Changes Ahead for South Orange - Maplewood Schools

The 2013-14 school year will see some changes in the South Orange - Maplewood School District (SOMSD), with the piloting of a Gifted & Talented program, the infusing of the elementary English Language Arts (ELA) enrichment push-in program into the regular classroom curriculum, the creation of an acceleration option for 8th grade students in ELA and most momentously, the launch of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Middle Years Program in the middle schools.

Superintendent Brian Osborne and Board of Education (BOE) members discussed these at recent BOE meetings. Here is a summary of what’s ahead: 

Gifted & Talented Program

A working group has been meeting to discuss the formation of a Gifted and Talented program, based on the framework of the district's guiding change document. The group has been working with stakeholders and plans to launch a program in 2014 and pilot it sometime in 2013.

Osborne said the Equity and Excellence committee of the BOE had been advised about strategies being discussed, including a focus on the identification of tools for assessing students. The program will not be a pull-out and the identification process will take into account different measures of giftedness, said committee member Bill Gaudelli.

The group is developing several options internally and there will be an opportunity for community feedback when the options are vetted by the BOE and committee, Gaudelli said. The district will seek input from administrators, teachers, parents, and BOE members.

The district will further discuss the program over the summer.

Elementary School Enrichment

The district will take the current "push-in" ELA program in 4th and 5th grades (where students are taught the enrichment curriculum in the classroom by the enrichment teacher and the classroom teacher) and infuse it into the regular classroom curriculum, to be taught solely by the classroom teacher.

(The push-in program replaced the original enrichment pull-out program, where students who qualified for enrichment based on certain criteria were pulled out of the classroom for lessons taught by the enrichment teacher.)

For example, Osborne said, the current 4th grade mythology unit will be "infused" into the 3rd grade curriculum. 

The math enrichment program will remain a pull-out program, said a district spokeswoman.

As for the current enrichment teachers in the district, two will remain as math enrichment teachers and two other positions were eliminated, the spokeswoman said. Those teachers were able to apply for other jobs within the district. 

8th grade ELA acceleration

The district will implement an acceleration option for 8th grade students in English Language Arts, said Osborne. Students who meet certain criteria based on grades, test scores and teacher recommendations will be given the option to accelerate into 9th grade ELA. The program is similar to one already in place for 8th graders in math.

The district recently sent out letters informing parents whose child(ren) were identified for acceleration, said the spokeswoman. 

IB Middle Years Program Launch

After a year of intensive teacher training, the district will launch the IB program for 6th grade students; 7th and 8th grade will be implemented over the 2014/15 and 2015/16 school years, respectively.

The program was proposed by middle school principals and recommended by Osborne in the winter of 2011, and the BOE approved the program in March of 2012. According to the district website, “IB MYP will help the District ensure that learning in the middle schools is rigorous, based on student inquiry, and what we call trans-disciplinary, which means that the learning is across subjects and transcends traditional content areas.”

Here is a list of Frequently Asked Questions about IB/MYP on the district website.

To get a sense of how teachers are being trained to implement the new program, see this description of “A Day in the Life of an IB/MYP Unit” on the website.