Will The Board Of Education Address Intermediate School Plans?

The Board of Education is scheduled to hold its regular meeting Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Intermediate School.

It was unclear early Monday if the board planned to address the proposed changes being considered by the administration to the Intermediate School schedule. No agenda for the meeting had been posted by 9 a.m. Monday.

Although several members of the board, including its President John Tavis, attended at least one of the two meetings held last week to address the changes, there has been no formal statement from the board on the proposal, which would bump at least one classroom session for music students each week while extending math and language instruction at the Intermediate School.

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.