Annual Town Easter Egg Hunt Postponed to Saturday, March 30
Due to the weather forecast of 100 percent chance of wintry Yuck, the Easter Egg hunt at the Winchendon Community Park will take place on Saturday, March 30 at 11:00 a.m.
Students Helping Students - Post-Graduate ALL Class Helps Keep Food Pantry and Clothing Loft Running
The Murdock Food Pantry. The items on the window shelf were donated by school staff.
Photo by Inanna Arthen
The hard-working crew: Nathan, Caden and Deyshon in the Clothing Loft
Photo by Inanna Arthen
When students at Murdock Middle High School and their families need a helping hand, the high school's Food Pantry and Clothing Loft are there for them. Supported by donations and supervised by staff, the Food Pantry and Clothing Loft couldn't keep running without the hard work put in by the post-graduate (age 18-22) ALL (Alternative Lifelong Learning) life skills class taught by Erica Lindsey ("Miss Erica" to her students) and Sharon Murphy. Assisting with organization, shopping and distribution, the student team--Nathan, Caden and Deyshon--learn and practice vital skills they can use in work situations after they leave the school system at age 22.
Cindy Lou Rivers, Community Health Worker for the school district, invited the Courier in to see how the food and clothing services operate, and meet the students and staff who keep them going--week after week throughout the school year.
The Food Pantry uses careful organization to make full use of a very small space. "It's a big challenge keeping it sustainable," Ms. Rivers said. Everything has its own labeled shelf or drawer in cabinets lining three sides of the room. The pantry stocks and distributes shelf-stable food such as pasta, canned vegetables and soup, cereal, peanut butter, tuna, canned meat, dried fruit, pudding, rice, stuffing mix, and many similar items. Sometimes the pantry receives bulk donations of food, but the students and staff often shop for food using grant money or donated funds or gift cards.
In addition to edibles, the pantry stocks cleaning supplies and personal hygiene products, including things like toothpaste and shampoo, but also feminine hygiene products, a category of necessity often overlooked.
The pantry distributes an average of ten large shopping bags per week, Ms. Rivers said. Students whose families could use some extra food need only ask. No assumptions are ever made, but a staff person in a private conversation with a student may gently ask if the family would like a bag. The service is absolutely confidential for the students. Bags are coded with stickers--no names--and placed in a location in the building, such as the main office, to be picked up, so no student has to visit the food pantry openly. The end of the month is often the hardest time for families, Ms. Rivers said.
The post-grad ALL class students began helping out last year. They take the order forms, fill the bags according to order, go shopping with staff, sort and put away donations and purchases, and keep the shelves and drawers organized and neat.
Ms. Rivers said that Walmart has donated $50 gift cards. Winchendon's United Parish has donated gift cards, $180 for Thanksgiving baskets for twelve families, and food. The congregation has offered so much assistance, Ms. Rivers said, that they were recently invited to visit the school to see how much their contributions have done, and to receive their thanks warmly and in person.
At the end of the school year, all the food products must be distributed, and then new stock must be ready for the start of the new school year in the fall. This involves additional strategizing to make sure nothing is wasted, while at the same time, student needs at the beginning of the year can be met.
The ALL class team works just as hard on the "Clothing Loft," as it's been named, where donated and gently used clothing of all kinds is carefully organized on racks in a larger room than the Food Pantry occupies.
Clothes are tagged and arranged by category and size. There are winter coats, casual and dress pants, dresses and skirts, shirts and tops, summer clothing in its own cabinet, belts and knapsacks, socks and underwear. The Clothing Loft even has some pillows and blankets to give out.
The post-grad ALL Class team helps in this space, as well. Working with large amounts of clothes requires particular skill sets--the students learn to zip and unzip, button and unbutton clothing of all kinds and styles, fold items, place items on hangers, and keep them in order by size and type. They assist in laundering new donations, using laundry machines located in the Middle School.
The clothing comes from various sources--donations of brand new clothing, clothes left in "lost and found" and never claimed, and donations of second-hand items. Staff told the Courier that they recently realized they needed to include smaller sizes of clothing for the younger students just starting at Murdock. As with the Food Pantry, students seeking clothing need only ask a staff person in confidence. Donations of appropriate clothing are welcome--contact Ms. Rivers for information about what is needed and how to get it to the Loft.
