Dr. David Hopson
The current hot topic in our seven towns seems to be the legislature’s approval of the bill allowing Worthington to withdraw from the Gateway Regional School District. From discussions at GTAC, conversations and meetings with local representatives and senators, discussions around the towns, and area media reports, this topic has garnered much attention. While the final outcome remains up in the air, due to the number of steps required to complete the withdrawal process, I’d like to take a moment to approach this as an opportunity for the district and our towns rather than as the cataclysmic disaster many are making it out to be.
Worthington has pointed out that the closing of their elementary school, while a major reason for wanting to leave, wasn’t their only reason. As shared in testimony provided to the joint legislative committee on education, another reason was that the district has reduced requested educational expenditures to meet some towns’ financial requirements for more than a decade, which has impacted student services throughout our schools.
At the same time, we’ve heard complaints about a lack of educational opportunities for students, the move away from educating the whole child to focusing on common state/federal standards and teaching to the test, and that the district is not performing as expected on the MCAS exams. Despite some of these assertions being contradictory—including the fact that our high school is a Commended High School in the state—there are some underlying issues that need to be, and are being addressed.
I believe that the legislation, as amended to require a review of the district’s educational plan and its very operational structure, could be a great opportunity. We know that Worthington will pay a financial premium to withdraw from the district and form their own public school district and has already spent a considerable amount of time, energy, and fiscal resources on reaching the point where withdrawal is a very real possibility. We now have other district towns discussing withdrawal due to the stated concerns of the financial impact of losing Worthington’s funding as well as the negative educational impact of losing opportunities for students if we must further cut the budget, or of the negative financial impact on towns if the district doesn’t absorb the loss of revenue and passes those costs onto the remaining towns.
In the process of ‘reorganizing’ the district, I believe each town should take a serious look at the benefits of belonging to the district, and the impact of withdrawing from the district, and weigh those against the overall cost of educating their students, the control they have over the education of children from their towns, and the social impact of potentially sending a town’s children to another school district, even if this requires the financial cost of hiring a consultant. My belief is that when all of the factors are considered, the towns will find that the Gateway district, as it was 50 years ago, is an excellent opportunity that far outweighs any other option in terms of cost, social and community engagement, and student opportunities.
Once this process is completed, and townspeople are once again cognizant of the importance of the district, it will then be possible to take an inspired look at what we can do to move forward to make the district even more relevant to our children, our families, our elderly, and the population in general. The ideas specifically outlined in the Worthington bill, of “enhancing learning opportunities and student performance for all students in the remaining communities” coupled with “recommendations for enhanced funding options for the remaining communities to maintain access to quality education for grades K-12” provides opportunities to rethink educational access and new ways to meet student and community needs.
As we look at all that is happening in education across the world – the use of technology to create new educational environments, the renewed emphasis on the whole child, including 21st Century Skills in areas such as collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking, the return to project based and student centered projects, the emphasis on community involvement, including adult and continuing education, and the growing demand to focus less on standardized tests, I see many opportunities to engage the community and re-imagine what we could be as we move forward. I find it interesting that many of these subjects were raised in Gateway’s 2015 project but not acted on for a variety of reasons (under the “information” menu on the Gateway website). While we have the interest of our towns, and the state, it is time to not just dream of what could be, but to enact processes to bring those dreams to fruition.
