Dr. David Hopson
The recent visit by Matt Malone, Secretary of Education for Massachusetts, to Chester Elementary School provided a very different and positive perspective on activities in the district. After visiting each classroom and speaking with students, staff, and parent volunteers, Secretary Malone spoke eloquently about the positives he saw. These included well behaved, actively engaged students; staff who were using varied teaching methodologies to work with students; the excellent embedded use of technology in the classroom; the showcasing of student work as well as shared objectives of what was being taught; and the positive work done on integrating the new “Common Core” standards into not only our curriculum, but into the actual teaching occurring in the classroom. I was pleased that Secretary Malone saw the fruit of our staff labor over the past few years.
I was also encouraged by Secretary Malone’s questions and desire to understand the different issues that impact our schools compared to more suburban or urban schools. It was also positive that Senator Ben Downing met with us for a while to provide input on the special factors impacting rural Western Massachusetts, including pockets of poverty that mirror the poverty found in some of our larger urban cities.
Secretary Malone’s comments and observations seemed to suggest that the Gateway District has done well in committing appropriate resources to help impact classroom activities including curriculum, technology, grant-funded opportunities and teacher professional development. These items are the essential, district-coordinated planning processes done by the Director of Academics, supported by the Director of Technology, implemented through the Principals and Pupil Services Director, with many funded through grants written by our Grantwriter, and financially managed by the Business Manager. I find it interesting that these are some of the same items that certain town officials would like to see eliminated or reduced to further control costs. At last week’s school committee meeting, two town officials shared their opinion that we have too many administrators, that the school committee isn’t focused on cutting costs as opposed to reducing town assessments, and—even after having the essentially unchanged budget expenses in hand since December—were amazed that the committee didn’t take more time to review the 6th change to the budget in the past five months. While I believe all of these items must be reviewed and closely scrutinized each year in the budget process, the idea of changing the budget significantly when you’re under a 75 day turnaround process between a budget not being approved and having a new budget for towns to reconsider is somewhat unreasonable, especially if the underlying services in that budget do not change. This detailed review of budget line items should, and does, occur through the school committee’s finance subcommittee as well as the entire school committee. I wrote recently of the district’s budget process and requested input from our community members on how we might change this to make it more open and accommodating so that people who are interested can find, and understand, the process and specifics of the budget.
We do have some suggestions, and will be working with members of the school committee and the administrative team to provide even more budget information for everyone. We’ll begin this process at the next school committee meeting and I hope everyone will follow the presentations on the district’s website. Of course, I’m also hoping that over the next two weeks, at least one of the towns (Chester, Russell, and Worthington) will approve version 5.0 of the current year’s budget so that we can concentrate on moving forward, rather than trying to make changes to the budget when the fiscal year is over 1/3 over.
