have all done planning. But to try and do that in a way that really has much greater impact. And I think the other thing we have evolved to in this process is building a state initiative that is not so much a top-down State-mandate approach, that you must do this, but we really have built a dynamic process that's really come with just as much leadership from the field as it has from the State Education Department. Barbara and some of my colleagues at the Department have shown a lot of leadership in coordinating our Department efforts, but we couldn't have accomplished as much progress if it hadn't been for the significant leadership of educators from across the state.

>> Rochelle: And I think we're going to hear that when we talk with some of our representatives from the school districts here as well.

Give us a little bit more in-depth look at the plans and the process and what schools go through.

>> Dick Jones: To build on some of the things that you heard Deputy Commissioner Jim Kadamus talk about in the Comprehensive District Planning Process, one of the things that we have taken a critical look at is so many of the current plans that we require -- Jim mentioned 25 different plans. We require plans for various grant programs. We're looking now at establishing even more plans.

If we look at what happens in school districts, there's a lot of planning activity that goes on, but this is more of a reactive process. We have one visual just to illustrate that process. That planning takes place with a lot of different people involved at different points. But sometimes we take into consideration the state standards; sometimes we take into consideration student achievement data, and we work toward a specific document. We produce a grant application or we produce something that's required for the state requirement and shared decision-making. But too often we're not tying those back to some of those real needs within the district.

Right now we're looking at some additional planning requirements: Adding requirements in professional development as part of a new State requirement proposed, adding one for the annual evaluation of professionals in the district, and a new one that we've talked about, the new state test that you mentioned, a planning requirement on how our district is going to provide the additional academic services. All of that becomes an overload: How do we handle that much information?

What we have tried to do is to look at this process and the ways some districts have done this very well in a more comprehensive manner. I think I have a visual that shows that in a logical fashion, very systematically taking into consideration student achievement data, taking into consideration the state standards, having an extensive participation in that planning process, and that systematically leading toward the use of funds, actions that ought to take place in the districts, the kinds of professional development that ought to be in place and the way that we evaluate staff.

The districts have shown us that that can be a much more systematic and much more effective process to look at in that comprehensive way.

A second purpose that we're trying to do within this Comprehensive District Education Planning Process is to include the quality of planning. There's a lot of planning that takes place, but we know that some of that that's most effective is very clear about the purposes. You heard Bob Murphy from Banebridge talking about the importance of knowing very clearly where you're going. There also is a key aspect of analysis, and that's following through with how do you set your plans and actions to implement that? And then finally to see what progress you have made.

I have an illustration here that I think emphasizes the point that this is a continuous loop. It isn't a matter of creating a document and saying, "Oh, we're done; we've created our comprehensive plan." But it's recognizing that we have to start first with where do we want to go? We analyze how our students are doing, analyze some of the unique strengths and weaknesses of our district, set some creative plans based upon best research practice, put in plan some action to really sustain that momentum, to carry that forward, and then finally what progress are we making? Then you start the process all over.

I think as you hear from some of the people here today in this discussion, you'll see how much they recognize the work and that continuous process of improving the quality of planning.

>> Rochelle: If we were going to compare this to what goes on in the corporate world, this would be probably analogous to a strategic plan that a corporation might have for how it's going to conduct its business for the next couple of years. But the idea is that you have to keep it flexible for changes that come along that are outside of your control.

>> Dick Jones: Very much so. And that's what we have really learned a lot from, some of the things that we've seen in business and ways that we can apply that to the settings that we have in education.

Lastly, one third point that I try and emphasize, with programs like this, where we're trying to get a message across, the connection between planning and what's really going on in school districts, it's something we're trying to portray by our state initiatives and we hope the districts will showcase this as well, and that's the alignment of plans and actions. We often hear references to plans that don't get used, that are only there for meeting state requirement or collect dust someplace. But we want to try and ensure a process that these really do have an impact on what goes on in schools.

If you were to go into schools today, you might see a real haphazard arrangement of plans. You could find a document; you could find grant applications and the way that funds are used and categories within budgets; you'd find a variety of professional development initiatives. You also would find a mechanism for evaluating teachers on an annual basis.

What we want to try and do is to bring those into alignment. Those things need to happen, but they need to happen in a systemic fashion. So we want to, through the Comprehensive District Education Planning Process, bring that in a much more systematic fashion. Just as an example, let's say your student achievement data shows that you have a weakness in student writing. Students aren't writing as well as we need to have them write. That shows up in your plan, based upon achievement data. It's a need that you have identified. That ought to be a part of your plan, as to how you're going to address that, how are you going to apply your resources to address that? Your professional development ought to emphasize that in the way that you're training teachers. And when principals and department chairs go into classrooms to evaluate teachers, they ought to be looking for writing in the classroom.

That's what we mean by alignment. That takes a lot of work. It's easy to talk about. But to have every one of the districts, particularly a large district, understand those purposes that are clearly tied back to some needs and understand how all those pieces connect, it really requires a great deal of effort within districts to accomplish that.

>> Rochelle: Okay. Later we'll be talking about what kinds of things might be done on the state level to ensure that the plans are actually implemented and you see that alignment that you were talking about.

But right now I want to talk with Barb Flynn a little bit about some of the things going on with Comprehensive District Education Plans. This is a pilot process right now, Barbara, is it not? Schools are not required to go through this. How many school districts have we seen participate and what kind of plans have you been getting?

>> Dr. Barbara Flynn: Okay. Let me say a little about the school districts. I do have a visual on this.

In fact, last summer, all the school districts in New York City completed comprehensive plans and turned them in by July. Meanwhile, upstate, 34 districts completed comprehensive plans in August 1998 for this current school year. At the same time, other districts which started planning last year but didn't feel that they could finish by summer -- there's 51 of those districts, and we expect to receive those plans within the next month or two, although some of them may not come in until summer because they want to coordinate their plans with their budget. An additional 63 districts have joined us this year in the comprehensive planning pilot, and they will be submitting their plans in July for the 1999/2000 school year. So we're getting to be close to 180 districts that are involved, so it's becoming bigger.

>> Rochelle: What kind of feedback are you getting from those who have participated so far?

>> Barb Flynn: Well, what we have heard from the districts who have participated is that even if their plan wasn't perfect, the fact that they participated in the process, brought all their stakeholders together, really seriously addressed issues for the first time in a shared manner. It wasn't someone sitting in a room saying, "I have to write this little plan" and someone elsewhere, but everybody getting a common understanding of what was going on in the district, where student achievement was not necessarily as high as it should be and what the district was going to do to address that. We've heard from almost all the districts that participated that that was the major benefit of the planning process.

