The province is changing the Pupil Accommodation Review Guidelines (PARG).
Even though some of the changes are connected to the province’s new rural strategy,
the changes will affect all school boards across the province.
The Ministry of Education has released a new draft
of the guidelines and will accept feedback on this draft until March 23rd,
2018. The final guidelines will be released later in the spring, at which time
school boards must revise their existing policies.
Longer
process, more options required
Among the major changes to the current process:
Boards will have to use Ministry-approved templates
for staff reports (the templates are under development)
The initial staff report from the board must contain
at least three options (previously it was just one): a recommended option, an
alternative option and a status quo option.
Reports must include detailed information about:
Impact on student programming (e.g. multi-grade
classrooms, speciality programs)
Impact on student well-being (indicators could
include things like impact on extra-curricular activities and busing, school
climate surveys)
Impact on school board resources (effect on budget,
school capacity, facility conditions etc.)
Impact on the local community, including the
economic impact if at least one of the schools has half of its population from
a community of less than 10,000
There must be at least 3 public meetings (up from
2), and there must be a minimum of 60 business days between the first and final
public meetings. If the board introduces a new school closure during the
process, then one more public meeting must be added.
For accommodation reviews involving one or more
secondary schools, the final report must include feedback from secondary school
students.
School boards must invite municipalities that will
be affected to be part of the process. Invitations must be sent to the elected
Mayor, Chair, Warden or equivalent, along with the Chief Administrative
Officer, City Manager or equivalent.
Moratorium
on school closings must continue until boards implement new guidelines
School boards will not be allowed to start new
Accommodation Review processes until they have communicated the new process to
their communities and trustees have approved the process as new board policy.
Weighting
schemes, which determine the extent to which each indicator is factored into
the combined measure, play an important role. Depending on what the goals are
for the combined measure, some weighting schemes may be more or less effective
at predicting teachers that achieve the goal. If the goal of the combined
measure is to only predict a teacher's student achievement gains, then the
student achievement gain measure should receive over 80% of the weight.
However, a singular focus on student achievement gains could lead teachers to
narrowly focus on this aspect of teaching and ignore other valued outcomes. If
the goal is for students and teachers to meet a broader set of objectives, then
scores on each indicator should be combined with a relatively equal weight. The
research also found that an equally weighted composite is more stable year to
year.
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