Why I must attend and participate moving forward

OMG, I think I am going to write some of my own content today, instead of providing a video or some other re purposed post for my blog. You should all be amply impressed. Though the idea for this post did come from another blogger.

So Kevin at Always Home and Uncool sent me an email yesterday stating that there is another Stamford Board of Education poster out there at Wing Dang Do: Stamford Board of Education, I am so over you . So I diligently followed the link and read what this person had to say. I found that I was in agreement with 80-90% of her points. Having the superintendent present the redistricting plan* on August 26, when the majority of parents are out of town for vacation is crazy. (I am not even sure if the board is allowed to punt this responsibility to the superintendent, but that is what is happening). Also starting school with a half a day, the Friday before is absolutely asinine. This is simply about getting an extra day on the calendars, and killing any chance anyone has of going away for Labor Day weekend.

However, what I have learned over the past 10 months and where I disagree with her, especially as the parent of children that are probably going to be in Stamford Public Schools for another 18 or so years is you have to attend and participate. If you don't attend the meetings, or read the minutes, then you cannot honestly say you know what is going on with the Board. I agree the Board needs to find better ways to communicate its calendar, its agenda, its decisions and its intention to the community as a whole, so it is not so difficult to find this information. I should not have spend more than 5 minutes online to find this information(It often takes way more than 5 minutes to find what you are looking for). The links for this information can be sent home in children's folders, the meetings can be video-taped and broadcast online for a period of time for parents to review the dynamic and hear first hand what each member has to say on any particular issue, rather than simply relying on the parsed meeting minutes which often take time to be approved and posted. This is 2008 afterall, not 1978.

Even though Wing Dang Doo claims she was at every meeting and was not heard, her presence has to be felt. I am not sure our (Save Toquam) presence was felt for the first few months of the process, but we sat their until they had to take notice (or at least until the Mayor took up our cause). Although the Board of Education does not always seem to listen to the individual or even to groups that are representing the individual, you still need to attend the meetings, speak when their is opportunity for the public to speak, and make your opinions known to the entire board both publicly and privately.

One of the points that I honestly believe helped the Toquam cause was by having the entire school represented at every redistricting committee meeting and every general board meeting. We attempted to make it to other germane committee meetings as well to make our presence felt. Don't get me wrong, it would be impossible to attend every meeting, since they meet 3-5 nights a week during the school year. G-d bless those volunteers who do win election, since whether you agree with them or not, they are agreeing to a huge time commitment.

Next, you need to attend and participate to know where the candidates stand on the issues that matter to you in order to make informed and intelligent decisions in November, when every year 3 Board Members are up for election, I don't know nor claim what issues every parent has, but I do know what is important to me and the Mrs. and I am going to attend and participate, so I can hold candidates to their word when they are elected to serve the parents of Stamford. This issue of school closure clearly showed that the division of the Board of Education does not simply go along party lines, that we cannot just vote for the party of our choice and hope that because I am a democrat or republican that this candidate is going to believe the same thing as me (the pull the lever for the party of your choice method of voting). You must know the candidates and to do this you must attend and participate.

Finally, I need to keep attending in an effort to unite the Stamford parents community. One thing that the BoE was able to successfully do this year, was divide at least 6** (out of 12)elementary school communities as we were each proposed for closure at some point in time during this preposterous process. The board forced us to defend our own schools, but would not allow us to comment regarding other schools and this wounded our entire community.

I will promise anyone that will listen that I will fight for school unity and harmony moving forward. I don't want to go toe-to-toe with another parent from another school on why our school should stay open and why their school should close. That is not productive and does not help the children, the district or the community. What I do want to do is figure out how we can divert more resources to underperforming schools since when they received extra support their test scores rose. How do we replicate or build upon the successful schools curriculum to expand it to the schools that are not as successful. By working together I honestly believe we can make Stamford more desirable to outsiders looking to move into the community, more desirable to Stamford residents that often choose to move out of district or send their children to private schools and more desirable for the parents who are done with the process believing they don't have a voice in the process. That is what I want to work for in 2008/2009 school year and beyond.

Footnotes:
* For those not intimately involved int he Stamford Redistricting process in July the Board of Education vote to decouple the school closing issue, which has been written about in this space infinitum, and the rest of the redistricting process. Now that the school closing issue has been resolved, the board can now focus on redrawing all the elementary (12 of them) district lines to help bring all the schools into socio-economic balance and hopefully help improve all of our schools in the process.

** Elementary Schools proposed for Closure during the 2007/2008 redistricting process:
Davenport Ridge
Hart Magnet
Julia Stark
KT Murphy

Rogers Magnet

Toquam Magnet