March 31 Post

Tomorrow begins the month of April - and no - that is NOT an April Fool's joke!☺ The school year continues to march forward at a seemingly increasing rate as we end the third quarter and launch into the fourth and final quarter of the 2022-23 School year!  Time sure flies by when you are having fun - while learning as the pictures below show!

What I love most about these images is that it shows our students learning outside of what one would call a "traditional classroom". Now don't get me wrong, plenty of that still takes place, but what we strive for in our educational programs is to get our students "out there" and engaged in our community as the incredible learners they are so that their learning is contextualized and authentic.  This allows our students to showcase what they can do, and what our community can do to support them!  

Our schools are so lucky to have our community visibly present in our learning environments!  

Now on to the informational parts of this blog!...

RESULTS OF MOST RECENT THOUGHT EXCHANGE ON FISCAL YEAR 24 BUDGET DEVELOPMENT PRIORITY AREAS

I wanted to take a moment to thank those of you who participated in our most recent Thought Exchange regarding priority areas in our ongoing FY 24 budget development processes.  The question that was asked in this exchange was:

As we begin our FY 24 Budget Development Process for the Gorham Schools, what 2-3 things do you want our School Committee to prioritize moving forward?

Below is a summary of participation information:

As you can see, we had 457 participants sharing 293 thoughts and then those thoughts were rated by participants a total of 14,869 times to create the themes I will share momentarily.  

Participants broke out as follows... 

As you can see, approximately 31% of participants were school staff members, 63% were school families and then 6% were community members.  It is important to understand that the vast majority of folks participating in the survey are directly related to the schools, which may or may not represent the larger or broader 18,000+ population of the greater community of Gorham.  As is the case with any data set, it is important to be clear about what the limiting factors may be.

With that understanding, I wanted to share the highlights of data collected.  First up for information to share are the top themes that were generated by the data.  Those can be seen in the graph below:

The top three themes were ensuring a high quality staff and educational program in our schools, followed closely by making sure the schools continue to offer important support programs to students, which was then followed by keeping class sizes at a reasonable level.

The top three thoughts for each of those three themes were as follows:

High Quality Staff and Education Programs:

Student Support Services:

Class sizes:

The TOP TEN thoughts shared overall were:

What was clear from the results of this Thought Exchange is that respondents wanted to ensure we maintain existing high quality programs for our students.  A primary way to do that is via maintaining the high quality staff that works directly with our students.  It was also clear that respondents felt that those staff should have the supports needed to feel as though they are able to perform the tasks asked of them with high quality results so things like keeping class sizes to a minimum, providing PD and other ways to retain staff were important.

You can view the full slide presentation of survey results by CLICKING HERE if interested. 

These results were shared with the Gorham School Committee at their last Budget Workshop meeting held on March 21, 2023 and is now a resource that they can review as they continue this important work in preparing the school's budget for the coming year.

FY 24 BUDGET DEVELOPMENT WORK UPDATE

Keeping with our budget theme from above, I did want to provide an update to folks on our actual budget development processes, timelines and next steps.  

WE HAD A BIG WEEK THIS PAST WEEK with a few significant changes that will definitely impact our discussions moving forward.  Let me start with updating you on these items.

First, in continued conversations with the Town Manager we were able to increase the total value of the town (our tax value base) from an overall anticipated increase of $10 million in value to a new anticipated increase of $25 million in value.  This helps when calculating the impacts of our proposed budget on taxpayer expense and estimating a mil rate impact.

Second, we found out on Tuesday from Anthem (our health insurance carrier) that they have been able to establish the caps for premium rate increases across the state for teachers.  This isn't what we will actually pay, mind you, but it establishes what the highest increases will be. The newly established cap is 6%.  This is good news because we had started our budget process with a conservative 10% projected increase.  With this new information, we now know we can safely reduce our proposed budget by $240,000.00 without impacting any positions/programs or quality of health services being provided to our incredible staff.  Good news indeed.