>> Rochelle: Okay. You indicated in the videotape that some of the plans had to be sent back or were sent back with some comment after the review. First of all, what's the review process like?

>> Barb Flynn: Well, we have a very complicated review process. We brought in people from districts that had completed their plans, BOCES folks who had worked with comprehensive planning and S.E.D. staff, for two days, to read the plans in teams of three people and to read them against a set of criteria that we had developed in the department.

Of the plans that came in, we approved about 15 of them just straight out, that these are fine; go back, implement, keep going. On the other plans, we had some comments. They were all approved and accepted for this year, but some districts will have to do some additional work for next year and submit an update to us in September. So they were pretty good. We were actually surprised; they were better than we thought they might be.

>> Rochelle: Well, it's new and it does sound like a daunting task when you really begin, especially when you're talking about incorporating a number of plans that are out there.

When you send feedback -- you know, you have looked at a plan and reviewed it -- how does the feedback go out? What kinds of things in terms of suggestions or "we require you to do this" or...

>> Barb Flynn: I think it was more general than that. What we learned is that there were three areas that the districts did not do well. The first was some of them were not that good at data analysis. Part of it, they just don't have the opportunity or the practice with that or they don't have people on staff who are good at it. In other districts, a common shared problem was that they didn't really identify the real cause of why students weren't getting -- they didn't push and push and push again. I think you'll hear some more of that when you talk with the districts this afternoon. And, finally, they tended not to have an adequate implementation plan. They did not say who was responsible, what kind of time frame they're talking about, things like that. So those were the major weaknesses.

>> Rochelle: Okay. And those plans that were good plans, was it basically that they had covered those issues? Were there other parts about them? Was there a common thread about what made them good?

>> Barb Flynn: Well, they had covered those issues and they had also successfully woven together the many plans that they had completed before into one plan that really focused on all their students: Special Ed students, regular ed students, everyone.

>> Rochelle: Okay. I understand that the process is as important as the plan itself and there is a lot of leeway in how the state will let individual schools or districts go through the process, but that the process itself is important. Why is the process so important?

>> Barb Flynn: Well, the process is what brings people together and into a shared conversation. We tried not to be at all prescriptive about the process. We said, "Here's one process that we have developed in terms of a written plan format." Another is the software process, which you saw a little demonstration of in the tape. Otherwise, if you have a better process or you have planners on your staff and have been doing something different, feel free to use that. What we have been trying to do in the pilot is to see if we can find some of the best ways to help districts go through the planning process.

>> Rochelle: Let's talk a little about what kind of resources are available to districts as they go through. Someone talked about the cost of this, the software program... what else is the State making available to districts to help them get through this?

>> Barb Flynn: Well, we're trying very hard to provide training, both training in analyzing data and training for facilitators who can help districts go through the process. We have offered every district that's participating to either have a person from S.E.D., or someone from BOCES who is a trained facilitator, work with the district. We have learned without trained facilitators, the districts don't do very well, and they tend to get bogged down. So we have really been putting a lot of effort into training people. We would like to do more in that area and plan to during the spring and summer. We have a five-day facilitator workshop planned for the summer. And I think that will make it a lot easier for the districts to come through next year.

>> Rochelle: I think it's an interesting process for facilitators as well. Steve Abelson of QUESTAR III BOCES, in Columbia/Green/Rensselaer Counties, is a trained Comprehensive District Education Plan facilitator. We had the opportunity to talk with Steve about his work with districts a little earlier.

Steve, how does a facilitator become involved in the process?

>> Steve Abelson: Well, I had been through a series of training opportunities from the State Education Department, and the State Education Department had also listed a series of school districts that might want to be involved in the pilot for C.D.E.P. And since we at QUESTAR always have the sense that we want our districts to be in the forefront of these opportunities, I contacted a number of our school districts and they were very interested in this idea of the C.D.E.P. plan.

>> Rochelle: Okay. As a facilitator, you talked about the training. What kind of training do you receive?

>> Steve Abelson: It's basically training where one understands the whole purpose of C.D.E.P., understands how it's going to be different from perhaps other opportunities and other kinds of training, how it may meld into the concept of shared decision-making and then also based on some of our experience through the Staff and Curriculum Development Network, we were then able to move the districts into a planning mode.

>> Rochelle: What do you bring as a facilitator? As an outside person, what do you bring to the discussion that a school district may not bring itself or that may add to the discussion?

>> Steve Abelson: Well, it's interesting. One of the things I like to speak to districts about when I first bring them together and explain what the benefits of C.D.E.P. are going to be, I say to the assembled folks there -- and it has to be a group of people who are involved from a multitude of the school districts, all the stakeholders: Principals, teachers, community members, students, a whole group of folks that's really representative of the district. I really say to them, when I look out into the group I say, "This really is a group that has all the answers. I don't bring the answers to you, but rather you have the answers here. It's my job as a facilitator to bring those answers from you out into this new plan that we're going to be working on together."

>> Rochelle: Why would it be an advantage for a school district to have someone such as yourself, an outside person to come in?

>> Steve Abelson: Well, one of the things we can do is we can really help the district focus on what some of the plan objectives and benefits are. I think that we have a graphic we can show with some of those plan objectives and benefits.

>> Rochelle: All right.

>> Steve Abelson: First of all, it's all for improved student achievement. Everything that we're doing now in New York State clearly is for improved student achievement to the standards. It also helps the district really focus their work and to identify some key issues of their district in particular. As opposed to an administrator or superintendent of the district leading the way, everyone can sit there equally: Parents, administrators, students, community members. They can really help to identify what some of the key issues are.

>> Rochelle: Without having to deal with the technicalities of keeping everybody on track and time and "Wait a minute. That's not an issue." There's no personal agendas.

>> Steve Abelson: There are no personal agendas, but at the same time, it's part of my role to prioritize what we call a "doable, narrowly defined issue." Also, it starts to become apparent that it's a better use of staff time that we're looking at in terms of a benefit. And one of the most important things is a clear understanding of where we are or where the district happens to be at that particular point and where they need to go.

>> Rochelle: Um-hmm.

>> Steve Abelson: There's also a concept of looking at a better use of resources. The whole concept of C.D.E.P. is to take perhaps 23 plans that might have been used but perhaps shelved in the past and make it really a very doable plan, one that's an ongoing plan, a live plan, so that the districts can really take a look at, again, where they are and where they happen to be going. In each district, of course, that's going to be different. It also reduces planning and duplication because, instead of going through 23 separate plans, we have a live plan that really focuses on student achievement. Of course, that's less paperwork if we're not filing 23 different plans. The main thing, also, is that it really starts to bring together a collaboration and coordination across the district. Again, all those stakeholders sitting in the room, or working in separate work groups as we move through this plan, really starts to jell and starts to get a sense of community in that room and across the district. The ultimate benefit, in addition to student achievement, is a clear interpretation for the community. Often people will say, "I don't know why we did that" or "I'm not sure why we have these particular results," or "I'm not sure why students are reading at a particular level." Since we have so many stakeholders in a group together, we are really able then to say, "We know how we arrived at this point and we understand why we are using this plan."

