Every year, the Connecticut State Department of Education issues Strategic School Profiles, which get discussed at the Board of Education meetings for the schools across the state at their November meetings. Last night, the Woodbridge Board of Education discussed the Strategic School Profile for Beacher Road. Unfortunately, the new strategic school profiles are not yet available online either at the State Website or at the Woodbridge Board of Education Website.

For a data hound, it was a great meeting. There was all kinds of little tidbits. 3.1% of the students are classified as talented and gifted. 8.8% are listed as participating in special education. 17.4% are from minorities, with Asian American students making up the largest group. Board members asked questions about trends and further details to determine if the policies and budgets of the school were having the desired effect. Some of this became fairly detailed and the superintendent, Dr. Stella, spoke about the need to prioritize which areas of additional research the board would like his staff to pursue.

As I listened to this, my mind wandered back to the workshop on Watchdog Reporting that I attended on the previous weekend. All of this information is available online and any board member, blogger, member of the press or citizen of the town can easily go out and to their own research.

Some of the data is in PDF files which are harder to extract data from. Some of the data is in a database that can be queried from a web page. There is also a summary of much of the data available as a spreadsheet. An enterprising researcher would contact people from the State Department of Education to see how much of the data could be obtained in a raw format that could be loaded into spreadsheets and databases.

One statistic that people expressed concern over was the percentage of students passing all four fitness tests. In 2005/6, 41.1% of fourth graders completed all four fitness tests. The number was unchanged for 2006/7. I don’t have the numbers for 2007/8 but I seem to recall them as being about the same. Yet for schools in the state, it was only 33.6% in 2005/6 and 33.5% for 2006/7. It may be that there is something wrong with the tests. For sixth graders, the numbers were different in 2005/6 36.6% passed all four tests, but in 2006/7 climbed to 62.6%

As the economy falters, people will be looking even more closely at the money spent on our schools and how effective the money is being used. In addition, there may be more demands on the school as more students need free or reduced price lunches and more students need after school care through programs like extended day as more parents need to work to make ends meet.

While the school appears to do a good job of analyzing the data to make sure that our students needs are met as fully and cost-effectively as possible, having school board members and members of the public go out and analyze the data is useful to help find other ways that our schools can be improved.

This leads to another part of the report. In Woodbridge there is one computer per 2.9 students. This is slightly better than the one computer per 3.6 students which is the state average. However, as of the 2006/7 report, only 67.3% of these computers were high or moderate power, compared to 89.5% on a statewide basis. The school continues to refresh its computers, and I suspect the number is much better now, but it is an area that needs vigilance. Beyond that, we need to make sure that besides having good computers, we have teachers that can help the students make the best use of these computers and, ideally, that this learning gets brought into the parents homes so parents can make better use of the Internet as well, like being able to research strategic school profiles.