Action of the School Board Action of the School Board 05/11/15 | Page 3
next year and a bit over $10 million the following year. A 3 percent increase would nearly
balance the budget next year and drop the deficit the following year to about $5 million.
Board member Nicole Hayes said she and Treasurer Bill Harvey met with eight of the 10
education budget conferees May 6 to discuss the needs of Anoka-Hennepin. She said nobody she met with was surprised by what she said, and she thought it was beneficial. “You
wonder as you walk through the halls and the tunnels… if you’re making a difference,
and I believe we were,” Hayes said. “We’re saying the same message that everyone else is
saying. They’re hearing it from school board members, they’re hearing it from Education
Minnesota members, and they’re hearing it from us, side-by-side together. Hopefully that
resonates.”
Heidemann also mentioned the importance of last year’s compensatory aid pilot, which,
at this time both the House and Senate have included in their proposals. Compensatory
aid provides additional money to meet the greater educational needs of students in poverty. Heidemann noted that the pilot recognizes the flaw in the compensatory aid formula,
which favors districts with small schools that have large concentrations of students in
poverty. Even though Anoka-Hennepin has many students in poverty, it operates large
schools so the concentration of those students isn’t as great. The pilot funding sunsets at the
end of this year, unless specifically included in the education bill signed by the governor.
Heidemann said the board is stressing to legislators the importance of keeping compensatory pilot funding in the final bill.
Elementary and Secondary Education
English language program overview presented
Chief Academic Officer Cynthia Hays, Ann Ertl, the district’s English language program
teaching and learning specialist, and Johnna Rohmer-Hirt, director of research, evaluation and testing, provided to the board an update on Anoka-Hennepin’s English language
program.
Ertl said the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) recently completed a program
review and their recommendations led the district to hire the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) as a consultant to help the program adopt a new set of state standards, which are
now the same as those for general education students.
“Our job as the EL department is to really figure out what are the language needs of the
students in order to reach that same set of standards,” Ertl said. “We aren’t teaching students a different curriculum.”
Instead, Ertl said the program helps staff identify the language students need to effectively
meet state standards in English, math, science, etc. “It’s a nice marriage of sorts. What happening in EL shouldn’t be different than what’s happening for students throughout the rest
of the day,” Ertl said.
Moving forward, Ertl said the program will continue to implement the new state standards,
increase rigor in secondary programming, bring on an EL program coordinator position,
and offer EL programming at all sites.
Hays outlined six recommendations made by CAL.
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ACTION
1. Establish a collaborative instructional model for EL teachers and strategically chosen
general education teachers.
2. Eliminate or reconsider roles of paraprofessionals.
3. Create an EL coordinator position.
4. Develop an EL leadership team at each school to facilitate the collaborative teaching
model and to better place EL teachers into appropriate classes.
5. Convene a working group to study high school graduation requirements of EL stu-