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Notes provided by: Colleen Kirby Superintendent Candidate
Interviews, Hi all, All of the candidates noted that our high school is in great shape-excellent teachers, kids that care for each other, good administrative support, ready to move on to the next level of achievement. All noticed that there is concern about all the upcoming retirements of veteran teachers and that many younger teachers leave for better pay in other communities. There seemed to be agreement that we need more professional development for our teachers. There also seemed to be more need for equalization of course offerings at each level and that there need to be more challenging offerings. So it sounds like they considered our high school to be good and solid and warm and caring and ready for even more excitement/rigor/excellence/teaching to the whole child. After the final candidate visit, each school committee member discussed a bit about which candidate(s) they favored late on Jan. 11th as Jeff Thielman was scheduled to leave town Jan.12th at 6 am for a long business trip. Basically 4 school committee members favored Ned Levenson as their favorite candidate. One school committee member preferred Ned Levenson and Andre Ravanelle equally for very different reasons. One school committee member did not feel ready to favor any one candidate and wanted more time to review the materials and have more discussion when the hour wasn't so late. One school committee member favored Andre Ravanelle. As Jeff was leaving town and there was so much support for Mr. Levenson, the school committee voted to start the process to set up a site visit at Mr. Levenson's location. On Thursday, Jan. 13th at 7pm the meeting will continue for more discussion and decision making (minus Jeff T.) about which other candidates to set up site visits for, and so on. The Thursday meeting will be an interesting meeting to attend. Also at this meeting the bottom line for the school budget was decided on to the amount of $32.4M which will be sent to the Finance Committee. Two members did vote for an amendment (which lost) to increase the request by $2M in order to bring the school budget closer to the service levels we had in 2003. Although all school committee members expressed their frustration that the current budget being asked for is for much fewer services than in 2003, they felt that the current increase of 6% from last year was a more realistic budget figure since Arlington is facing a deficit which is likely to continue for several more years. So even with this lower budget request it is virtually certain that we will need an override to meet Arlington's budget needs this year. It was painful to watch our dedicated school committee members express their anguish about what they consider to be necessary services that certain children will not be able to do over ie you can't get 4th grade back again. There will be more discussions coming over what services this bottom line figure will cover and which of the essential services will be underfunded or cut back. All the best, Colleen Please note these are just my notes and are not formally sanctioned in any way. If I have made errors or mistakes let me know and I'll gladly change them. SPOT
offers these notes as a service to the community. |
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