>> Rochelle: When you begin working with a district and then as that group of stakeholders goes through the process, what do you see happening?

>> Steve Abelson: Well, that's an interesting question. I see at first a "Why are we here?" kind of a question. And as a facilitator, I invite folks to say, "So what?" at any give time, "Why are we here?" No matter what we're saying, no matter who happens to be saying anything, I want them to call out "So what? I think the "So what?" question really begins to focus on the purpose of why they happen to be there. That then brings the focus that's extremely important. That focus then begins to look at the data that the district happens to be holding. Whether it be data on reading levels or math levels, or whatever it happens to be, that focus is very important because from a data gathering and a data analysis, the district can then decide where they truly are and where they want to go to.

>> Rochelle: So by the time they finish the process, what do you see that committee being like?

>> Steve Abelson: I see a sense of community; I see, again, a focus and understanding of, "Wow! We have really produced something that's really very meaningful. It shows us very particularly for our particular school district where we were and where we're going to be, and we really believe now we're going to be able to get there based on the use of this plan." It's no longer, again, just something that we might have put together, the administration might have put together during the summertime and filed just because it happens to be a necessity to file on behalf of the State Education Department, but rather a very focused "We're going to go ahead and improve student achievement based on these plans."

>> Rochelle: I understand that one real problem area for a lot of schools in this process, or districts in the process, is that they analyze the data and really try to get to the root causes. It's that constantly asking, "Go deeper, go deeper, go deeper."

>> Steve Abelson: Quite frankly, I think one thing we really need to improve on in education is the whole concept of data gathering and data analysis. We can really do a lot better. Part of the concept of C.D.E.P. really begins to help a district focus on an appropriate way -- most of the data of course is there; it's a matter of finding where it is and taking a look at what we call hunches. When we get together in workgroups, people will say, "Yeah, I know why our reading scores are low. It's because of this." We say, "Let's prove it." If we do prove it and that happens to be the meaningful data, then "So what? What are we now going to do about it?" That's the "So what?" Once we get to that stage, we can then have a very planned way of moving from where we really are, with data, not based on a hunch but based on real root causes, based on real data, to move ahead to, again, increase student achievement.

>> Rochelle: How do you work then? How do you set up the group? Once you have had that initial meeting and you've said, "Okay. This is the process and this is why we're here and this is what we're going to do," do you set up subcommittees of that primary committee? How often do you meet? What are the meetings like?

>> Steve Abelson: Well, typically we meet once a month, but there are tasks for the groups to do in between that month. And I am accessible to the districts in between that time, based on their schedule and mine. But what we're really looking for them to do, again, is to understand that they have the answers and it's not waiting for Steve Abelson or another facilitator to come into the district. We want them to be talking to one another.

In our initial group, we'll again speak about why we're there, what the whole purpose of C.D.E.P. is, and someone will inevitably say something, and I say, "Well, you speak to them! Don't talk to me." We start that dialogue going across the various constituencies, whether it be the parents, the students, community members or whomever.

>> Rochelle: How long will it take a group to generally come to consensus on a plan?

>> Steve Abelson: Well, each district and each plan has a life of its own. But we have started with three districts in the QUESTAR III region. That has begun this year and we believe that we will have a goal of completing the plan by the end of the fiscal year, the end of June.

>> Rochelle: Once a plan is completed and is approved by the state, it's accepted and been reviewed, is accepted and okay, will your role as facilitator in implementing the plan continue or is it then up to the school district to go ahead and follow through on its own?

>> Steve Abelson: It's really up to the school district to follow through. It is their plan. Any technical assistance that they might want from me in terms of continuously looking at the plan -- because, again, it's not going to be a shelved plan; it's going to be one that's really live and sort of being used continuously -- I'm certain that I would be able to offer technical assistance, but it is their plan and we want them to use it to the benefit of their students.

>> Rochelle: Okay. One final word: Last piece of advice for school districts as they embark on this whole process?

>> Steve Abelson: Do it. It's very important to take a look at where you are, where you want to go, and by looking at the data that you already have in your school district and by making some meaningful choices about that data, you can really then begin to say, "Okay, I know how we want to get to the next place." I think probably one of the best pieces of advice is the best way to predict the future is to create it.

>> Rochelle: Okay. Steve Abelson, thank you very much.

>> Steve Abelson: Thank you.

>> Rochelle: The Newburgh School District near New York City has the responsibility for educating some 12,500 students. At the start of the '97/98 school year, Newburgh was a School Under Registration Review. A new superintendent was beginning to reorganize, so when the State Education Department asked Newburgh to participate in the Comprehensive District Education Plan Pilot Program, officials there felt the timing was right.

>> We had the first meeting of our committee mid-June. We got the entire group together. As we sat and we spoke to a number of constituencies, we decided that we would take a number of people into our group. Our group was approximately 30 members and they were members -- we had, of course, Arlene Sheffield was with us every single meeting from State Ed, as well as our administrative association, our teachers' association being involved, central office staff, community organizations, parental involvement. We had them from all of the constituencies.

We had an agenda of the various areas of the Comprehensive District Education Plan that we would address at each of our meetings. When we got together at our meetings, of course, we always had our greetings and we always spoke about what we did in the past meeting. But as we began to address the issue for that particular meeting, we would discuss it totally in an open meeting. But, say, as an example, when we were dealing with root causes, what we would do is we would arbitrarily break our team up into maybe four or five different teams. They would break apart, go into their own little teams, talk about what they felt the causes were, for instance. Then we would come back together as a group and we would process out from each of the teams. Now, we did this each and every meeting, and each and every meeting, those little teams were different. So people had different people that they were working with at all times and they began to get a sense of really being a part of this whole process. The other piece of this team is that as we reported out each week, each of the teams -- each of the groups that worked together would actually see their work in the new document that we would present. Each time we met, we would present the document as it stood at that moment so they would actually see their work and they really felt that they were part of this whole process. This was the first time where we were asked to continually dig to find out why our young people were not achieving or why we had problems. You know, very often we would superficially say, "Well, young people in urban districts don't achieve," and we would put in a band-aid approach. But Arlene Sheffield, who was our State Ed person with us, kept asking the question "But why?" And we would go one layer deeper, and then "But why?" and one layer deeper. And we continually do that as of today. As we meet today, and as we're planning for our next year's Comprehensive District Education Plan, we are looking at these root causes -- Why is it happening? -- so we can address those root causes.

