Mansfield School Budget Breakdown Part 2: Qualters

has requested an additional $45,000 for a Response to Intervention Specialist for MCAS and RTI support for all QMS students for their budget this year after level services from the School Committee.

The position made it to the top for the fiscal year 2012-2013 budget, as put together by all the schools’ administrators.

Response to intervention is a term to describe the way in which a school helps improve MCAS scores for students who are struggling in certain areas. Providing adequate RTI services is currently a goal in the school’s strategic improvement plan.

“We are really struggling with this aspect of RTI [goals],” said QMS principal Zeffro Gianetti. “We have a support team that’s up and running. We’ve made great strides, but we’re struggling as a building with providing those additional supports for students who are at risk."

Gianetti said that the problem currently is there are just not enough people in the building to accommodate every student.

“We just don’t have the staff in the building,” he said. “We have some of the capacity to schedule with the academic support block, but we just don’t have the staff. This position is critical to moving forward with our strategic improvement plan.”

Gianetti added that this has been a chief concern among parents, and they ask him what options there are for students who are at risk.

“They ask me what are we doing in this building to provide supports for those students?” he said. “I don’t have a whole lot to offer because our support really is thinning. We just don’t have the staff or the resources to do some of the intensive small-group interventions with our general ed population that struggles academically.”

QMS has also put forth other considerations for the school committee that did not make the top ten, including a paraprofessional, RTI tutors, a reading teacher, an adjustment counselor, an occupational therapist, lunch room monitors, and two foreign language teachers. These positions are all in the school’s strategic plan and will be requested again in the next budget season(s), but were not considered an immediate priority for the school.

“They’re all important, they’re all significant, but when we had to tear it down administratively to our top ten, that [RTI Specialist position] was the key position there,” Gianetti said.