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In Saybrook Schools, Trying on New Roles for a Year

Starting in August, two educational administrators known to parents and staff will be sitting in new interim seats for one year.

Amity Goss, once an elementary teacher at Goodwin Elementary School and more recently an interim school principal in the Colchester Public Schools, will step into a new leadership role in Old Saybrook. Goss was chosen recently by the Board of Education and Superintendent of Schools Jan Perruccio to serve as interim director of Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment for this next academic year.

The slot is vacant because the prior incumbent in that role, Heston Sutman, will move to Goodwin Elementary School for the current academic year to be the school’s interim principal.

The two moves were driven by an unexpected announcement in April that Goodwin School Principal Sheila Brown would retire at the end of that academic year. At that point in the academic year, most of the statewide hiring for the next academic year had occurred, so the Board of Education and Perruccio decided to wait and search for a permanent replacement during the next hiring season to ensure a large and highly qualified pool of applicants.

Moving Sutman to Goodwin School left the district with a key role in the district office staff that needed to be filled. To do this, the district conducted a search for a school administrator qualified and willing to serve for one year who also had knowledge of the Old Saybrook schools. They found that person in Goss.

The role is an important one since it oversees the district’s curriculum and review process, teacher training, and the student assessment process.

This next academic year will be the second in which the multi-state Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBAC) test will be the standard used throughout the state’s schools. This new group of grade-level tests replaces Connecticut’s prior tests known as the Connecticut Mastery Tests (CMTs for grades 3 through 8) and, for 10th-graders, the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT).

The new SBAC test assesses student mastery of common core standards for language and math for each grade level as set forth in the State of Connecticut Board of Education guidance documents.

(For more information on testing and curriculum as applied in Old Saybrook, the school district website www.oldsaybrookschools.org posts for each grade level the Essential Curriculum to be mastered and taught as well as a presentation on the CT Common Core of Teaching Rubric for Effective Teaching 2014, and a video on the SBAC narrated by two district students.)