>> I learned where the district's shortcomings were that I wasn't aware of. I learned that the entire district has to be involved in something or it's not going to work. If you don't have a good foundation, the building will fall down. I learned that the parents want to be a part of things and central office wants to help us. We have backing from the superintendent, and...

>> For me, I think we're starting to step out of a process of being -

>> Isolated?

>> Isolated. Right. Very good. Thank you. I really felt that our district really wants everybody to be a contributor to the educating that's taking place in our district. I was very happy with that. Central office, the community... you could just see the bonding. You could see the concern; you could see the support that's there.

I think again, that old adage, "It takes a whole village to raise a child," I think that that's what we're starting to do here, look at the components of each person that contributes and bring it together collectively so that we can have a real, real --

>> Including the students. They're part of the whole process.

>> We had students, right.

>> They're part of the plan, the most important part of the plan. It's their outcomes that we're looking for.

>> What I learned was basically everything about the district really and how it works and what programs are available, what are the deficiencies within the district, the strengths within the district, how we can actually help as a group to maintain a good -- to provide good educational backgrounds for our children? That's the most important thing really, our children. They're our biggest asset here. We're working to establish a good education for every child within this district.

>> We had the priorities of not having met the state reference point in reading at Grades 4 and 8 for this coming year. Those were two of our priorities. We also had the priority of lowering our dropout rate. Newburgh Free Academy is a School Under Registration Review, and we needed to ensure that we had strategies in place to lower our dropout rate.

Newburgh Free Academy, our high school, is 10, 11, and 12, and the junior high schools are 7, 8 and 9. So we have taken and we wanted to ensure that these young people came, were engaged and graduated. So we developed four themed academies at the high school. As a matter of fact, we have just gotten our first results. The unexcused absences for young people in those theme academies are significantly lower this first marking period than they are for those that are not in academies.

>> I think the C.D.E.P. program is going to improve student performance. One reason mainly is because we have really focused and made that a key issue in the district, to improve the standards for reading, for math, for better attendance, okay? Certain areas have already -- for example, with Newburgh Free Academy, certain steps have been taken with the truancy officer, with the academies within the school to reduce the attendance problem.

>> Who has the lens paper? Clean off your lens...

>> I think that because we had so many shareholders in this committee, I could see their point of view; I could see what they wanted to get out of the plan. I can see the end result where the children all benefit.

>> Right. I know we're looking at high standards for our students, and we're looking at ways to achieve those high standards --

>> Better outcomes.

>> Better outcomes. So I think the process of us coming together and using our resource or our experience from the classroom really, really made the process very, very strong.

>> If another school district asked me if they should partake in this comprehensive planning process, my advice would be that every school district should participate in this type of a planning process. It allows you to focus your resources and to focus on what is most important and that is higher student achievement. And then all of the resources and everything that you are doing throughout the entire year will be focused on this higher student achievement.

>> Rochelle: Here now to provide more details about Newburgh's plans are Superintendent Dr. Laval Wilson, who brings lots of experience with him, former head of the Rochester School District, Boston and Patterson, New Jersey. Delighted to have you with us.

Also, Philomena Pezzano, Deputy Superintendent; Dr. Annette Saturnelli, Executive Director of Funded Programs, and Dr. David Noriega, Executive Coordinator of Special Projects.

Welcome, everybody. We're delighted to have you with us.

Dr. Wilson, the video gave us an example of one priority that your school dealt with and that was the dropout issue. What are some of the other priorities that you found and how is your plan addressing them? I know that you and Dr. Noriega are going to address this.

>> Right before I give you some of those other priorities, I just want to indicate that the most critical issue for me was to take these various separate plans that were going on across the district -- quality plans -- and have them brought together into a very comprehensive plan. That was the overall goal.

You mentioned that we had been involved in trying to figure out how to remove ourselves from being a School Under Registration Review. We had developed a very comprehensive secondary school planning process and we developed a corrective action plan. All of those neatly fit right into this Comprehensive District Educational Plan, and I was able to select some very quality people such as Dr. Saturnelli, next to me, Dr. David Noriega, and Mrs. Philomena Pezzano to head up that process.

And there were four student-focused initiatives. Those four student-focused initiatives were literacy, attendance and school completion, excellence in education, and equity among all of our young people. Those were the student-focused initiatives.

Besides focusing on what our school system could do to help improve the educational program for our young people, we also wanted to take a look at how we could involve our administrators and our teachers and our parents more. So those were five of the adult-focused initiatives. And those were critical for us also.

Combining the student-focused initiatives and adult-focused initiatives, we think we have a pretty good plan. I would like for Dr. David Noriega now to begin to review in depth a little bit those initiatives for us.

>> Rochelle: Perfect. David?

>> The focus -- the adult focus was placed on the five areas that were mentioned before by Dr. Wilson. In addition, the team identified ten priorities based on the analysis of data that had been presented to the team. The first priority had to do with eliminating the high dropout rate at the high school, Newburgh Free Academy, which was under registration review and still is.

This was going to be done or is being done through the development of four theme academies and the closing of the school campus, et cetera.

The second priority had to do with the improvement of achievement for 4th grade students of this current year who were those who last year either did not achieve above the S.R.P., or did, and so we kept an eye on both populations and we have provided data to all principals about those students who scored below and those students who scored above, so that the strategies being implemented for both groups are different.

Two more priorities had to do with those students who did not achieve above the S.R.P. in the 6th grade reading P.E.P. two years ago, who were last year's 7th graders, who are this year's 8th graders, as well as those who did score above the S.R.P., so that we could maintain the same level of effort and, as the superintendent had indicated before, ensure that they helped the district meet the 90% standard set by the state.

Next priority had to do with ensuring that all students throughout their career are going to be successful in achieving the Regents requirements, that they graduate with a 65% score or higher beginning five, six years from now.

The seventh priority had to do with supporting special education students in general education, in all environments in general in the district.

The eighth priority had to do with providing minority students with additional participation in special opportunities programs, and with participation to ensure that they had access to the programs and were provided with the support so that they could succeed once they were enrolled in those programs.

The next priority had to do with revising the discipline procedures, the school's discipline policy, and disseminating the results of the revision to the community, including students, parents and staff.

And the last priority had to do with ensuring that we could attract to our schools all students as much as possible and once in the schools, that we could maintain and engage them in a meaningful way in educational activities, to ensure that the dropout rates continued to go lower than the standard, indicating that there is a higher attendance and participation of the students.

