BY STATE EDUCATION COMMISSIONER RICHARD P. MILLS
May 1998
BY STATE EDUCATION COMMISSIONER RICHARD P. MILLS
The 1999 budget opens the way to reform of special education funding with an increase in aid for special education and a small increase for prevention funding. These two ideas are at the heart of the Regents proposal. Now in the closing weeks of the legislative session it’s time to finish the work.
We have a new incentive in addition to the simple logic and justice of the matter: both the U.S. Office of Civil Rights and the U.S. Department of Education have written to inform us that New York’s system for funding special education does not comply with new federal law. We don’t need to be told by Washington that our formula has to change. We just need to follow through on our own plans.
The Executive and the Legislature may have discussions concerning a supplemental budget before the end of the session, but there are no signs of this yet. If there were to be a supplemental budget, it would focus on the items included in the Governor’s veto.
The budget as adopted now includes a state aid increase of $850 million, increases in special education, support for the new testing, and for the Regents standards. It also includes the state’s full share of funding for libraries. There are other needs that are partially met. For example, there is a total of nearly $900 million for school construction, without the additional $500 million represented by RESCUE which the Governor vetoed.
For schools, the field of action shifts to the communities as they prepare to vote on school budgets. Time will surely tell whether they have committed their new funds to strategies that will improve student performance. In the State Education Department, we are more than half way through preparation for the Year 2000 budget. It will be tightly focused on the Regents strategic goals.
Superintendents are intensely engaged in instructional matters as they lead their communities toward the higher standards. What exactly are they doing? Here are just a few of the dozens of ideas I heard last week from school superintendents:
The names of all students thought to be in academic difficulty are identified to the superintendent, who talks with principals about what is being done to help them…prescriptive summer school for more students… one week "Success Academy" for all 9th graders to discuss the standards and the exams… superintendent’s mini-grants to support changes in instruction related to the standards…learning labs to provide extra help; the parents of every student doing failing work got called to encourage them to have their children attend the learning labs… all 8th graders take Regents math 1…
There were many more ideas. That conversation illustrated the kind of leadership I have seen in the schools. It is that leadership that the Regents and the Department will seek to encourage and support in the months ahead as we begin the work outlined in the April Regents meeting.
Actually, that work has begun. Four invitational meetings of school superintendents are scheduled for late May and early June to prepare the way for regional meeting with Regents in the fall. Other informal discussions are going on with principals and school boards. And individual Regents have intensified their public speaking on this issue. There is a lot more to come.
A strong team of local practitioners and scholars is preparing recommendations at our request to enable more students to meet the standards and pass the Regents exams. They were commissioned to develop prevention strategies such as extra help and time for students who are not passing their course work, mandatory summer school, promotion guidelines, and other support services for students at risk of not meeting the standards. They are also considering equivalent testing practices. For example, could a student who narrowly fails a section of the math test – such as statistics -- meet the standard by taking an additional and quite rigorous test just on that topic after additional instruction? I asked them to refine their ideas and prepare information on costs and the numbers of students who might be affected.
Recently, Deputy Commissioners Larry Gloecker and James Kadamus and I met with all the superintendents and special education coordinators in Nassau County to work on the issue of the high use of separate site programs for children with disabilities. It was an effective problem-solving session, thanks to advance preparation by District Superintendent Chuck Fowler and the full turnout of local leadership. This is the start of a very productive collaboration to resolve the issue.
The second annual Partners for Children teleconference, The Early Years: Giving Kids a Jump on Life, took place on May 1, 1998. The teleconference featured Dr. Karen M. Hopkins, a noted pediatrician with expertise in early neurological development and several programs from around the state. Thirty sites participated with approximately 800 attendees. And as before, Commissioners from several agencies participated. As the demand for better school performance intensifies, it is ever more important to learn the art of joint venture with other state and local agencies.
Solve it @ the Library is the theme of the New York State 1998 Summer Reading Program. The aim is to encourage collaboration among public libraries, library systems, schools and BOCES to promote summer reading. The program will touch about 150,000 – elementary students, pre-schoolers, parents, teens, the home-schooled and students with disabilities. Last year, they read more than a million books. The Gaylord Brothers Company of Syracuse has cooperated with the State Library since 1992 to underwrite the costs of producing materials to support this effort.
On May 14-16, the New York State Archives will exhibit the only existing draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation handwritten by Abraham Lincoln. The exhibit will also include letters, photographs, newspaper editorials and other materials to illuminate the events and emotions that attended Lincoln’s act. Some of it will make for difficult reading. People were intensely and violently divided on the matter in 1862. On May 14, Harold Holzer, an authority on Lincoln and the Civil War will lecture at the Cultural Education Center in Albany on the Emancipation Proclamation.
With the guidance of the Regents Committee on Quality, we are renewing our strategic plan. We have to, since many of the assignments we gave ourselves two years ago in the first plan have been accomplished, while others need reinforcement and there is new work to begin. To support the new planning, the Rockefeller Institute will again interview a sample of those we serve, and we have evaluated all of the performance measures and strategies in the old plan. We examined the whole organization to identify all major functions and we are beginning a new scan of the environment in which we work. We are considering the newly available data on performance throughout the educational and cultural landscape, and will shortly have more focused performance measures and better strategies to improve results. The new strategic plan will be ready for Regents action in our July policy retreat.
The USS Slater is a World War II destroyer escort – a DE – that served in both the North Atlantic and the Philippines. I saw her on the recent Sunday afternoon when the ship was first open to the public in the Port of Albany. Looming out of the rain, she looked small but tough – a fighting ship. This is no sanitized historical site but it is a place to learn nevertheless.
Old sailors who were as impressive as the ship explained the twin Bofors, the hedgehogs, the K-guns, and the meaning of the hospital operating lamps fixed to the overhead in the officers’ wardroom. One veteran didn’t like the four gun tubs that had been mounted amidships in 1944 when the Slater was modified to face kamikazes. "I’m used to seeing torpedo tubes here," was all he said, but I wondered what else he had seen. I thought of my father in law who with his shipmates on another DE, the USS Carter, defended convoys against U-boats in the North Atlantic. And I thought of my own father, who was at Leyte Gulf when little more than a picket line of such lightly armed vessels protected the landing force against the oncoming Japanese fleet.
We can all learn something on Memorial Day.
A monthly publication of the State Education Department
