Greenfield schools are once again at a pivotal point in their history, and the educational success of the children and adolescents in our city is dependent upon how you vote in the Nov. 2 election.
We not only have a new superintendent of schools, and a new assistant who is the first curriculum director we have had in years, but three of the six elected School Committee seats are up for election. Over the past few years the School Committee has not been responsive to parents, has not consistently worked collaboratively with the school administration, has not pushed for school practices that equally support persons of color or of lower economic class, and has not pushed for universal curricula across all schools that engages children in being effective learners and enjoying learning.
To put it bluntly, from those of us who regularly attend their meetings, the committee has been rather dysfunctional.
We can take a major step in undoing this dysfunction and creating a collaborative process leading to more effective schools by electing the three School Committee candidates who are running on a slate together because they share this goal. Two of them, Elizabeth DeNeeves and Katherine Martini, are parents with children enrolled in Greenfield schools who found the School Committee as not responsive to them or other parents and citizens. As they began to investigate the committee they found that School Committee member Glenn Johnson-Mussad had similar issues with the committee, but was having a hard time changing it from within. They agreed to join forces to work as a collaborative team to make major changes in the way the school committee works and interacts with parents, citizens, and the school administration.
Although a School Committee needs to be responsible for the overall budget allocated to the administration to run the schools, for the last few years meetings have gone on endlessly as certain members, one who is running again, have questioned the line-by-line spending of the district. Dealing with this minutia is the job of the business manager and the superintendent. This dysfunction has not allowed the School Committee to do their actual jobs of looking at the larger educational issues of certain curricular approaches, creating effective communication with and responsiveness to the community, fairly distributing students to each elementary school so that each school has equal representations of students from various backgrounds, and providing extensive staff development opportunities for our hard working teachers to better address the academic and emotional needs of their students.
Some members of the School Committee have also had a rather contentious working relationship with the school administration. This slate of candidates, DeNeeves, Martini and Johnson-Mussad, plan to work together to seize this rare opportunity of having a new superintendent and curriculum director to have the School Committee be the agents that create a new atmosphere of collaboration between administrators, parents, teachers, and school committee members.
With this cooperative working relationship we can take the Greenfield Public Schools to a new level of effectiveness, utilizing the most effective and engaging educational approaches. We can create schools that are so engaging that students who hear about them from their friends will ask their parents to include them.
As a lifetime professional educator, parent and citizen of Greenfield who has attended so many dysfunctional School Committee and sub-committee meetings I ask you to join me on Nov. 2 in taking the first step to make this a reality by electing the team of Elizabeth DeNeeves, Glenn Johnson-Mussad, and Kate Martini to the School Committee.
Paul Jablon lives in Greenfield.