There is a graphic that indicates very schematically what our district planning process has been. It includes the State Education Department, the school-based teams, the school district planning team, the committee, and indicates that the school district plans are closely linked with the school district plan.

One of the areas in which we're continuing to concentrate is ensuring that principals, school staffs and school communities do have a good understanding of the plan and that the school plans follow, dove-tail with the district plan which was recently developed.

>> Rochelle: Okay. I noticed that one of the things that you talked about in terms of achieving higher standards dealt with such things as extended hours, afterschool programs, summer programs. Annette, have you been involved with that?

>> Yes, our sources of funding have been pooled and resources have been put together so that we can support all of the students who have special needs who have not met the standards but also to look at those students who have met the standards but have not yet reached the higher level of standards that we want children to.

So we are looking at both of those. We have after-school programs, Saturday programs. During the summer, we have transition programs to prepare students for the coming year when they're going into the higher-level courses now. We have adopted the Equity 2000 model for mathematics which really says it's a policy with the district, identifies as all students will be enrolled in Sequential 1 no later than 9th grade, starting in September of 1999, and all students then will move to be enrolled in Sequential 2 by 10th grade the next year. And success is going to depend on how much support we can give them, and the support we are looking at is really enabled through our safety net committee which is functioning and headed by our Director of Guidance and a team of people, and again pooled resources helps to support that.

>> Rochelle: I think that this is very interesting in that there's probably some school districts or people watching who are saying, "Well, that sounds great but how do you find the money? Where do you get the money?" This is an example, Dr. Wilson, is it not, that this plan is doing the kinds of things that Dick and Barb and the State Education Department talked about, that it's really driving your budget.

>> It really should. The critical issue here is for the planning process to drive the budget process. We right now are looking carefully at the resources we're going to use next year for the instructional program. So rather than looking separately at just the tax-based moneys or the State Education Department grants, we're looking at all of this. The priorities of the district: Number one, the Comprehensive Educational Plan; the corrective action plan. Those are the first two items that will drive the entire allocation of moneys for the district, all focused on better achievement for all of our young people.

>> Rochelle: Once again, this is something that you can go back to the community and say, "We have our plan. These are our priorities based on this data analysis, and this is why the funding is going here as compared to someplace else."

>> And all the different types of funding sources are articulated and we can track the way we're spending money to support all the initiatives for the school district.

>> I just wanted to comment there that we're in the process of developing a three-dimensional model that would focus on what the resources are, where they're coming from and how much they are, where they are deployed and how is that connected with the third dimension, the area of student achievement. So that will be an actual, physical way of analyzing the model. I hope to have that done by this year. That's one of my objectives for the year, a personal goal.

>> Rochelle: (Chuckling) Very good! All right. We'll check back with you in a while to see how you're doing on that. Dr. Noriega, Philomena Pezzano, keeping the community then, your stakeholders, continually apprised of what's going on with the plan and implementation is very important, I would imagine.

>> Yes, it is, Rochelle. As a matter of fact, earlier, Dick Jones showed the continuous process for the planning, and when we met with our team and as we met throughout the summer, they were very concerned about completing the plan, but they were also concerned about "How will we know this plan is actually being implemented and what are the outcomes?"

So we have set a process in place where we have begun meeting with our team, again in October, this past October. We meet monthly and we report to the team and we are continuously receiving reports from the field in terms of what our achievement is on all of these priorities. We report back out to the team so that they are kept apprised of what is actually happening, and then based on those reports, we're beginning to develop the plan for next year. We have already received some time lines from the State Education Department as to when various aspects are due and we are beginning that process. That's really very important and it was very important to the stakeholders.

>> Rochelle: Okay. I want to ask you about the special education component in your priority list. This is very interesting that it's included in the overall plan. Talk a little bit about that for me.

>> Sure. When we began the planning process, it was important for us to make sure, make certain that every single group of young people were included in this comprehensive plan and, of course, that included our special education population. We began by including the director of special education and our coordinator of the committee on special education on our team. They became members of our team and they met with us every time we met.

It was very important that as we discussed all of the aspects of this plan that their input was critical. We developed a priority to address special education needs to ensure that we are moving towards a more inclusive model, that we are integrating our special education students in regular classes and providing the various supports that they need. So it is a major component of our plan.

>> Rochelle: Okay. We'll talk with some representatives from the VESID office in a second, but I want to go back to Barb and Dick for a moment because we saw Dr. Noriega in the videotape of your orientation session, and I know that he and several other people represented school districts where you had, the State Education Department, had asked them to come back and talk about their plans and the fact that these were very good plans and we liked these plans and wanted these plans to be models for other school districts.

What are some of the particular elements of the Newburgh plan that you find particularly appealing?

>> I think the thing that impressed us most about the Newburgh plan when we reviewed it was that it really did pull everything together. We had the feeling that the whole district had come together behind it and we had the feeling that they had really worked hard on sorting out what their major problems were and the ten things they identified to address in the coming year were really important things and that they had considered it very carefully; it was not something just slapped together.

>> Rochelle: Okay. Dr. Wilson, I want to ask you also about your data analysis. Gathering data, as indicated in the one videotape and per our discussion earlier, it's somewhat difficult for schools. We have a lot of different data from a lot of different places, and pulling it all together and then being able to use it in a way that's helpful to the school district, how did you go about doing that in Newburgh?

>> Well, our administrative team has a strong belief that the data that we collect concerning student achievement should really drive the planning process, that we should look carefully at how well students are achieving, what are some of the weaknesses in the various subject areas, and that we should plan the instructional program to assist those young people to enhance, you know, those areas that they're weak in and to continue to allow them to grow in those areas where they're strong. So we have disseminated that information.

I should also point out that as part of the superintendents' conference day in December, we had our plan reviewed for each of our buildings. So each principal, along with support from the central office, reviewed with each teacher, each support staff, the entire Comprehensive Educational Plan. So we had wide dissemination of the plan and we're monitoring its implementation.

I also would like to indicate that we have always considered our plan as a cooperative effort between the district and State Education Department. This was not something imposed upon us. We philosophically believe that planning allows a district to chart the course as to how it will fund its programs, what different activities and strategies and events will be taking place during the year, and it's a planning process. And it's one, I think, every district should go through.

>> Rochelle: What about support that you received from the state? You said partnership, and in the videotape you talk about your S.E.D. partner. Talk a little on that.

>> Well, Arlene Sheffield, as I think we indicated in the videotape, took part in each one of our sessions. So as we planned with our committee members, and we had a very broad-based number of parents, staff members. The stakeholders were diverse: Administrative staff, central office, principals. And to have a member of the State Education Department part of those stakeholders we thought was an excellent opportunity for us to plan together. So it was a real pulling together of all of the various stakeholders who had something to contribute to the entire planning process.

