Hamden School District a State "Partner District"

The state Department of Education has designated the town's school district as one of 15 statewide "partner districts."

The designation gives the district access to free training programs for teachers and administrators but does not come with the additional funding it once did, school officials said.

"We are a partner district with state Department of Education and allows us free state training," Hamden Supt. of Schools Fran Rabinowicz said. 

One of the town's schools will receive an executive coach, she said, who will help implement steps to improve student performance. Rabinowicz said she and other school officials will meet with state officials Nov. 30 to work out the details.

Every year the state Board of Education determines if a district has made adequate yearly progress in accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind legislation. If AYP is not achieved, the school is labeled "in need of improvement."

A district is deemed a partner district when its schools are identified as "in need of improvement" for more than two years in a row. 

As a partner district, Hamden administrators and teachers are eligable for free training programs from state technical assistance teams. In the past, the designation has come with a $15,000 stipend to pay the costs associated with the training, such as substitute teachers to fill in for full-time staff attending the training, Rabinowicz said.

"In the past, partner districts were provided $15,000 for professional development, and they're not doing that anymore," she said. "It is excellent to have free training, but we don't have the money for substitustes for teachers to go to it.

"We are going to try our best in terms of finding different ways to find resources for that through Title I grants and use school choice money when becomes available," she said.

School data teams will work with district data teams to formulate improvement plans that will be submitted to the state. The teams will analyze strengths and weaknesses in what is currently being done and establish new goals and strategies for improvement.

"We will work with them around the district and data team will look at student outcomes on a regular basis," Rabinowicz said. "We will talk about what the strengths and weaknesses are throughout the district and how we might strengthen the deficits."

Ideas borne from brainstorming sessions will be sent out to each school data team, which will take the strategies and work them through for each particular school, she said.

While there may be weaknesses, there also are strengths throughout the district, she said.

"We have [student] stregnths in math grading computation, we are very good in some parts of measurment, good in some areas of number sense," Rabinowicz said. "What we need to do a better job of [teaching] estimating answers to problems and applying the skills in different approaches to problem soving.

"Also overall our writing is not as strong as I would like it to be," she said "We can do better in that and have been concentrating on that over last year."