Ridgefield Candidates '97
Board of Education

Mary Pat Devine

A fifteen-year resident of Ridgefield, Mary Pat Devine has served for more than a decade as a volunteer in the Ridgefield schools, including terms as co-president of both Ridgebury Elementary School and East Ridge Middle School's PTA. She has worked as everything from "Room Mom" to a volunteer classroom art instructor in the Ridgebury´s "PACE" art appreciation program.

As a member of the 6th Grade Curriculum Revision Committee, she participated in creating the successful new program for sixth graders which placed a new emphasis on educational basics and writing skills for the town´s 11 and 12 year olds.

Mrs. Devine also served on the Board of Education´s 1995 site selection committee which considered possible locations for the middle school expansion. She was the principal advocate for updating and reopening the "Old High School" as an answer to the school crowding process, which was universally agreed to be the most cost-effective solution.

In addition to her school work, Mary Pat served on the board of the Ridgefield Lakes Association from 1985 through 1993. She spent five years as board chairman, handling a large number of financial and environmental issues that are part of managing a 120 family lake community´s interests. She is also a member of Ridgefield Ladies´ Golf Association and a member of St. Elizabeth Seton Parish in Ridgebury. Mary Pat has been active in Girls Scouts and as a Ridgefield Red Raider cheerleader volunteer.

Born in Santa Monica, California and educated at Loyola-Marymount University in Los Angeles, Mary Pat Devine pursued a career in advertising in both Los Angeles and New York City before moving to Rainbow Lake in 1982. She is a full-time mother for her two daughters, Elizabeth, 14, a freshman at Ridgefield High and Samantha, 9, a fifth-grader at Ridgebury Elementary School. She has been married for 18 years to Frank Devine, a producer at CBS News.

On the issues facing the school system, Mrs. Devine has pledged to put education over politics; the children´s interests above personal agendas. Her primary values are three:

• Compromise and consensus;
• Find the best professional educators and encourage them to do the best job they can; and
• Spend wisely, not wildly. Spending money will not guarantee the success of our schools.

Here are a few examples of her thinking:

• No more million-dollar boondoggles -- The current school board´s flip-flop decisions on grade configuration and East Ridge Middle School expansion has cost the children of Ridgefield at least two years of overcrowding and cost the town´s taxpayers one million wasted dollars. The town boards and committees can -- must!   -- work together.

• Education over egos! -- Educational initiatives need to take precedence over individual agendas. For the past two years the board has been mired in partisan politics, bickering, and embarrassing deadlocks. The Board needs to come back to an unpoliticized program of cooperation and compromise with an emphasis on policy, not micro-managed details.

• Superintendent -- There is no more important decision a Board can make than choosing a superintendent. In the coming year, we need to hire a person we can trust and then allow that person to implement the policies and goals set by the board. Effective board members establish good working relationships with the superintendent, not undermine the superintendent´s position and efforts.

• School crowding -- It is time to get on with the necessary job of providing classrooms for our children. The Board will need to find a solution that is both fiscally prudent and educationally sound. There is no "magic formula" for grade configuration, but the Board must consider the educational implications of bigger elementary schools -- will the youngest of our students be lost in impersonal facilities? Does it make management sense to undertake five (or more!) building projects simultaneously?

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Brought to you by the Ridgefield, Ct. Democratic Town Committee, John Kukulka, Chairman.

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