>> Rochelle: Terrific. Congratulations on a good plan.

>> I would just like to say this really is a partnership effort and that's why we wanted to have State Education Department staff involved. It's a real risk for boards and superintendents to move ambitiously on this process, and many times our presence can help lend support to that and how it's something that we're really looking at to try and improve the use of funds and increasing student achievement.

>> Rochelle: Terrific. We're going to talk about how the Office of Vocational Education Services for Individuals with Disabilities has a big interest in how districts include in their plans services for special education students. We just heard how Newburgh did and had a component dealing with that.

Representing VESID in our audience today, Lydia Lavin, who monitors the Newburgh School District. And Dana Retherford, a SETRC trainer from the Franklin/Essex/Hamilton BOCES. Welcome to both of you.

Let's talk a little bit about Newburgh's plan and its inclusion for special ed. Lydia?

>> Well, basically, it's critically important that when districts develop these plans that they definitely look at including students with disabilities. That's based on a number of reasons. Some of these you have already heard.

One of the key pieces that one of the teachers mentioned is that if you are developing a comprehensive plan, you really must include everyone. And that includes students and staff who work with students with disabilities. Presently, as it is across the state, districts who receive federal funding are now mandated to include a comprehensive plan that deals with staff development for students with disabilities. That is already mandated.

But does it make sense to do this in isolation? I think not. I think it's critical to pool this all together and have one general plan.

Additionally, if we look at the new reauthorization of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or I.D.E.A., the focus there is to provide education for students with disabilities in the general education curriculum, with access to general ed. The bottom line is if you're going to do this, if you're going to raise standards for all students, you need to encompass this in this large, comprehensive plan.

>> Rochelle: The idea of moving towards inclusion in classrooms, it means inclusion all along the line, including the planning process as well.

>> Absolutely. And I.D.E.A., the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, also reinforces the notion of blending of resources and taking a look and pulling these together. And we can see this occurring very definitely in the Newburgh plan.

>> Rochelle: Thank you. Dana, your work in SETRC, what advice or recommendations or suggestions would you offer for school districts with regard to students with special needs?

>> I think as we take a look at the facilitator and the stakeholders that the district includes in the planning process, that they be sure to include people who represent students with disabilities. And another helpful piece is that if the facilitator has a vision that also is encompassing all students, including those with disabilities, I've found that district plans then were more representative of the full gamut of students within the district.

Probably another piece is the data piece. We have talked a lot about that. I found that districts could probably spend a lot of time learning how to truly analyze data at a more in-depth level and therefore being able to establish the true root causes as opposed to something that's a little bit more on the surface level.

I think those elements are ones that make for a more comprehensive and detailed plan that truly works.

>> Rochelle: I think that was something that Steve Abelson brought out when he said, "I keep saying to people, "Ask so what." Or you saying Arlene was helping Newburgh, saying "Go deeper. But why? But why? But why?"

Terrific. Thank you very much.

The North Country School District of Salmon River could not be farther from Newburgh geographically. It lies on the Canadian border. It's also very different in that it has 1,500 students as compared to 12,500. And it also has some very, very interesting uniqueness about it. But in preparing its Comprehensive District Plan, Salmon River also found some common bonds with Newburgh. We're going to take a look at that right now.

>> Our concerns are that we are statistically the poorest school district in the State of New York and we also are concerned about the fact that we have such an interesting population mix in the district, being native American and non-native American, a 50/50 mix. We're concerned about dropout rates, attendance rates.

>> We're a very small school, 1,500 kids. But we also have many entitlement programs and competitive grants. We have 39 separate programs. You know that each one of those programs, the grants and the entitlements, requires a plan. And all of those plans require shared decision-making, community representatives, lots of different people sharing their input. We were finding that in my office, the Office of Instruction which oversees all of these programs, we were spending all of our time doing paperwork. We were writing plans; we were meeting every afternoon; we were drawing on the same people day after day after day to contribute to these plans. And the bottom line was we weren't getting the work done. We didn't have any ability to be able to manage the programs that we had as effectively as we should.

So when Steve Schaffer, the BOCES representative, said C.D.E.P., we raised our hands and said, "We're ready to go."

>> At that point, they invited us to participate in that partnership, to expand our Professional Development School partnership to include a summer project in which we would bring together teachers from the Professional Development School, representatives from the Mohawk community who were expert in Mohawk knowledge and ways of knowing and also had an interest in education.

>> We had six content area groups: English language arts, social studies, science, math, et cetera. And then we had a management team, and that management team looked at procedures and policies and then synthesized all of the recommendations of the individual teams.

>> In my experience, the most successful programs are those programs that are looking for all-inclusion and looking for a way to establish a collaboration between the universities and elementary schools, the community here with the Mohawk Nation and the non-native students as well. And if you involve all aspects of the community, there's a tremendous amount of wealth of experience and resources.

>> One thing I also liked about the C.D.E.P. pilot is that it affords us an opportunity to communicate with our community more. There is a requirement for community interaction in terms of the development of the plan and community input into the development of the plan. That's very important for our school district because of the uniqueness of the district, serving two cultures, two distinctly different cultures. So it's given us that opportunity to do that.

>> The community has had a 40-year relationship with the school district and historically it wasn't a positive relationship, I know from the community's perspective. I think part of the problem was that as adults we tended to focus on the differences between our community and the rest of the school district and their community. With that type of thinking, it's a negative environment.

What's happened with the C.D.E.P., particularly with the Mohawk Education Project, is it's created an opportunity to focus instead on what are our common interests? And the kids are the common interest. If you look at it from that perspective, then it becomes a positive situation.

>> It's not really just a -- it's not a problem-fixing situation. I think we're looking at more than that. I think we're looking at an opportunity here to have some real dialogue and to develop a deeper understanding of what some of the key educational issues are: Issues such as what does it mean to be a literate, thinking person and what does it mean to be a literate, thinking person and to be Mohawk? And how do we as teachers, in working with students, how can we use these understandings to really help and work with children?

>> The state is moving to the Regents-level standards, and that's a tougher standard. I think as a long-term goal, it's still a minimal standard. As a community, I think we have to set standards that are above that, you know, and I think we want our kids to be the best that they can be. You have to present them with a challenging curriculum in order for them to challenge themselves.

>> We can start to see the changes as a result of this plan as we walk through our classrooms. Just this morning, in fact, when we came to the St. Regis Mohawk School, I had an opportunity to walk into one of the Grade 2 classrooms, and they have instituted a writers' workshop in that classroom as part of the C.D.E.P. plan, and they are absolutely thrilled to be doing something called cushion-sharing. And that's actually when they're conferencing about their writing.