The Courier visited the students in their classroom. The post-grad ALL classroom is a microcosm of potential job and home environments. A former Home Ec classroom, it includes a range, oven, and sink. A dishwasher was added recently. On one side of the classroom shelves are set up as a mini-grocery store with empty food packages and a check-out space, so students can become familiar with how a store works, and how to check out and bag groceries. A folding bed helps students practice making up beds with linens and blankets--a valuable skill at home as well as for potential housekeeping jobs in the hospitality industry or residential services. The students learn to cook and bake. Some of their baked creations are sold at the youth-run Sunshine Café at the Winchendon Community Center.
It's not all work and no play, though! Students also make crafts in celebration of holidays, decorate their room, and participate in projects like the school's annual sock drive for World Down Syndrome Awareness Day.
The Murdock High School Sociology and Citizenship class taught by Mrs. Frye works regularly with the ALL classes, collaborating with the students on projects and goals.
Recently, the post-grad ALL students began volunteering at the Old Murdock Senior Center, where new Director Miranda Jennings has found an endless variety of projects and tasks for them to work on, calling them the "Murdock Community Crew" or MCC. The students are gaining experience in interacting with older people as well as those of their own age, and learning new responsibilities as they help serve the seniors' daily lunch and clean the building to a sparkle.
The Food Pantry is always in need of donations. Especially needed are shelf-stable, healthy staple foods, protein sources (canned meat, peanut butter, tuna, beans, and so on), cereal, soups, canned vegetables and fruit and canned entree items and similar foods. Also needed are home cleaning products, personal hygiene products and toiletry items. To find out what's most needed, and other ways you can help, contact Cindy Lou Rivers at 978-297-5052 from 6:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on school days. Ms. Rivers is also the Administrative Assistant for the Murdock Health Center located in the High School.
Murdock HS Principal Talks about Attendance Issues
At the School Committee meeting on March 7, the Committee heard from Murdock High School Interim Principal Dave Fredette about concerns with attendance by high school students and its impact on academic achievement. These are issues that the administration is "laser laser laser focused on," he told the Committee.
"Currently, our current enrollment is 245 students. Our average daily attendance is 79 percent. Our chronic absenteeism is 67 percent," Mr. Fredette said. "This includes tardies, excused, and unexcused absences, which I find a lot of people don't know the difference between the two. Obviously, an excused absence is something that has allowed the student to go to a doctor's appointment and things like that. But it still counts as an absence."
Mr. Fredette said this had to be compared to the school's academic progress. "Our star reading current growth percentile data shows that we're at 68 percent. And our student growth percentiles is 68 percent. Our school goal was 65. So there is some positive there. However, as Dr. Goguen pointed out, math is another story entirely. We are 53 percent student growth percentile [in math] compared to our school goal, which is 65 percent."
The student class failure rate could be looked at two ways, Mr. Fredette said. "One in a positive way is that 63 percent of our students did not fail a class. However, 14 percent failed one class and 23 percent of students failed two or more classes. For quarter two, zero failures for 56 percent of our students. [Failing] one class was 20 percent and failing two or more classes for quarter two is 24 percent of students."
Mr. Fredette said that there are two sets of factors affecting student failure rates--teacher factors, which are more controllable, and student factors. With teacher factors, the school can look at assessment, quality of instruction, student engagement, learning methods that are targeted for different kinds of learners, parental involvement, and feedback cycles. There is "a need to design lessons which are more engaging and interactive, as well as making learning and the objectives clear...asking for more deeper cognitive lifting from our students," he said.
"The student factor focused on what was within the student level of control: attendance and effort," Mr. Fredrette went on. "What we found is that the 58 percent of students failing one or more courses in quarter two are also classified as chronically absent. And this shouldn't be a real surprise. Essentially, what it boils down to is students who are not attending school are missing valuable class time and lessons." The school's first priority here is to get the students into school, and on time.
"The second priority is to hold students accountable, and provide them with opportunities to be successful," Mr. Fredette said. "Students who readily identify themselves as lacking motivation and incentive were quite numerous. This was a self reporting scale one of our teachers provided for our students and it was quite eye-opening. These are the students whose failures can be tied to a lack of work completion." The students can do the work, but are choosing not to, or are not provided the opportunities needed to complete their work.
Mr. Fredette emphasized that the school now has a full team on board--Principal, assistant principal, adjustment counselor, guidance counselors, school nurse, school resource officers--for the first time in over a year. A great deal is being done to address the attendance and failure rate issues.