Third, (and also occurring late Tuesday evening) school systems across the state were made aware of a calculation error made by the Maine Department of Education to state subsidy allocations.  Superintendents had been pushing back at the MDOE for some time wondering why they weren't really seeing the impacts of additional funding for education in our actual subsidy allocations and kudos to the state for continuing to dig and look until they were able to identify the problem.  The end result was a release of about $40 million dollars back into the distribution side of the EPS funding formula to schools.  This ultimately allowed the state to move the min. mil expectation for schools (this is the amount of money the state requires local municipalities to pay before being eligible to receive state subsidy dollars) from the originally calculated 7.29 mils to a new 6.97 mils.  For Gorham, this resulted in a much needed increase of just under $700,000.00 in state subsidy allocation.  Also Good news!

On a personal note, I rushed home late on Tuesday night and was sure to buy a lottery ticket!  We'll see if anything comes of that!  ☺

On a more serious note, it is important to know that although these pieces of new information are helpful to our budget discussions, they don't truly resolve some fundamental issues that we must grapple with as a school committee and as a greater community.  Issues such as increased overall costs of doing "business", or the increases in needs of the student populations we serve, or issues such as annual increases in property values that exceed the state's average are all still significant issues that we must face and that still put us in a difficult spot for our FY 24 budget development processes.

With that said, the School Committee, the Town Council, and ultimately each of you as voters will determine how we move forward to address these issues as we continue our budget development work.  The School Committee will next meet in a budget development workshop on April 4, 2023 at 7:00 p.m. at the Municipal Center.  This meeting will be recorded and shared with the public asap afterwards.  There is then one more budget workshop scheduled with the School Committee on April 11, 2023 (same time and location) prior to the School Committee being asked to vote on the total proposed budget at their April 12 regular school committee meeting.  Once that is done - the next steps are as follows:

-  Proposed Budget Booklets are delivered to Town Council on April 19

-  Joint Budget workshop is held with School Committee and Town Council on April 25 at 6:30 p.m.

-  Town Council Votes on school and municipal budget on May 16 at 6:30 p.m.

-  Budget Validation Referendum takes place on June 13, 2023 all day at the polls.

As I close, just one more reminder that you can find "all things FY 24 budget" on our website at www.gorhamschools.org, then go to "About Us", then "School Committee" and then to "School Budget Info. "

As always, please reach out with questions if you have them!  My email is: heather.perry@gorhamschools.org

A FEW PUBLIC PRE-K SLOTS STILL AVAILABLE!

I wanted to take just a moment to let folks know that we still have a few slots available for our new Public Pre K program to be housed at Narragansett Elementary School starting in the Fall of 2023.  Applications were initially opened earlier this month and we have had an awesome response...but there are still a handful of slots left if folks are still interested!  Because of this we have re-opened the application process and will be taking rolling applications until all slots are filled.  Use the QR code below to apply today if you are interested.

As a quick recap - to be eligible a child must be 4 years old by Oct. 15, 2023.  All children and families that reside in Gorham are eligible to apply for these slots.  The program will serve students in a half day program (am/pm) format.  Transportation will be provided from home/daycare to school and back to home/daycare each day.  Feel free to call 222-1295 if you have ANY questions.  

We are so looking forward to the start of this program!  Such exciting work!  As a quick update, we've begun screening appointments with families.  We have ordered key supplies and equipment, and have accepted a new playground design to move forward specifically for Pre K aged students.  The playground may not be fully ready by start of school, but it will be ready shortly there after and we have plans for the interim.  We will begin hiring processes for staff later in the month of April, and we are currently meeting with Child Development Services (CDS) to nail down agreements for needed services to begin.  

Additionally, we have solidified our partnership for a second year with the Gorham Arts Alliance to host up to 10 public Pre-K students and we have recently solidified our new agreement with Seedlings to Sunflowers to host up to 32 public Pre-K students.  Much more work is planned and going on behind the scenes and things are moving along nicely!  We have no doubt that we will be ready for programs to begin this fall!  We can't wait to better serve our "Little Rams" via these programs and it is awesome to BEGIN to see some of our work outlined in the "Bright Futures For Little Rams" document come to life!

LET'S HEAR FROM STUDENTS ABOUT OUR SCHOOLS!