>> Just remember one thing when you are fixing your story to be better. Gainey?

>> For words that are spelled incorrectly.

>> Very good. That's one.

>> As a person who is a parent, I want my children to achieve at the best they can be, you know, not at minimal requirements but beyond that. I think we see that for the whole community.

>> Rochelle: Here with us now from the Salmon River School District, Annemarie FitzRandolph; Jim Ransom from the Mohawk Education Committee and Bill Doody from SUNY Potsdam. Thank you for joining us. I know it's difficult for you to get in from the north country.

I want to start off with the differences in how things were put together at Salmon River as compared to Newburgh. Annemarie? The committee structure, everything was different, yes?

>> I think that we are, as you know and some of the people here have heard today, we are a unique school district here in New York State. I came here this morning thinking, "My gosh, what could there possibly be that's similar between Newburgh and Salmon River?" You mentioned before, they have 12,000 students and we have 1,500. But having had an opportunity to talk with the people from Newburgh here today and from VESID and so forth, I guess what I'm realizing is that as Salmon River came out of this process we do in fact have more in common than I ever would have dreamed possible, especially the focus on student achievement.

But one thing that is very different for us, again because we're so rural, so remote, and because we serve two culturally distinct groups, our school district has a contract with the State of New York to provide education for the children of the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation at Akwasasne, and it's very important for us to make sure that we include all segments of our population in that planning process. We had ongoing -- before we decided to volunteer to do the C.D.E.P. plan, we had ongoing two very important initiatives in our school district. One was called the Mohawk Education Project, and that was something where we had come together, with the help of the Potsdam State faculty, to try to articulate some standards in Mohawk language and Mohawk culture, and I think Jim can tell you more about those. But we had had that working relationship with the St. Regis Mohawk tribe, and we wanted to make sure that with that major initiative of the Mohawk Education Plan that we continued that in whatever comprehensive effort we would undertake.

The same was true of the relationship that's been developed with Potsdam College. Again, in a very rural area of the state, we discovered that we draw many of our teachers in our district from Potsdam College. It's a very important pipeline for us in providing quality staff to our kids. We wanted to make sure that Potsdam State had a place in this process because they are so important to us in our recruitment efforts.

So what we did is we convened the three major groups, and we went to Jim Ransom at the Mohawk Ed Committee and to Dr. Bill Doody at Potsdam State and said, "We have an opportunity to take all 39 plans that we have in this district, take a look at them, put them together and see if we can make some sense out of them." We did exactly that.

So in our case, rather than having all of those internal offices and entities that a district like Newburgh would have, we wound up having three institutions coming together, representing our community, our future teachers, our current teachers, our students, our parents, and our faculty. It was amazing!

We convened seven teams. I was very surprised to learn that we had about the same number of people that Newburgh did! I think we had 42 people on our teams. We had seven teams and we had divided them into six content area teams. For example, we had a social studies team that was led by a social studies professor from Potsdam State. So not only were we looking at the general achievement of students, but we were also having an opportunity to go into some of the content.

So in those ways, I think that our plan was a little bit -- or the initiation of our plan was a little bit different from Newburgh's, but I'm really quite amazed to discover that of their ten priority items, I think we have four that are just about the same.

>> Rochelle: I think this is really fascinating. We're going to talk with Jim about the Mohawk aspect and also with Bill about SUNY Potsdam. But Dick made a comment earlier about this shows something very interesting about the uniqueness of each plan and why the state was so flexible in allowing districts to go about the process in their own way, yes?

>> Absolutely. There's not one shoe that fits all of this. We recognize the diversity that exists in New York. So while we encourage the comprehensive process, there's just a few elements of that we have really been adamant about, but the process itself has to be unique and it has to have a heavy infusion of local goals, as you have seen in Salmon River.

>> Rochelle: Okay. Jim, back to you. With the Mohawk Education Project, how did this work in with the planning for the Comprehensive District Education Plan and what are some of your plans for implementation?

>> For us as a community, we saw the need for our kids that we wanted a 200% education, 100% that's provided through the New York State Education Department and Salmon River, but we also saw the need for a 100% Mohawk education, and that as a society, in order to do well in other societies, you have to understand your own first and you have to have the confidence, the pride in who you are, knowing your history. And so we decided that it was lacking within the school district.

The Mohawk Education Project provided an opportunity for us to integrate our way of thinking with the school district's and benefit not only the native students but as well the non-native students in the school district. So that's real important to us.

And in terms of implementation, we see implementation as ongoing, and really our goal is just to take a closer look at the curriculum. If you're teaching a unit on science, then how do you incorporate traditional knowledge into that science unit? If you're talking about trees, then talk about the importance of trees from our society's viewpoint. The maple tree is the king of the maples for us, and what does that mean in terms of science and things like that?

>> Rochelle: And resources available within the...

>> Well, for us, our biggest resource is our people and the knowledge that they hold. We have people who know the medicine plants; we have people who know our legends, our ceremonies, and the idea is to bring them into the school system. That's one of our objectives.

>> Rochelle: Terrific. Fascinating. Very unique. What also is very interesting in this plan is that it brings in another group of stakeholders in that it brings in future teachers. Bill, how is that working?

>> The Mohawk Education Project brought together teams of community leaders and teachers working with faculty. The faculty that led each of those teams also teach their pre-student teaching methods courses at Salmon River. They have their students in the classrooms with the mentor teachers who are part of the overall Mohawk Education Project. So what that does is it links the mentor teachers, who are looking at the community goals for education, with our teacher education program by having our students in their classroom trying to implement some of the recommendations that are made as a result of the summer project.

>> Rochelle: Terrific. Annemarie, how has your plan directed the use of financial and personnel resources? Jim indicated bringing in some members of the tribe to actually teach courses. What else?

>> When we counted them up, we had 39 separate plans. And I think that as Dr. Wilson said earlier that one of their goals was to make sure that they focused all of those plans, well, of course, along with those plans goes funding. Since all of those plans were always directed out of my office, I think that any individual with any sense could sit down and read them and discover that they were at least similar; they had the input of some similar ideas, but I think that you would also find that in the use of some of our funds. So in our district, because we're so small, we had to be very, very creative about the way we did use our money and the different funding streams that we had before. I have laughed sort of privately a few times and I've said we always had to make sure that we weren't co-mingling funds, and now all of a sudden the State Education Department is saying to us, "That's okay! In fact, you had better do that!" We have been doing a little bit of that all along because I think in a district the size of ours, it's almost impossible not to. When we receive competitive grants from the state and from other sources, we don't usually get enough money to be able to implement a program. So we have quite a bit of creativity in that area and I think there's a lot of freedom in the Comprehensive District Education Planning process now that allows us to do that and identify those resources and use them for the common goal.

