School system hits the Web social networks

As Published in the Record Journal Sunday May 30, 2010

By Samaia Hernandez
Record-Journal staff
shernandez@record-journal.com
(203) 317-2266

Follow all the news directly on the Record Journal Website for the most up to date information. www.myrecordjournal.com

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WALLINGFORD — Miss the school board’s new assistant principal appointments? Wondering if the next Board of Education meeting will be held at Sheehan High School or across town at the new Vernon E. Cleaves Vocational Agricultural Center?

Now there’s a place where Web savvy parents and residents with an interest in the town’s public schools can receive instant notifications from administration: Twitter.

“The goal would be to gradually expand the use of it, but right now we’re using it as a way to communicate with parents,” School Superintendent Salvatore Menzo said of the “WallingfordPS,” account on Twitter.

Last month information technology teacher Robert Kovi and system Director Randall Backus joined forces with Menzo to bring Wallingford public schools to the social networking site where followers can opt to receive instant text messages on their cellular phones.

As of Thursday 29, people were signed on as followers. Residents may also sign-up from a link on the school system’s website at: www.walllingford.k12.ct.us.

“Eric Carbone appointed Assistant Principal of Dag Middle School at 5/24/10 BOE meeting,” reads the latest post or tweet updated Wednesday. Other messages vary from links to reports and surveys to notices of special meetings. “Cindy Lavalette appointed Assistant Principal of Lyman Hall,” reads the second most recent tweet.

While the school system moves forward with plans to revamp its elementary school system for the fall, Twitter will be used as one of several ways to keep parents in the loop. Email, public access television, newsletters and the district’s website will function as communication channels during the reconfiguration process, which Menzo is calling a, “Grand Re-Opening” of the town’s elementary schools on Aug. 31.

The system is also planning a re-launch of its website this fall with expanded features such as online school registration.

“We also have a couple of people who are investigating the use of Facebook as a means of communicating with parents,” Menzo said. “We have some very progressive staff members.”

One such member’s office is located in the same building as administration.

Before central office caught wind of tweeting as a way to reach local families, Sheehan’s Athletic Director V.J. Sarullo was already busy using Twitter and Facebook for sports announcements.

As far as the department is concerned, the Twitter account, “MTSAthletics” and new Facebook group “Sheehan Athletics” are still getting off the ground with officials sending instant messages from their cellular phones of canceled games. Next fall Sarullo is hoping to expand coverage on both sites to include instant game results, awards night and other topics that relate to any of the school’s 22 teams.

“Things change up to the minute,” Sarullo said. “This way people will get the info a lot quicker.”

Lyman Hall High School is also on Facebook with 87 followers to date and the school’s Key Club is actively using Twitter.

 

From Jason Zandri – You can view / save the RSS feed of WallingfordPS’ tweets at RSS feed of WallingfordPS's tweets

Paradise and Paradise Lost

As Published in the Record Journal Sunday May 30, 2010

Talk about it online

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By John Bau

I’m John Bau. I have a daughter at Dag Hammarskjold Middle School, a son at Moses Y. Beach Elementary School, and another who will be at MYB in just a few years. I’m not originally from Wallingford, but I got here just as quickly as I could.

Over the past several months, I’ve uttered these words— or something similar — as I’ve stood up to speak at countless meetings, forums, and ‘focus groups’ as Wallingford has examined the reconfiguration of its eight elementary schools. I always thought it provided a good, quick synopsis of the origins of my point of view. I’m a dad who loves his family and is proud to have chosen Wallingford as his home. I grew up in a 1970s development of cookie-cutter homes in Virginia. When I bought my first home in North Carolina after college, I chose a brand-new house in a neighborhood of cookie-cutter homes. I figured, isn’t that how everyone lives in our modern society?

When I took a job that moved me to Connecticut in 2001, I was charmed by the state’s ancient hamlets anchored by historic neighborhoods clustered around storied town greens or quaint central business districts. Having a lifelong love affair with our great nation, its history, and even two summers under my belt leading tourists through military drills as a “sergeant” in Colonial Williamsburg, I believed that towns like Guilford or Chester only survived in the movies. When I saw the home prices in those towns, I learned that I needed to be a movie star to afford to live there.

Then I found Wallingford.

Founded in 1670(!), Wallingford featured a recently-revitalized downtown with shops, restaurants, Victorian streetlights, and more. It was comparatively affordable and — miracle! — I was able to scrape together enough to buy a small, charming (if rundown) home tucked in between the public library and the elementary school right on Main Street. Who knew that places like this still existed?

I worked hard on that house and it became a little gem. We could walk to the school, walk to shops, and generally live a life that was otherwise consigned to textbooks and storybooks.

