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Binghamton schools outline five-year gap-closing approach after district improvement review
Summary
Superintendent presented the district comprehensive improvement plan, including a 20% gap-closing objective spread over five years, performance gains on local assessments and continued focus on attendance and tiered student supports.
Superintendent Tanya presented the district’s comprehensive improvement plan to the Board of Education on Aug. 19, outlining academic goals, measurement tools and supports staff will use to raise student outcomes across the district.
The plan focuses on four commitments — academic and instructional excellence, student supports (attendance and social-emotional well-being), extracurricular engagement and safety — and uses a 20% gap-closing measure as the multi-year target for subgroups the district seeks to improve.
Tanya said the district adopted a 20% gap-closing approach tied to a five-year horizon: “to close the gap to 100% reading at grade level over five years we set a 20% gap-closing measure,” she said, explaining that the calculation multiplies the existing gap by 20 percent to produce a nearer-term, realistic annual target. The district is using the i-Ready tool and other common formative assessments to track growth. She said several grade levels posted double-digit gains on the district’s end-of-year reading measures; second grade, she noted, showed over a 10% increase in reading at grade level.
Tanya said two district elementary buildings outperformed state ELA proficiency by about 10 percentage points on recently released state results provided to the schools. She credited building leadership, teacher professional learning teams, reading specialists and coaching for those gains, while noting that results vary widely across buildings with different concentrations of poverty and special-education populations.
Attendance and chronic absenteeism remain priorities. Tanya said kindergarten attendance is the lowest in the district and chronic absenteeism increased instead of declining last year, complicating improvement goals. She described technology changes planned for fall — new phone systems to let teachers dial out and convert voice messages to email — aimed at improving communication with families and attendance follow-up. The district’s attendance task force will analyze data for patterns linked to transient families and homelessness.
Math remains an area of challenge districtwide; the superintendent said the state’s math proficiency benchmark is 53 percent and the district will compare its performance with other similar small-city districts and run baseline math analyses this fall.
Tanya also described tiered academic supports: checkpoint assessments, tier 2/tier 3 interventions, coaching for teachers and use of veteran teachers as coaches. She said the district will continue to emphasize professional learning teams and to articulate clearer tiered expectations and resources.
No formal action was taken; the district improvement plan and supporting material will be posted on the district website as a work in progress and will return to the board as staff refine targets and metrics.
