School District Re-posts Music Survey

Wall School District officials late Thursday for a second time posted on its website a parent survey asking whether music instruction at the should be moved to either a before- or after-school session.

The move, which also includes a post of the district’s presentation given in public meetings earlier this week, is the latest in a series of steps the district has taken to garner support for .

The school, along with Wall High School, has been designated a “School In Need Of Improvement,’’ by the state Department of Education -- a designation given to schools that fail to make progress on standardized tests for two or more consecutive years.

The district is proposing expanding to 80 minutes each the language and mathematics instruction in grades six and seven for the upcoming school year. Eighth grade students would have their math and language instruction bumped up to 60 minutes each.

. Pupils enrolled in music would also be pulled from gym class once a week and could opt to cut short their 40-minute lunch period for music practice, administrators have said.

The district on and held public meetings to discuss the scheduling plans, which were first brought to the public’s attention not by the district but by an email from a district parent. That email .

At , which was held in the Intermediate School auditorium at 9 a.m., district officials faced an occasionally hostile crowd that was calmed mainly by a short speech by Wall High School Music teacher Leslie Hollander, who said of the two choices, the music teachers agreed that a before-school option would be best for the continuation of the music program, which include band, orchestra and chorus.

That apparently changed the minds of many at the meeting, who showed support for the before-school option by an impromptu straw poll near the conclusion of the 2 ½-hour session.

The crowd of about 50 at was more amiable, with several parents praising the district’s efforts to improve testing stature at the Intermediate School, even if it was inconvenient to some students.

At that meeting MaryJane Garibay, district curriculum director, said the district's entire curriculum was being revised to address, among other things, the school's lagging test scores.

It was unclear as of Thursday night what the Board of Education's position is on the proposed schedule changes at the Intermediate School. No formal statement or comment has been released.

It is also unclear how much information the school board has had the reported wholesale change in curriculum. A review of the board's meeting recordings in 2012 reveal no information on the curriculum changes from the panel's Curriculum Committee.