Millbrook Unified has hired Priya Raghunathan as a district-wide mathematics coach, restoring a position that was cut in 2016 and has not existed since.
Raghunathan comes from a district near Ashford, where she spent seven years as a middle school teacher and three as a coach. She starts September 15 and will split her week across the four elementary buildings and the middle school.
A coach is not a tutor
The job is working with teachers, not students. Raghunathan will sit in on lessons, model them, and meet with grade-level teams to look at what students actually got wrong on a given unit — a role the district has essentially not had for a decade.
“Most elementary teachers are not math specialists, and they are not supposed to be,” Raghunathan said. “They teach six subjects. My job is to make the math part of the week less lonely.”
You can hand a teacher a new curriculum in August and by October they are teaching it the way they taught the old one, because nobody has been in the room with them.
Priya Raghunathan
The numbers behind the hire
Millbrook’s math proficiency has sat between 44 and 49 percent for six years while reading has moved up sharply. Board members have raised the gap at nearly every meeting since the spring scores came out in June.
The position costs $92,000 including benefits and is funded from the general fund, not a grant — a deliberate choice, Superintendent Marcus Feld said, so it does not disappear when outside money does.