When life changes forced me to sell that home, I settled on a ramshackle house one block off Main Street. I was still downtown, and my children would not have to change schools; they could continue to walk to Moses Y. Beach, to church, to the YMCA. This new neighborhood was not quite as polished as Main Street, but is still a place where folks — rather than hunkering down on private backyard decks behind tall vinyl fences — sit on their front porches and talk to each other, chat with passersby, and generally engage with their community. Wallingford as Mayberry, if you will. And my family gets to live here.

Paradise.

The reconfiguration of Wallingford’s eight community based elementary schools into four pairs of K-2, 3-5 partner schools is not a patently bad idea. It helps to ease some of the disparities in class sizes that our town’s ridiculous and ridiculously-outdated school districts have long assured. Like middle schools, high schools, and industrial monoculture farming, it allows for certain efficiencies and economies of scale that arise when you conduct more of any single process — be it fifth grade or growing soybeans — in one place. It lets my seven-year-old ride a bus to school instead of a bicycle. It might even save our town $199,149. I get it. I really, really do. I shall embrace it and support my children and their schools because I’m a dad and that’s my job. Reconfiguration is good.

But in the process, it takes one more swipe at a fabled way of life in our proud nation. And it takes one more step toward making Wallingford into just another suburban zip code.

Paradise lost, anyone?

FROM WALLINGFORD - Memorial Day

This week’s FROM WALLINGFORD is written by my counterpart on the column - Stephen Knight

As Published in the Record Journal Sunday May 30, 2010

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Tomorrow is Memorial Day, a day set aside to honor those who sacrificed their lives in the service of our country. Over the years, while the day has lost some of its solemnity, it has somewhat evolved into a second Veterans Day, where we not only honor those no longer with us but extend gratitude to those who are. This is entirely appropriate, and, to that end, I would like to excerpt a speech I gave on Veterans Day of 2007: “We are the most fortunate, the most blessed people on earth. We live in the United States of America. I have never been able to say United States of America without thinking what incredible good fortune that is. Never in human history has there been a society of such astonishing opportunity, of such unparalleled freedom and such breathtaking abundance as what we enjoy here. And the bedrock, the foundation of all that makes America great is the essential goodness, dignity and generosity of the American people.”

“We are here today to honor and thank the finest examples of those traits: those citizens among us who have answered the call and continue to answer the call to serve in the armed forces of the United States. From Valley Forge to Lake Champlain to Gettysburg to Verdun to Normandy to the Chosin Reservoir to Hue to Kuwait to Bagdhad to Kandahar and countless other places in the world, the American soldier has stood and defended this country with honor and distinction, first with the ferocity and determination to win the battle and then the kindness and compassion to win the hearts and minds of those they have liberated. They have always conducted themselves under the rules of international law and those of common humanity, and have been quick to condemn those incredibly few within their ranks who would stain that record of honor. And in their service, the American veteran — whether protecting the freedom of hundreds of millions of human beings in peacetime or liberating many hundreds of millions from tyranny and enslavement in wartime, has been a positive force throughout the world and has brought credit to this country.”

“But there is one special trait that, in my mind, makes the American soldier, sailor or airman an almost unique figure in the history of conflict. In almost every armed conflict you can name, one side was pursuing conquest and the other side was defending itself from that subjugation or annihilation. The defenders had a personal stake in the outcome, that oftentimes being survival itself.”

“But if you examine the history of the wars in which America has been involved, especially those in the 20th and 21st century, you see our involvement not only to protect the security and interests of the United States but in a larger sense to defend the concept that liberty and freedom are a basic right of all of humanity. To have risked their lives in defense of this high ideal and not just the protection of their homeland puts the US military men and women in a category unique to human history.”

“Let me give you a quote to illustrate my point from Nicholas Sarkozy, the president of France, speaking to our Congress [on November 8, 2007], ‘…America did not teach men the idea of freedom; she taught them how to practice it. And she fought for this freedom whenever she felt it to be threatened somewhere in the world. It was by watching America grow that men and women understood that freedom was possible.”

“What made America great was her ability to transform her own dream into hope for all mankind.”

“The men and women of my generation heard their grandparents talk about how in 1917, America saved France at a time when it had reached the final limits of its strengths, which it had exhausted in the most absurd and bloodiest of wars.”

“The men and women of my generation heard their parents talk about how in 1944, America returned to free Europe from the horrifying tyranny that threatened to enslave it.”

“Fathers took their sons to see the vast cemeteries where, under thousands of white crosses so far from home, thousands of young Americans lay who had fallen not to defend their own freedom but the freedom of all others, not to defend their own families, their own homeland, but to defend humanity as a whole.’ ” To view photographs of the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in France where 9,387 US servicemen are buried is to understand Memorial Day. The sight renders one speechless at the thought of such heroism. That we are privileged to call these people our countrymen is an honor beyond words.”