>> Rochelle: And as these plans are living plans that need to be continued and updated along, what are Salmon River's plans for continuing to meet with your groups and keep it happening?

>> Right now we are scrambling to implement because our plan is ambitious. It involves implementation of standards-based education, kindergarten through Grade 12, and that's quite a bit to bite off in one year.

We have decided not to come back and try to do the monthly meetings but rather focus our energies on the new testing requirements, implementing standards, on the new planning process, on creating new literacy environments and so forth, and we'll be coming back together in the summer. We have ten days mapped out and hopefully the same individuals -- I know the same groups -- will be able to come together and actually take a look and say, "Well, where were we last July? What have we done? How did we do on those first state tests and where are we going from here?" So hopefully we'll have an update by August of 1999 for next year's plan.

>> Rochelle: Terrific. We'll check back with you.

The next step is, of course, implementation for schools who have submitted plans, measuring for success as well. And for State Ed, it's monitoring implementation. And, Dick, this is where I want to go back to you. You said these are not plans that are going to sit on the shelf. How can we ensure from State Ed's point of view that these plans are not sitting on the shelf?

>> Well, I think from a couple of perspectives we're trying to do that. One is to make sure that the various categories of funded initiatives that we have a responsibility for, that we maintain reinforcing the notion of a comprehensive plan in those. As we follow up in those funding categories, we want to see how the plan that comes together and how those funds are used to support that and increase student achievement. I think a lot of our day-to-day work will be in that direction. The other piece, in having staff here from VESID, and some of the different offices that work with school programs, we're trying to have a common voice about the importance of this planning, and I think that regardless of who you talk to, you're coming back to the singular notion of a comprehensive plan. So I think that message ought to reinforce the notion that that's what we're looking for in the way that schools carry out their ideas.

>> Rochelle: Okay. We're running short on time, and I want to make sure we go back to our districts we have talked with who have submitted good plans and ask them to make some final recommendations to other districts out there as they begin the process.

Dr. Wilson, what do you think other school districts need to keep in mind as they begin this process and work through it?

>> I think it's important for us to realize that there are people who take part in these planning committees who will raise the question, "If we spend all this time and effort trying to plan, will these plans be used or will they be placed on the shelf?" We had some of those types of questions raised. We indicated that we were committed to the planning process; the superintendent was committed to it; the board of education was committed to it. In fact, our board had a member who was designated to participate as a member of the stakeholders of that group.

So we're committed to making sure that all of the partners plan and that the plan once it's completed is an active plan, a living plan, and gets disseminated throughout the district.

>> Rochelle: Okay. Annemarie, from your point of view?

>> I think one of the best decisions that we made this summer when we were constructing our plan was to have a person whose job was to collect and disseminate data. This person was provided to us by Potsdam State. We had these teams working all day long, and they would encounter situations where they wanted another piece of information, and we had one individual whose job was to do nothing else but to go and get the information that the teams needed. I know that it sounds very simple, but one of the things that made the difference is that the teams were able to progress seamlessly. They didn't have to take breaks, "Well, we'll get that for you tomorrow," but there was somebody there who was familiar enough with the information that we have in the district that those teams could look at it all the time. So when they were looking into the root causes, for example, and they would say, "Possibly it's related to attendance. Well, we need to look at the attendance data," and they could have it within minutes. I think that that really helped our team function more efficiently and develop a good plan.

>> Rochelle: Great. Bill?

>> One of the tips that I would like to give to any district that would be implementing is to ensure that when they are implementing and when they're working with their constituents and their teams, that they ensure that those teams are heard and that they can actually see their work. That was critical for especially our parents, our community members. They were really thrilled when they saw that their suggestions and comments were actually seen in the developed plan. So I think that's really important. You can keep that enthusiasm going when you, you know, reinforce it.

>> Rochelle: And I can see everybody nodding heads, Barbara and Bill.

Any other comment that you want to make as districts go through the planning process? No? (Chuckling) Lydia does.

>> One of the things that I would like for us to examine further when we start going through this is to take an in-depth look at what we mean by the different data. Certainly we are data-driven in New York State. I know VESID is certainly data-driven. We base a lot of pieces of choices based on that critical information. But we need to do several things. As the data information comes in, we need to examine the different ways of dealing with it statistically. We need to have a better understanding and an in-depth knowledge of different qualitative and quantitative methodologies. We may need to rethink about the types of statistical analysis programs that are out there to help us. And that's just a few things to consider.

>> Rochelle: Terrific. It's reinforcing what Dana was saying earlier about the data analysis.

That is all the time we have for today. I really want to say thank you to everyone who participated in today's program. I congratulate you all on submitting good plans and I wish you a great deal of luck as you go ahead towards the implementation.

"New York Learns, Teacher to Teacher" returns Wednesday, February 3rd, when we'll spend a half an hour answering any questions that you may have about Comprehensive District Education Plans.

Send in those questions any time between now and then. You can fax them in to 518-477-4311. Phone them in, 518-477-6749. Or E-mail them to one of two sites: tmoore@questar.org or jquinn@mail.nysed.gov.

You'll also be able to join us live on February 3rd to telephone or fax in your questions then. We'll follow that program, that live half-hour, with a ninety-minute look at scoring for the revised comprehensive English Regents to be given for the first time this June. By understanding how these important exams are scored, teachers will have a better idea of what they need to accomplish in the classroom so that their students will be successful come June.

Joining us that evening will be Jackie Marino of the State Education Department and some teachers who have been training others in the rubrics and tasks that are part of the Regents. We'll have some student work for you to take a look at and discuss how they should be scored. Be sure to tune in starting at 8 p.m. for the question and answer period and 8:30 for the Regents program. Comments from our viewers provide us with invaluable information, helpful in making these programs more meaningful to your needs. If you'd like to comment, offer a suggestion or recommend a topic, please call or write us. Call 518-477-6749. E-mail us at rcassel1@twcny.rr.com, or send a letter to the Satellite Broadcast Network, care of QUESTAR III, 1580 Columbia Turnpike, Box 8, Building 1, Castleton, New York, 12033.

Again, my special thanks to my panel today for taking time from what I know is a very busy week to be with us. Good luck to all those 4th graders also taking the English language arts assessments this week. Good luck to everybody who is going to be grading the exams in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks to you our viewers for being with us today as well. Don't forget to send along your questions on Comprehensive District Education Planning. We'll be looking forward to them.