The Fairfield-Suisun Unified
agenda for tonight’s governing board meeting looks all but routine, except for
Item 13 — a review and potential response to the somewhat critical 2014-15
Solano County grand jury report about a district intervention program called
Capturing Kids’ Hearts.
In its summary to the
district, the grand jury noted that, since 2013 and under Assembly Bill 1729,
California school districts must provide “effective intervention” for students
with behavioral problems and avoid, if at all possible, suspending or expelling
them.
A U.S. Department of
Education program called Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS) is
just one way schools can achieve the positive goals outlined in the state law,
the grand jury noted in its background notes.
The Fairfield district, under
PBIS guidelines, selected as one of its training programs Capturing Kids’
Hearts, a Texas-based teacher training curriculum created by Flip Flippen, a
licensed professional counselor in Texas. Later, 15 district employees attended
a professional development session in San Diego.
The grand jury said of the
district employees interviewed, that they had “difficulty articulating what
exactly they learned from it, if anything,” and only one could cite an example
of something from the program that she had used, “and even that was only on one
occasion.”
Grand jury officials, while
agreeing the Capturing Kids’ Hearts satisfies the law and the district’s needs,
“information obtained by the grand jury indicates that it may not have been
implemented as intended by the facilitators of the program itself.”
From interviews, the grand
jury said neither Superintendent Kris Corey nor any other district employee may
require that any particular program or method of teaching be used throughout
the district.
What the grand jury appeared
to take exception to was this: The lack of uniformity of intervention programs
used in the district, that such a lack “negatively” affects the potential of
Capturing Kids’ Hearts “to actually cause an intentional culture shift, which
is one of its primary purposes.”
While noting that so-called
“school cultures” vary from school to school, there was “admittedly no process
in place to measure the effects of ‘Capturing Kids’ Hearts,’” the grand jury
report noted.
The grand jury, therefore,
recommended that professional development programs should be “thoroughly vetted”
before taxpayer monies are spent, to ensure the program is “actually compatible
with the structure of the district and the schools.”
The grand jury also
recommended that district assign a staff member to oversee the PBIS programs
and “continuously monitor effectiveness. PBIS.org has an assessment tool, which
can be used.”
In proposed responses,
addressed to Judge E. Bradley Nelson, district officials “partially” disagreed
with the first grand jury finding, that Capturing Kids’ Hearts is not necessarily
suited for individual professional development.
Additionally, Corey will tell
the trustees that she agrees such programs be thoroughly vetted before being
used and Capturing Kids’ Hearts was.
She agreed with the grand
jury’s second finding, that no staff was assigned to monitor the success of
Capturing Kids’ Hearts, but that the district took corrective action “six
months ago, prior to receiving this finding from the grand jury,” she wrote in
her response to Nelson.
The
program will be reviewed annually as part of the district’s Local Control
Accountability Plan, Corey wrote.
September 9, 2015
The
Reporter
By
Richard Bammer
No comments:
Post a Comment