I wasn’t particularly thrilled with how I was quoted, largely devoid of surrounding context, in this article in the Gazette on Wed. Oct. 28. So, to allow you to get the full context, here’s the link to ACTV’s video of the protest:
http://204.213.244.104/Cablecast/Public/Show.aspx?ChannelID=1&ShowID=5224
I’m not giving up on Amherst yet. What I used was a commonly employed rhetorical device. You’d think people would understand that sort of thing by now…
-Adrian
At the end of last week’s Town Meeting, we passed an article that called upon Congress to allow cleared Guantanamo detainees to be resettled in the United States, and that further stated the town’s intent to welcome some of those detainees should they choose to come here.
I fully supported the article, and I am glad that it passed. However, it only adds to my frustration with how Town meeting has failed to deal with a more serious and local issue-how the School Committee is pig-headedly making the wrong decisions for our schools by closing Mark’s Meadow and approving a redistricting plan that impacts negatively the very students for which they claim to be making these changes.
I guess the answer is somewhat obvious. Making a statement of Guantanamo costs the town nothing. Actually doing something to keep a strong, small, neighborhood school open, and allowing existing important cultural support programs for Cambodians and Latinos to continue do not seem to be a priority.
People have been running around with this “sky is falling” financial doom and gloom mentality, and this panic has overridden common sense in this community.
Closing Mark’s Meadow is a cheap and dirty way to save the town a few bucks, but will be a relative drop in the bucket if the doom and gloom scenarios being predicted come true. So the sacrifice of Mark’s Meadow will have been in vain.
Rather than making a cut just for the sake of making a cut, where are the out of the box ideas? I’ve suggested before here and elsewhere that the attitude of both the School Committee and the School District are betrayed by the subtle semantics of how they phrase things. Asking a lawyer “is it legal to keep doing this?” is very different from asking a lawyer “how can we continue to find a way to do this thing that works well legally?” Statements made by School Committee and School District reps alike regarding what is legal and not legal about language clustering are patently false and misleading.
It’s great that we care for the people who were unjustly imprisoned in Guantanamo. Why can’t we care as much, if not more, about our own school children? Yes, those who have bulldozed these wrong-headed decisions through claim to have the best interests of all of Amherst’s children at heart. I think the haiku on the previous post gives a better look at the classist and racist agendas that are really at work here.
-Adrian
A friend and fellow Mark’s meadow parent, Lynne Weintraub, wrote the following haiku (which, btw, the Amherst Bulletin refused to print.)
school 1: happy kids
high scores (though incomes are low)
"boutique school--close it!"school 2: scores falter
"break 'em up! ship 'em out!" it's
the least we can dodraw the lines just so
more rich kids can fit into
the one school with wallsno school may excel
all must falter together
this is equity
I think this sums up the situation perfectly! More on this topic in the next post.
Dear Parent or/ Community Member,
We Need YOUR SUPPORT and VOICE this Coming Tuesday!
PLEASE JOIN US This Coming TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27th, 2009 @ 4pm at The Amherst Commons.
We are organizing a MARCH TO PROTEST the Amherst Schools Committee’s Plan to REDISTRICT our elementary schools and the closing of Marks Meadow. The School Committee’s decision DOES NOT REFLECT THE NEEDS OF OUR CHILDREN nor their communities. We believe their plan will be harmful and divisive to the multicultural fabric of our town. We believe this plan will create animosity between those that struggle economically and those of a more privileged community. We don’t feel it is FAIR to bus children to new schools within the Amherst School system just because they qualify for FREE OR REDUCED LUNCH. Furthermore, we are not convinced that moving our children to new schools will improve the quality of their education. We feel that FORCED BUSSING OF LOW INCOME, MULTICULTURAL/ MULTILINGUAL CHILDREN IS OFFENSIVE.
We feel that those School Committee members that want to speak about EQUITY should bring plans WITH MULTIPLE STUDIES OF TESTED RESULTS to improve the education of our children. They are basing their idea of redistricting on only one study. We do not think that dispersing children who qualify for free or reduced lunch and/or are multicultural/multilingual into more affluent schools will improve MCAS scores or their abilities to learn. On the contrary, the School Committee’s Redistricting Plan will isolate our children and their communities from the support they need.
We support the philosophy that children thrive in elementary schools that provide supportive environments in close proximity to their neighborhoods and families. We object to the comments made by a School Committee member on October 22nd, 2009, stating that Amherst did not need Marks Meadow and that he would have closed it “even if there was one million dollars to keep it open.” We disagree with his comments that “the money could be spent more wisely in other projects.” We feel that each of the elementary schools in the town of Amherst has a special relationship with the various communities they represent. To close Marks Meadow will be a severe blow to the communities and neighborhoods that make up North Amherst.
