HOWELL – The local schools are once again a high performing school district in every area evaluated by the state, according to superintendent Dr. Joseph Isola, who discussed the outcomes of the New Jersey Quality Single Accountability Continuum (NJQSAC), which is a monitoring and district self-evaluation system for public school districts in the state.
During a recent Howell Township Public Schools Board of Education meeting, Isola said that during the 2024 cycle of the NJQSAC, the District fell short in one of the five areas of evaluation for the first time ever, as they fell below the necessary score of 80 in the category labeled Instruction and Program.
While Isola mentioned that the district passed the other categories with room to spare that year, he also talked about his initial disappointment at the results the district got that go around.
According to the state’s website, Instruction and Program indicators are used to assess a school district’s performance and capacity in instruction and student performance. The components of Instruction and Program include a school district meeting the state’s measure of academic progress and graduation rate, state assessment results and the analysis of the results to improve teaching and learning, curriculum alignment with the New Jersey Student Learning Standards (NJSLS), instruction in the NJSLS, continuous improvement of curriculum and instruction, equitable access to the NJSLS, and tiered supports for all students. Schools that fall short of these requirements are labeled as “in need of improvement.”
Upon further research into the process and how they were evaluating school success, Isola saw something that he believed was a flaw in the evaluation process. In an opinion article he wrote to NJ Spotlight News, Isola claimed that one of the key problems with NJQSAC scoring is inequitable weighting of categories that disproportionately affects low-income, high-diversity districts with many multilingual learners due to the fact that a single student may be included in several subgroups allowing that student’s test performance to be counted multiple times. According to Isola, this unfairly skews results and perpetuates a false narrative.
In response, he galvanized other school leaders from across the state to change the process. They were successful in changing the process and due to a combination of those changes, and improvement by the students in the classroom, Howell is now considered a high performing school district in every area once again.
Later on in the meeting, the board discussed the possibility of making public comment periods in-person only. Right now, the board gives time during the second public comment period to read public comments submitted by email, which was put in place during COVID. They discussed the possibility of ending that and returning to the pre-COVID in-person only style of public comments. After some deliberation, the board postponed that conversation until an unknown date with Board President Jennifer Okerson stating she would like to end it by June 30 if that is what they decided to do. This does not mean that board members cannot be contacted with issues via email, it just means that comments made via email will not be read aloud during the public comment portions of the monthly meetings.
The next board meeting will be on May 6. It is at this meeting that the board is expected to vote on the final budget for the upcoming school year.
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