District will transition to new standards

March 27, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

By ELISE McKEOWN SKOLNICK

BOARDMAN

The Boardman School District, like every other school district in the state, will transition to the Common Core Standards by the 2014-15 school year.

The standards have been adopted by 44 other states and the District of Columbia.

In Ohio, they will replace the current Academic Content Standards.

The common core is K-12 standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy. Ohio has also revised its social studies and science standards.

At the board of education’s Monday meeting, Dr. Linda Ross, director of instruction, outlined Boardman’s transition process to the new standards.

This year, kindergarten, and first-, 11th- and 12th-grade teachers are receiving training on the new standards.

“We have great teacher leaders who are becoming very knowledgeable about not only the common-core standards, but the revised standards in social studies and science,” Ross said, “and they will be our go-to people in the buildings for this content.”

Next year, they will look at what is being taught to determine if it needs to be taught in greater depth or eliminated, based on the new standards.

Content that has been changed or that is new to the grade level will be mapped out the following year.

They will also discuss what is taught in each grade level, so teachers know not only what content is taught for their particular grade level, but the content for the grade before and after.

Full implementation will be in the 2014-15 school year. At that time, new assessment tools will replace the current Ohio Achievement Assessments and the Ohio Graduation Test.

Also at the meeting, the board recognized three students who recently won essay contests.

Mikel Zeidenstein, a junior, won first place in the Dominion Ohio Essay Contest, earning him a laptop computer and a $1,000 award for the school.

Lyndsay Olenych won first place among Ohio 11th-graders in the Ohio Civil Rights Commission’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. essay contest.

Nektarios Kasamias won first place among Ohio eighth-graders for the same contest.