FROM THE SUPERINTENDENT: The culture is in the details

By Robert Parry

Interim School Superintendent

You really only learn how an organization works by living in it over a period of time. As small as Shelter Island School is, it is a complex organization in the way it tries to meet the educational needs of its 250+ students.

While academic learning is the core of a school (reading, writing, math, science, social studies and foreign language), general education also provides valuable time for art, music, PE, technology, home/career skills and library/computer learning.  In addition, many students require remedial help while others need special education services with specialized teachers.

The only part of the school experience that doesn’t change is the limited time we have to meet more and more needs. Kids come to school from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. for 179 days and almost every day includes special events that take time from the basic mission. Of course, all of the special events have value but they each take from the core. For example:

• State and national testing:from SAT, ACT and ASVAB to ELA/Math/Science in Grades 3-8; Regents exams; and school mid-terms and finals.

• Half-days for parent conferences; field trips to Brookhaven Labs; Nutcracker Ballet; pumpkin picking; Block Island bike trip; Disney week; High School NYC trip; schooner trip week.

• Special events: Fire Safety Week; Arbor Day; Anything Goes; Young Writers Residency Week; college visitations; class meetings; Arts in Ed assemblies; county music festival rehearsals; senior trip week; family vacations during school weeks and so much more.

We also have athletes who leave early for games (and practices if a joint team with Greenport or Ross); BOCES career tech students who leave at 10:15 a.m. for Brookhaven or Riverhead-based classes.

Many schools start high school much earlier than middle or elementary schools because of bus runs but that doesn’t work for us because of shared K-12 staff. In many high schools, serious academic students eat lunch on the run and take AP or lab classes all day. Here, “recess” is valued not just by elementary kids but by Middle School and High School students as well. We start school at 8 a.m., but Middle School/High School kids have “advisory” time so that first period starts at 8:15 am instead (a soft opening each day). Scheduling a small school also creates dilemmas since choral and band and PE needs understandably drive the schedule. Elementary classroom teachers face the day with “pull-outs” taking kids who need extra help also missing out on basic instructional time in their classrooms.

The result of all this is that serious academic time to work on the basic skills (reading, writing, math, science and social studies) is a regular victim of the best intentions being the enemy of the core instructional time. Unless the school day and the school year are extended, the core mission will continue to fight for time in the school day.

UPDATES ON SCHOOL PROGRAMS

Science teacher Dan Williams reports that the Advanced Biology class had a “hands on” tour at Brookhaven National Lab on Tuesday, November 30.The students brought DNA that they had extracted from local dragonflies. They set up polymerase chain  reactions to amplify the DNA so that it could be sequenced. Brookhaven provided a complete tour and explanation of the sequencing lab; we expect results shortly.

The students also toured the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS). They were allowed exclusive access to the floor of NSLS where the students learned about X-ray crystallography. Every unit of the Advanced Biology class uses the results of X-ray crystallography.  The class examines proteins in a three dimensional imaging program called J-Mol, this helps us to answer questions on how molecules truly function inside the cell.

Method Test Prep is an online SAT/ACT tutorial program, sponsored for the school by the Shelter Island Educational Foundation, and will be provided to high school juniors in January. Method Test Prep is used by over 500 schools, including many on Long Island, Western Suffolk BOCES, and the hundreds of high schools that subscribe to Naviance, an online college counseling resource. Method Test Prep is used to help students identify sections of college testing that they are scoring poorly on, and focus efforts to improving weak areas. Performance and improvement is tracked and measurable. Students also get immediate feedback and explanation to practice questions.