With all the political turmoil going on across our country and some of the stories of what is or isn't happening in our public schools that are out there, it is sometimes hard to know what is really happening in our schools.  As a parent, especially of a MS or HS aged student (which is often when students start to clam up when asked what did you do today in school) it is hard to know.  You can't go to school and sit with your child each day.  We can't live stream our classrooms to the public.  You can look into google classroom to see the "stuff" that students may be working on, but you don't necessarily have the context within which that "stuff" is being taught.  When asking about curriculum, grading, and reporting practices the level of information that is out there can sometimes be overwhelming.  

We do our best as school professionals to provide "windows" into our schools.  We publicly share our standards, performance indicators, and learning targets, we share syllabi, and summary achievement data.  We have weekly updates, we have blog posts.  We have see saw and other software to share information.  We schedule Parent/Teacher Conferences and we encourage parents to reach out to our teachers directly with questions you may have. We do a lot...but sometimes the student voice is missing.  

Earlier this winter, as a school system we asked ourselves:  "What do our students think about our schools and how can we better allow them to tell their stories?  An idea was born.  What if we did just that?  What if we allowed students to share their stories about what they think of our schools?

We have some pretty talented videographers in our schools (both staff and students) and so we reached out to them to help tell our student's stories.  So far, we have been able to create THREE video stories using the voices of our students.  One student from 6th grade, one from 7th grade and one from 8th grade.  Each video is under three minutes in length.  We are working now on putting together stories from the HS as well, but that is going to take a little longer.

These stories are told by the students themselves, recorded by students and then with a little help from some of our talented staff, put together in some brief videos.  My plan is to share one of these in each of my next three blogs and then share the high school ones when they are completed as well.

Below is our first story from Devon Paradis, a 6th grade student at Gorham Middle School.  

6th Grade Video Link: https://vimeo.com/811806070/7e106c9422

A SPECIAL THANK YOU to the following student videographers who made this work possible and learned a lot in the process! (check out their pictures below too)...

8th grader - Cohen Landry

Freshman - Colby Jordan

Sophomore - Aidan Madore

Junior - Cole Allen

Seniors - Mikaela Pellerin & Tabitha Ishimwe

THE POTATO TORNADO IS BORN!

If you follow some of our social media feeds, you would have seen earlier this year that some of our 5th grade Gifted and Talented students at Village Elementary School started learning about how to develop business plans.  As a result, they invited Kate into their learning spaces.  Kate is the owner of Mow's Munchies Food Truck.  Students got to tour the food truck and talk to Kate directly about how she started her business and some of the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur.  Students immediately wanted to learn more and immersed themselves in figuring out the question of:  How do you start a food truck business?  Students from Great Falls also got involved and well - student curiosity took over!  

More recently, Kate challenged students to develop a new food item.  Students accepted the challenge and worked together to create a tasty new fry burger that Kate loved and will be including in her summer 2023 menu!  Students named it, and Kate agreed to keep the name - the new burger will be called "The Potato Tornado"!  WHAT FUN!

This is the great stuff that can happen when our students connect with our incredible community!  Check out the photos below, and check out the new menu...perhaps you can be sure to stop by Mow's Munchies Food Truck this summer for a taste! 

BAXTER MEMORIAL LIBRARY CELEBRATES THE WEEK OF THE YOUNG CHILD!

The week of the Young Child is coming up NEXT WEEK! If you are curious to learn more, check out my last blog post from March 17 for details and how you as a family can celebrate...but I also wanted you to know that Baxter Memorial Library right here in Gorham is celebrating this special week and they INVITE YOU to join them!  Check out the flyer below and call 222-1190 with questions!

DO YOU HAVE A 7TH or 8TH GRADER INTERESTED IN THE TRADES?

Check out the information below and CLICK HERE to learn more about a summer Trades camp being sponsored by Gorham Recreation Department in collaboration with Moody's Collision, JMG, CMP, Harvey Performance, Gorham Sand and Gravel and Portland Ship Yard!  Wish they had these camps when I was a kid!  Details about how to apply are on the flyer and website! 

Well that's enough for this Blog Post!  My next post will be April 14 just before vacation week!  I'm sure by then spring will have fully "sprung"...ENJOY!