by Paul R. Sutherland
My family and I moved to Ridgefield 6 years ago, partly because of the good schools. With two children still in Ridgefield High School, I continue to believe Ridgefield schools are good, but they could be better. From my position as parent and taxpayer, there are a number of improvement opportunities that the Board of Education (BOE) could address in the coming school year.
On the BOE web site, one of the stated goals of the Board is to "improve the effectiveness of all internal and external communication." On the positive side, the ConnectEd program, which allows administrators to quickly communicate important information to parents, was successfully implemented. On the negative side, the BOE website itself appears to be suffering from neglect. There is no way to get a current schedule of BOE meetings from the site. And, while there is a listing of BOE minutes, they are not actually readable or downloadable. This is an issue of transparency: the ability to know what our government is doing and why.
A greater transparency issue is the lack of readily available, clear, measurable objectives for the public to see, defining what the BOE hopes to achieve with its expenditures of taxpayer dollars. The public has a right to see such objectives from the BOE (similar to objectives that teachers and administrators have), and to hold the Board accountable for meeting those objectives.
Agreeing on objectives is not easy. The State of Connecticut has encouraged accountability for years through the use of Connecticut Mastery tests, now administered in grades 3 through 8. A similar effort began at the national level with the bipartisan No Child Left Behind legislation in 2002. Clearly, test results alone are not an adequate measure of school system performance, but they are certainly an important one.
The 2006-2007 Connecticut Mastery Test results show Ridgefield, as usual, far above the state average in all three areas of math, reading and writing. In math, on average over the six grades tested, 84.9% of Ridgefield students met the state performance goals, versus only 62.1% of the students statewide. Furthermore, Ridgefield students' scores improved from an average of just 79.9% in the prior year. On the other hand, Ridgefield math scores are still lower, on average, than all seven other towns in our comparable socio-economic group (towns like Wilton, Redding and Weston).
Transparency itself is a fundamental issue for good government.
Transparency helps to ensure the allocation of scarce resources to where
the public believes they are most needed. It benefits the Board of
Education by allowing taxpayers to see the connection between tax dollars
spent and the return on that investment. It is a prerequisite for
accountability. It lets us know that our leaders are managing with facts
rather than ideology, in a bipartisan effort to continually improve. A
board of education that operates on the three cornerstones of
transparency, accountability and bipartisanship is more likely to ensure
that our children thrive educationally and that our town benefits from
excellent schools.
The writer lives on Mimosa Court and is a member of the Democratic Town Committee and Democratic candidate for the Board of Education