The new Evanston/Skokie District 65 School Superintendent Paul Goren will be a special guest tonight at a meeting of parents who formed their own group, called Math Matters, whose sole purpose is to help improve the program of mathematics instruction in the district’s schools.
The meeting will be held from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in the Community Meeting Room of the Evanston Public Library at Church Street and Orrington Avenue.
At its April 25 meeting, the District 65 Board discussed a memo from the administration outlining new procedures the district was implementing in placing students in math classes.
Following the meeting, members of the Math Matters group submitted to the administration their own review of the memo and requested a meeting between parents and the administration to discuss the relevant issues.
All of this occurred just before Superintendent Goren assumed his post on May 19. Therefore, it is expected that he will respond to many of the parents’ concerns at tonight’s meeting.
Parents who addressed the board during the public-comment portion of the April 25 meeting expressed concern about the fate of students whose comprehension of math concepts was so far ahead of the class that they were turned off by the classwork.
Others, however, were concerned about how the district would deal with students at the other end of the spectrum who had difficulty comprehending basic math concepts and felt lost in coping with class assignments.
Thus, the agenda for tonight’s meeting with the superintendent that lists “issues parents care about” specifically mentions differentiation within the classroom as well as grade-skipping and acceleration procedures.
Earlier story:
