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IB costs at GCS examined
District superintendent presents cost breakdown of International Baccalaureate program to school board at March 2 meeting

Clara Beard/WGCN<br>
GCS Board president Clarinda Vail discusses the International Baccalaureate program with board members Pete Shearer, Bess Foster, Erin Noojibal and Katie Morris.

Clara Beard/WGCN<br> GCS Board president Clarinda Vail discusses the International Baccalaureate program with board members Pete Shearer, Bess Foster, Erin Noojibal and Katie Morris.

GRAND CANYON, Ariz. - Discussion continued last week regarding Grand Canyon School's (GCS) International Baccalaureate (IB) program. At their March 2 regular meeting, the GCS Board discussed costs associated with the program although no action was taken.

According to Grand Canyon School Superintendent Sharyl Allen, during a non-evaluation year fees total $15,070. The sum is broken up into estimated percentages, of which personnel is 58 percent, training and development is 9.8 percent, fees are 22 percent and school supplies are 1.2 percent.

As 2011 is an IB evaluation year, annual fees are 9 percent higher at 31 percent of the total cost.

Training and development should have a target of $10,000 annually committed to ongoing IB training for both primary years program (PYP) and middle years program (MYP), according to Allen. This includes attendance at conferences, school visitations and on-site school wide training.

The IB program requires school districts to employ a coordinators for the program. If the coordinators were eliminated, the district would need to have teachers on special assignment in order to comply with the increasing compliance load mandated by the federal and state government.

Allen wrote in documentation provided to school board members that IB program supervision is more than a superintendent and principal can manage, and the cost of IB personnel is in alignment with all other areas of the GCS budget.

At the meeting, questions arose regarding IB coordinators and leaders, with school board member Katie Morris asking what the difference is between the two positions. Allen said the coordinators concentrate on the curriculum process, supporting the curricular work around IB's framework.

"Your team leaders are your collaborators. So your coordinators are working on curriculum and another element of ideas is the facilitation of teacher collaboration. So that is where they will work with them and bring up issues and they work with their coordinators," Allen said. "That is part of that structure recommended by IB, and has worked well."

Discussion also raised questions regarding a past teacher training seminar that was located in Hawaii, asking if situations like that were necessary since travel costs are included in personnel training.

Allen explained there were no other options to choose when scheduling specific training sessions.

"It is the challenge that we face. The options were Florida, which was full, and it filled very quickly and the only other place that had the specific training necessary was Hawaii," she said. "There are training sessions all over the country, but sometimes the one you need is only in this destination and they are not necessarily all offered online."

Board member Bess Foster said online training has become more available recently, but does not always provide the training needed at certain points in a teacher's development.

"Some of that has become a little more recent because yes, IB is infamous for having their training be in very desirable locations, at very high-end hotels, and that has been an ongoing issue of mine to begin with," Foster said. "So even the ability to go online and to do any kind of training is relatively new with this whole IB thing."

IB will assign two external IB-approved evaluation teams that will visit the school in May. They will inspect whether the school is upholding the standards and integrity of the program's mission statement, looking across the board at all aspects of IB's implementation at the school.

According to Allen, the board is still working on how to evaluate the effectiveness of IB.

"I have been chewing on this quite extensively during those sleepless hours," she said. "You have some teachers that have taken this and fully implemented it in their classrooms. They have bought in. You have others that have resisted this, and not or half-heartedly implemented it. So if we started taking this and de-segregating the data from those who implement it in the classroom versus those who have not, it might be interesting to see the data of student achievement results."


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