Wallingford Politico: reconfiguration

Showing posts with label reconfiguration. Show all posts

Monday, June 27, 2011

Menzo counts benefits of K-5 revamp

As published in the Record Journal, Monday June 27, 2011

By Russell Blair
Record-Journal staff
rblair@record-journal.com
(203) 317-2225

WALLINGFORD — The debate leading up to the decision last year to reconfigure the town’s elementary schools was often heated and contentious. But once the plan passed, school officials said the first year of reconfiguration went smoothly.

The change has brought about the advertised results: smaller class sizes, budget savings and an increased focus on literacy education for students in the K-2 schools, but there have been other benefits, too.

And while there were some bumps along the way, and logistical challenges the district had to tackle, School Superintendent Salvatore Menzo called reconfiguration “a community success.” Reconfiguration creates two smaller groups of elementary schools and makes it easier to offer uniform instruction to the district’s students, said Assistant Superintendent for Personnel Jan Guarino. She said it has been easier to hold meetings with staff and administrators from the four K-2 or the four grade 3-5 schools, rather than getting people from all eight elementary schools together.

Two of the big strategic plan items the district purchased for next year — the Treasures reading program and hundreds of tablet computers to create literacy stations — should help bolster the reading and writing skills of the district’s youngest students. The reconfiguration allows for better resource allocation, Menzo said, and the opportunity for technology and personnel to be divided in a more consistent manner.

An unintended side effect of reconfiguration has been a greater balance in enrollment across the district’s elementary schools. Menzo said that, at times, Parker Farms and Moses Y. Beach were at risk of being considered “racially imbalanced” by the state, but reconfiguration has offered more equity across the district. Menzo said another unintended benefit has been the opportunity for him to get more involved in the community. The plan, created in Menzo’s first year as superintendent, “helped me get out in the community,” he said. Reconfiguration required input not only from parents, teachers and the Board of Education, but community organizations and the police and fire departments. “I would have made those connections, but it happened faster,” Menzo said. “We had a real reason for working together; it wasn’t just a meet and greet. You can’t measure the value of those relationships.”

Financially, reconfiguration has been a gain for the district. Menzo said the move saved $1.14 million, much of it coming because the district no longer had to pay for rental properties. Menzo said the school district could not have dealt with the slight (0.42 percent) increase in its budget recommended by the mayor without the savings. The alternative, he said, would have been more teacher layoffs and elementary school classes that would be nearing 30 students.
The plan passed the school board by a 7-2 vote in May 2010, with the two “nay” votes not necessarily against the idea of reconfiguration, but rather the pace with which the district seemed to be pushing it forward. Jay Cei, a board Democrat who voted against the proposal, said at the time that the district should take at least the next year to work out the kinks. Reached Friday, Cei said he felt the plan had worked well in its first year.

The district “believed having only half the grades in each school would provide better focus and more resources at each grade level. It appears they were correct,” Cei said. “Although it will likely take another year to fully implement the programs associated with this new structure, we are already seeing some educational benefits. I think we will see many more in one more year.”

Michael Brooder, a Republican, was the other board member to vote against the plan. At the time, Brooder, like Cei, said he wasn’t against reconfiguration, but felt it would be better to wait a year. But Friday, Brooder also said he felt the first year had gone well.

“With anything you change, there’s going to be hiccups in the beginning,” Brooder said. “But I think what’s most important is that they have the same good teachers. I think it went OK.” Brooder had a daughter in second grade when the reconfiguration passed, but she avoided the transition because Rock Hill became a grade 3-5 school. “I haven’t heard anything that leads me to believe it didn’t go well,” Brooder said.

Guarino said it took the cooperation of the entire community for the plan to work, and once it was set into motion, everything went smoothly. “We were moving 10 schools and we had less than $1,000 worth of damage or items we had to replace,” she said. “It wouldn’t have been possible without everyone working together.” The difficulties with buses that some parents experienced at the start of the year would have happened regardless of reconfiguration, Guarino said, because the district had planned to redraw the bus routes anyway.

Menzo felt the district was responsive and honest. “We listened to parents’ concerns,” he said.

But not all parents agreed that the plan had been well thought out. Erin Labbe, who has twin sons at Rock Hill, said she felt there was a lack of communication between her family and the school. “I feel like it was a big mess all year,” she said. “They didn’t have it together.”

Labbe said she felt that the district had to spend so much time selling the program to parents and dealing with angry feedback that it didn’t have time to properly plan for reconfiguration. Labbe, who has an older daughter at Dag Hammarskjold Middle School, said she had good experiences with the middle school and only had trouble with her twins after they moved from Moses Y. Beach to Rock Hill.

Administrators, however, say they have gotten many more positive responses than negative. Menzo said he has been receiving phone calls from parents who have seen improvement in their children’s learning. He added that for most of the parents who were against the change, once it was made, they were onboard with doing what was best for the kids. Many of the parents who lobbied hardest against reconfiguration have helped lead the charge to implement it in the town’s schools. “The loudest voices against have become our best problem solvers,” Guarino said.

The impact on student test scores likely won’t be seen for three to five years, Menzo said. But even then, it may be impossible to ever draw a direct correlation between any test score increases and the reconfiguration.

“I don’t think we’ll ever be able to pinpoint what leads to higher scores,” he said. “We don’t want to ignore the hard work of others.”

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Paradise and Paradise Lost

As Published in the Record Journal Sunday May 30, 2010

Talk about it online

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

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?

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.”