(Note: A complete report on the Board of Education meeting Tuesday will appear in a later post on the Middletown Eye.)
On Tuesday, principal architect for JCJ Architecture, Greg Smolley shared his company's findings and conclusions with the Board of Education regarding a plan to redistribute students and reconfigure classrooms to address the problems of over and under capacity schools at the elementary level, to reduce bus and travel time for students, and to address the issue of an equitable and in-compliance distribution of students along racial and socioeconomic lines.
The Board will hold public forums on the proposed plans on Tuesday December 1st, 6:30 PM at Macdonough School, and on Thursday December 3, 6:30 PM at Keigwin.
During the public session preceding the presentation, two parents representing the concerns of Macdonough School and North end residents strongly opposed the proposed plans which would shift much of the burden of addressing redistribution problems onto Macdonough School.
Macdonough PTA president Jennifer Alexander indicated that in her reading of the report she found a number of inconsistencies in important statistics.
"The report claims that Macdonough is over capacity," Alexander said. "I was surprised to read that because we have empty seats there.
"This report asks Macdonough to bear the burden of a solution to racial imbalance for all city schools," she added.
Izzi Greenberg, director of the North End Action Team, concurred.
"I was sad to see that the only solution to the problem involved Macdonough," Greenberg said. "It's a shame that it falls to our school to solve the district's problems."
In his presentation, Smolley indicated that among the options to achieve racial balance in schools is, according to JCJ's plan, a few radical options for Macdonough, including the possibility of closing the school, expanding the school or creating an intra-district magnet school.
According to JCJ, those plans, along with the reconfiguration of students (as expressed in an earlier Eye posting), and the reconfiguration of classrooms in each school, could help achieve an in-compliance balance at all schools, ease classroom crowding and lessen time students spend on buses.
Complete detail of the presentation, and a detailed report are available here.
Early on in the presentation, it became clear that the amount of background detail and statistical information in the presentation was confusing to some board members who had not reviewed it thoroughly before the meeting. But some members of the board pointed out that there were inconsistencies. In fact on one chart, an entire column had been shifted in creation of the presentation to show, inaccurately, that several schools had Family Resource Centers, when, in fact, these centers are only present at Farm Hill and Macdonough schools.
Smolley apologized for the inaccuracies, but explained that the charts would be corrected and refined, and noted that some figures which appeared inconsistent were the result of gathering information over the course of two separate school years.
Perhaps some board members would not have been confused by the "background detail and statistical information in the presentation" had they actually committed themselves to a careful reading of the entire JCJ report. All board members had the completed report days before last night's meeting, but some of their questions revealed that they hadn't read it carefully.
ReplyDeleteI was amazed to hear Mr.Raczka admit that his initial review of the report was not sufficient enough to give him a clear understanding of its content and that he would be re-reading the report. His lackadaisical approach was underscored by the fact that Mr. Raczca did not ask a single substantive question of JCJ during the meeting.
A report this important deserves the serious attention of all board members, but especially the Chairman who needs to lead by example. Had Sheila Daniels been elected Board Chair last night, I'm convinced that Middletown would have benefited enormously by her fine leadership and intelligence. Instead we can look forward to two more years of mediocre leadership and pandering to Middletown's Democratic machine. What a shame.