Faced with a “bit of an urgent situation,” Kyle Kinoshita talked Sept. 15 of how a Marysville School District grade school is going to be using that state’s curriculum – because it closely aligns with ours.

Kinoshita, the district’s executive director of learning and teaching, said other advantages are it is free, and there is a lot of background material.

“It’s overwhelming to look at all of the material,” he said at the work session.

The curriculum was written by teachers and includes professional development videos for teachers. Quil Ceda-Tulalip elementary will use the math pilot program for a year. The district was basically forced to make the move.

“We have standards. We have accountability. But we have no curriculum,” Kinoshita said.

The state has mandated schools to meet Common Core standards but not provided direction on how to get there.

Briana Conway, a fifth-grade teacher at Quil Ceda-Tulalip, said the curriculum has been a great success so far, both with teachers and the students.

“They are talking about math without being told to,” the fourth-year teacher said.

Rather than just learning math procedures, the students use place-value charts and story problems the help them better understand what the numbers mean.

“It’s more rigorous and requires deeper thinking about numbers,” she said.

As a result, they are understanding math better and building confidence. Even if they don’t master the standard, they at least understand the concept enough to build on, Conway said. Students that fall behind for whatever reason can be put into small groups to catch up.

Just like some other subjects, math is now one where students can talk and learn from each other.

“It requires conversations about math,” she said.

Back at the school board work session, director Chris Nation asked “why are we jumping on the bandwagon when we don’t even know if this (curriculum) works?” By next year new requirements or new curriculum could be developed that is better.

He was told the district is required to take action now because schools have not met past standards.

“This is temporary, and we don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on textbooks,” Kinoshita said.

The only cost will be in printing the online materials.

Director Pete Lundgren hinted that even those costs could be minimized as the district moves to students working more online.

“That would be the hope,” Kinoshita said.

Nation said the Quil Ceda teachers will be able to share information with others next year if the district decides to use the curriculum elsewhere.

“Even though it’s temporary it’s not a waste of time because the teachers have to learn this (Common Core) anyway,” Kinoshita said. “They will have to be able to look at any curriculum and say, ‘Oh, I see that standard.'”

Superintendent Becky Berg said Quilc Ceda is the perfect school for this.

“It’s a very action-oriented school,” she said.

Also at Monday’s work session, the board discussed Homeroom 2.0, a computer program that is new this year to all schools. Cinco Delgado, another executive director of learning and teaching, said the program gives teachers a road map of data about students. The user-friendly program tells teachers how well students are doing. They can find out if a student needs help in a certain area.

“You can’t make a decision without data,” Delgado said. Teacher “questions can be customized to meet the needs of students.”

The data will encourage conversations between teachers and principals, Delgado said.

Lundgren said his problem with it is it can’t measure potential. There are other programs the district has to measure that.

“Can’t they get married” at some point? Lundgren asked.