Déja vu in the schools - Reconfiguration not Wallingford’s first elementary school argument

As Published in the Record Journal Sunday May 30, 2010

By Samaia Hernandez
Record-Journal staff
shernandez@record-journal.com
(203) 317-2266

Follow all the news directly on the Record Journal Website for the most up to date information. www.myrecordjournal.com

Write a letter to the editor letters@record-journal.com

WALLINGFORD — In 1983, when the Board of Education voted 5-4 to close Parker Farms School, not only did it lead to a major grassroots campaign by parents, but also to the first recall election of its kind.

Two board members in favor of the closing were voted off the board the following January in what became a town and state first. Two years later, the Connecticut Superior Court outlawed recall elections of public officials.

Yalesville School had been selected by district officials as the building to close since it was older, smaller and in need of repairs. When the board voted to close Parker Farms instead — at the last minute, citing economics and enrollment figures — many parents were outraged.

Students from Parker Farms were sent to Highland School and Yalesville. Then, in 1986, a different board voted 7-2 to close Yalesville and re-open Parker Farms at a cost more than three times the original savings from closing Parker Farms.

Twenty-seven years later, there are some parallels: Again, the country is in a recession, again enrollment figures are trending down, again the education budget has been slashed by Town Hall and again the school board has voted in favor of a controversial measure that impacts its elementary school system.

This time, parents banded together online, starting a “$O$: Save Our Schools” campaign and pleading with the board to reconsider breaking up neighborhood K-5 schools in place of buildings that serve grades K-2 or 3-5 only.

A recall election is out of the question this time around, but some parents, across party lines, have already declared that on Election Day 2011 they will not be voting for school board members who supported reconfiguring the schools.

State Rep. Mary G. Fritz, D-Wallingford, would have seen her name on the Jan. 27, 1984 recall ballot. Fritz narrowly missed the election after resigning from her post as school board chairwoman the previous summer to take up a spot on the General Assembly, which she has held ever since.

“Parker Farms needed $300,000 in work,” Fritz recalled. “That’s what that was all about. And Yalesville didn’t need any work.”
“I couldn’t justify spending money to renovate when we could close it,” she added. “What happened in the end? They got a new school and Yalesville got a new school. Then Yalesville became a model for the subsequent renovation project in the ’90s.”

In 1983, the mayor cut $850,000 from a $17.4 million budget request. This year, more than $2.5 million was trimmed from an $86.4 million proposed school budget.If Fritz were on the board this time around, the minority vote against reconfiguration would likely have been higher. She said she sympathizes with parents who are concerned about grade clustering in a town of Wallingford’s size and has questions about the transportation component that will require more buses and cuts into costs savings of close to $200,000.

“I think it’s going to be very hard for people to get adjusted to it; this is a major overhaul,” Fritz said.

Chet Miller, a Republican school board member, was also on the board in 1983 and is now serving a second term after an almost three-decade hiatus.

Back then, he was part of the minority vote, but like most board members today he is very much in support of school reconfiguration. He didn’t believe enrollment would continue to decline in the early ’80s, and it didn’t.

“It wasn’t very long after they closed Parker Farms and Yalesville that they had to be reopened, and at exorbitant costs compared to what we saved: well in excess of one million dollars,” Miller said.

Unlike some vocal parents, Miller doesn’t view reconfiguration as a loss of neighborhood schools, but rather an expansion.

“No matter what anybody decides, there’s always going to be those people who disagree. It’s not a winning position that you can ever take. But ultimately what you try to do is what’s going to be best educationally for the students. Everything I have found will, I believe; it will be much better educationally,” he said of the plan that is reported to result in smaller classes and to more evenly distribute resources across all eight elementary schools.

Board Chairman Thomas Hennessey, a Republican, isn’t worried about political fallout from the reconfiguration vote. He said he stands by his position that the change is an educational tool with a growing number of supporters.

“It’s like night and day between redistricting and closing a school, and we’re not doing either,” Hennessey said.

And this time, the vote in favor of reconfiguration was far from along party lines, as it was for closing Parker Farms.

Democrat Valerie Ford, the longest-serving board member, now in her 15th non-consecutive year and eighth-term, is in agreement with Miller and Hennessey when it comes to reconfiguration.

“I don’t make decisions on whether people are going to vote for me or not,” said Ford, who started her career with the Wallingford schools as an active member of the Cook Hill School Parent Teacher Organization fighting for smaller class sizes. She was a registered Independent before seeking support from both the Republican and Democratic Town Committees.

“Turn us all over; good luck,” said Ford, who told the Record-Journal, before this budget season, that she is not planning to seek re-election after this term. “We did the best we could. We made the best decision that we thought we could make. You try to do the best you can and I really have a lot of faith in our Central Office staff and in most of our teachers and administrators.

“I really think this is going to work and I really don’t think the 50 or so people who show up at meetings represent what everybody is thinking out there.”