Thursday, October 1, 2026
Oyster Bay-East Norwich school officials presented a wide-ranging update on curriculum, instruction and assessments at the Board of Education’s Dec. 1 meeting, outlining progress on summer curriculum, student performance, expanded middle school programming and new initiatives tied to national academic milestones.
The presentation, delivered by Patrick Harrigan, the district’s executive director for curriculum and instruction, focused on aligning academic programs with state standards, improving participation in assessments, strengthening advanced coursework and supporting teachers with expanded professional development.
Harrigan said the district intends to align curriculum, assessments and long-term strategic planning. State exam participation remains a priority, he said, because higher participation correlates with better long-term achievement.
“We’re proud to say we have a higher participation rate across the board than Nassau County, but we do still want to engage with parents,” Harrigan said. “Kids who participate in the exam … correlate with higher Regents exams.”
He noted that officials analyze state assessment data in several ways: comparing each grade’s results with those in the students’ prior year, comparing year-to-year cohorts at the same grade level and comparing performance with Nassau County averages.
“You can see grades four, five, six and seven outperforming each metric,” he said.
Harrigan also highlighted diagnostic assessments given three times a year beginning in kindergarten, explaining that most students start out in the “yellow” performance tier but adding that “the focus is on improvement.”
Regents exam data, he said, remains important both for graduation requirements and for measuring college readiness, although participation rates in some assessments fluctuated across the district.
He also reviewed participation in Advanced Placement courses. Some AP enrollment dipped slightly, which he attributed in part to smaller class sizes and student choices. But even with those shifts, he said, the breadth of offerings remains a point of pride at Oyster Bay High School.
“For a smaller high school, the wide range of offerings is terrific,” Harrigan said. “It’s really great to have so many options.”
Oyster Bay’s performance on AP exams remains strong, particularly in physics, where, he said, 83 percent of test takers scored above the national average. And “not a single student,” he added, recorded the lowest possible score of 1 out of 5 on an AP test.
Harrigan told the board that the College Board has not yet issued its annual AP Honor Roll, but noted that two of the district’s three subcommittees were at the platinum level, the college board’s highest category. The high school also received an AP Access Award for underrepresented student groups’ participation.
The update then turned to curriculum writing, which is undertaken each summer. Harrigan thanked the board for funding the work, saying that “a school district budget is a statement of your priorities.” Summer projects ranged from elementary health class curriculum to programming for students with disabilities and preparation for both Regents and AP exams.
One of the most notable curriculum projects involved alignment of instruction across grade levels for the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Harrigan described teachers from kindergarten through high school collaborating on lessons ranging from how the United States was created to comparative studies of historical documents. The collaboration, he said, produced “some really engaging lessons for this year.”
He also highlighted new middle school programming, including the extension of the Atlantis humanities program to seventh grade and expanded competitive math opportunities.
“We’re trying to increase the rigor year in middle school,” he said, referring to making seventh grade an opportunity for students to take more challenging courses. “We’re seeing great results.”
Harrigan concluded with an overview of the superintendent’s conference day on Nov. 4, when the district focused on mental health support, including emphasizing faculty mental health first aid training. He cited statistics on the high rate of youth suicide across the nation, and emphasized that having teachers trained in mental health services can save lives.
Before turning the floor over to Harrigan, administrators addressed several follow-up items from previous meetings, including ongoing community questions about old banners previously displayed in the high school gym. Superintendent Francesco Ianni said the banners “are in a safe place. They’re not going anywhere,” and added that the district was collecting community feedback on what the district should do with the banners through a survey.
“We are asking the community to fill out a survey, and the link has been posted, has been emailed to their home,” Ianni said. “We’re not destroying them.”
He also clarified community questions about $2.9 million in bond anticipation note payments.
The payments did not require a separate public vote, Ianni said, because “when the community approved the bond in 2021, that vote also approved the taxes needed to pay back the borrowing over many years.” He added that payments were made from the district’s regular debt service line and totaled “approximately $1.5 million the first year, $800,000 the second year and $600,000 the following year.”
