I continued my meet and greet with Amesbury Public School Principals and Administrators today. Trailing in behind a few (ahem) tardy High Schoolers, Councilor Bob Lavoie and I spent some quality time with Principal Roy Hamond first thing today. As with previous visits, the focus was on trends in the current student population and the rationale behind the 'Top Two' budget priorities that each Principal was asked to develop for the FY16 budget.
[So far, I've had the chance to meet with Superintendent Robinson, Assistant Superintendent Farrell, Principal Helliesen (AES), and Principal Curry (AMS).]
As I wrote previously, "[f]or the budget development process, the Mayor asked the Superintendent and her Principals to tie their school budgets to building-based Student Achievement Plans (SAPs) and to quantify and support any request above 'current' services with a priority ranking, a cost ranking, a data-based rationale, and a clear connection to the Goals and needs in the SAP. The School Committee's budget process clearly benefited this year from having this sort of exercise. The Principals and the Central Office rose to the challenge, articulated a number of worthy new priorities and narrowed it down to 'Top Two' priorities each."
First, some numbers. This chart shows enrollment trends from FY11 onward. AHS has seen a decline in overall enrollment since FY11 but note that FY16 is projected to be back at the same FY11 number of 644. During that same time, the number of teacher FTE's has dropped by 7.8. So, with current staffing levels, we would have to educate the same number of students as in FY11, but with 7.8 fewer teachers (15.6% fewer teachers than AHS had in FY11). (The diagonal lines running between columns indicate the progression of a particular 'year' or cohort of students through grades 9 - 12.)
Dropout rates have really tightened up in the past 10 years:
Looking at the long-term enrollment trends report on the MA DOE website (hat tip to Rob Chamberlain), you can see that between 8th and 9th grade is when year after year we see a real cliff in terms of folks choicing out of Amesbury. [Open and select 'Amesbury' on the Long Term Enrollment Trends spreadsheet.]
These numbers are reflected on this table, shared by Principal Hamond:
All of this gets us to Principal Hamond's 'Top Two' budget priority requests for FY16.
First, he is requesting a 1.0 FTE Math Teacher. With expected enrollment combined with Commonwealth of MA 'Mass Core' expectations that students receive Math instruction in all four high school grades, AHS will not be able to meet this requirement with current staffing. Students are able to meet Amesbury School Committee Math requirements for graduation but AHS will be unable to meet MA DOE expectations for the school, which exceed School Committee requirements. Keep in mind, AHS will need to serve the same number of students as 5 years ago, but with over 15% fewer teachers, which puts real constraints on our ability to have enough classes available across grades.Second, he is requesting the re-instatement of the 1.0 FTE Tech Ed teacher, cut from last year's budget. The rationale is similar: offer blocks/classes to a larger student population next year, including in this 'electives' area. Additionally, this position would support the expansion of STEM programming at AHS, including the staffing support for the Robotics team.
As with previous visits to Principals in order to discuss their requests in detail, I was struck by the fact that the requests were well reasoned and data-driven. In this case, the motivation is support AHS's response to an increased enrollment and maintain its ability to offer adequate number of class blocks to satisfy student demand and meet state requirements.
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