Changes include a student support team, and a new bullying/harassment reporting system which is anonymous. "If you see something, say something," Mr. Fredette put it--there will be visible information with a QR code for students to report things that concern them so that the administration can investigate and take steps to correct the issues.
There has been some improvement in the absenteeism rate, Mr. Fredette said. The district has been funded $10,000 by the Department of Elementary and Secondary education (DESE) specifically to work on a plan to reduce chronic absenteeism, starting at the high school level.
School Committee member Adam LeBlanc said, "how are the principals going to wake up somebody who is pretending to sleep? Someone's just gonna fake through the fog. How are you going to challenge them to come and show up or how are you going to hold them accountable? We're putting $10,000 out there to help with this situation. But at the end of the day, what are we doing to hold not only the student accountable, but the parent accountable for a student who's supposed to be at school?"
Mr. Fredette said there are a lot of things that could be done. "There are letters that are sent home, five day letter, ten day letter, fifteen day letter, reminding parents of their obligation, especially the students under 16." He went on, "Not that it's something that necessarily we would want to go down that road, but unfortunately if it's parents', guardians' responsibility to make sure that students are in school, and if they are shown to be getting in the way of a student's education, and they are the ones who are responsible for not getting their students to school, then there are there are legal routes that we can take and we will need to take."
But the best thing is to encourage students to get into the building and then fully engage them with an interactive curriculum shaped to their needs and desires, so the students want to be there. "That's why it's important for us, as we did before, to develop that program of study. That is going to be something that really engages our students whether it's a hands-on, but we're also looking at--and this is going a little bit further down the road, but we're also looking at career pathways as well, and how do we develop those pathways for students who are maybe not necessarily thinking about college as a next step, but the workforce as well, and how do we engage those students."
Committee member Anthony Findley asked whether the letters have any kind of receipt showing they were received. Mr. Fredette said at 10 days of consecutive absence, a certified letter is sent, but before that point, letters ask parents if they can meet with school staff, or call to discuss what might be keeping the student out of school. If there is no response from the parent, Resource Office Flagg may visit the student's home. "We've done a bunch of [home visits] this year already, and there's more to come, as well," Mr. Fredette said. The school does try to follow up with phone calls, especially when absences are consecutive. Sometimes a family has moved and not yet requested records and transcripts for their new school system.
Committee member Jake Caitlin asked what normal attendance numbers should be, and how the district compares to the state average.
Mr. Fredette said that he didn't have those numbers at hand, but typically, elementary schools have about 90 percent attendance. Town Town and Memorial Elementary are "hovering around 93-94 percent or so...we were ecstatic when we had 94 percent so that's a good barometer for elementary schools." The attendance numbers go down as students get older.
Committee Chair Karen Kast said, "This is quite concerning. I guess my frustration kind of echoes along with Adam. My concern is that we're not doing truancy visits even sooner. So maybe we'll come to that. Like how soon are we doing them?" She asked how the raw numbers break down by five minutes late, three hours late, completely absent and so on.
Mr. Fredette said, "I would be interested in that myself, because I can tell you that I've positioned myself at the door at 7:30 and as soon as that bell rings that door is shutting. And I would say there's a good charge of about 20 students past with all of their Dunkin Donuts cups in their hands, flying into the building...I can't speak to the practices before me, but I can say there was a little bit looser as far as students being allowed in the building at 7:35, 7:40. And it's like, no, we're not doing that. So there's been some changes, some tightening of things." He went on, "There are consequences for students who are tardy, not just intrinsic consequences, but there's some punitive pieces too for students who are habitually tardy, but again, those are all part of the process."
Ms. Kast noted that the schools can't always know what's going on in the home or what a family may have going on that contributes to absenteeism or tardiness. Mr. Fredette agreed, saying "we never approach this from a punitive standpoint." It's about understanding why the student isn't attending or on time and what the school might be able to do to help.
Backyard Poultry Raising Seminar March 26
Horse & Buggy Feeds, the American Legion and Blue Seal Feeds will co-host a backyard poultry-raising seminar on Tuesday, March 26 at 6:00 p.m. at the Winchendon American Legion Post 193, 295 School St. Speakers will be Jason Harris from Blue Seal Feeds and Walter Anair of Horse & Buggy Feeds.
Learn what you need to know about raising chickens! Bring your questions and learn from the experts. There will be valuable coupons available, and door prizes.
To RSVP, call 603-352-0328 or 978-297-2518, or email horseandbuggyfeeds@gmail.com.