Please join us in supporting our children’s educational needs and our diverse community fabric this coming Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 @ 4pm at the Amherst Common.
We NEED YOUR SUPPORT and VOICE in presenting our Grievances with the AMHERST SCHOOL Committee regarding their Committee’s Redistricting subcommittee plan. Please give us your presence VOICE and PRESENCE in ADDRESSING the needs of our CHILDREN. Their plan will sever the fabric of our multicultural community and isolate our children in their new placements. The School Committee’s plan to disperse the children who come from families who qualify for free and reduced lunch IS NOT in the best interest of those who are most vulnerable in our school system. The School Committee Redistricting plan WAS NOT created to address the academic needs of our children.
Sincerely yours in the struggle for our Children’s education..
Contact Persons Email Address
Zulma Rivera zulma88@hotmail.com
Nelson Acosta nelson@stuaf.umass.edu
Lissa Pierce Bonifaz lissapiercebonifaz@gmail.com
Vladimir Morales vladimirmorales@comcast.net
The School Committee appears to be a juggernaut, an out of control steamroller or bulldozer that simply refuses to stop. They've made their plan and, come hell or high water, they're gonna stick to it. In fact, the more resistance they encounter, the more stubborn they become. This is not how public officials, volunteers or not, should behave. These sessions for "public input" are probably more a sham, to give the appearance of openness. The transparency of this contemptible attitude was transparent in how the SC chose to present a map last night that had already changed from the meeting last week at MM (throwing a few crumbs to the masses, I guess.) Presenting two different maps at two different public forums on the same subject hardly seems appropriate. In doing so, they have taken away the opportunity for people who responded last week at the MM forum to again respond to this new map in a public forum (and writing emails and letters is just not the same.) If anything, the SC should have presented the exact same map as was presented at MM the week before, and then mentioned that, in response to suggestions, they were going to be making thus and such changes. That, at least, would have seemed less disingenuous. Just another mis-step in a process that has been one mis-step after another. It's such a flawed process, I wonder how it has managed to proceed this far.
It is patently obvious to anyone who attended either last week's meeting at Mark's Meadow, or yesterday's meeting at Crocker Farm, that there are a significant number of taxpaying Amherst citizens who object to the redistricting plan for a variety of reasons (and many of them also agree that closing MM is a mistake as well.) Jim Oldham's remarks hit the nail on the head. Before our children get squashed by this bulldozer, we need to get the School Committee to put on the brakes. If they won't do it on their own, then Town Meeting should direct them to do so, with whatever tools it has at its disposal.
I also want to question the so-called financial savings that are supposed to result from closing MM. Since redistricting is a direct result of that decision, all the costs incurred to make the redistricting happen need to be factored into the equation. (The redistricting may have happened anyway, though in a different time frame. Here there is a direct cause and effect, which cannot be disregarded.) So are the costs to the district of all these grand plans they keep talking about to address all the special new training for staff, and other factors related to so many students being shifted to different schools. Those costs need to be directly attributed to closing MM.
I suspect there are many costs incidental and indirect to the process that have not been included in real-world numbers. I also suspect when you factors those costs in, the savings won't look so great. Certainly not worth the price of all this disruption to our elementary schools.
Adrian A. Durlester
Good evening,
My name is Jim Oldham. I have a son in the high school and a daughter in third grade at Wildwood.
I am here tonight to request that you reject the current redistricting proposal and postpone closure of Marks Meadow for at least one year in order to take the time to consider and address the many concerns that have been raised.
There are three strong reasons why you should do this.
First, your process has failed to provide timely and meaningful opportunities for parents, staff or others to influence the proposal. For example, no public input was sought regarding the goal of balancing schools in terms of family income. Clearly there are good arguments in favor of this goal; but there has been no attempt to weigh it, in public, against other equally valid goals for our schools, or to discuss what we are willing to sacrifice in pursuit of this single goal, or to investigate other ways of addressing the affects of income imbalance between the schools.
The poor process has also made it impossible for knowledgeable staff, parents, and community members to contribute proposals for preserving existing language clusters while addressing the legal concerns that the committee has raised. The failure to carry out such a consultation makes nonsense of the claim that there is no legal way to save these programs and the a priori decision to eliminate language clusters is insensitive and damaging to the schools
My second concern is the quality of the proposal. The map presented tonight does not provide the “logical school boundaries” you set out to achieve. The disassociated island of families living in apartments on East Hadley Road defies any claim to have resolved the appearance of gerrymandered districts. All you have done is focus the problem and the burden on one set of families.
The proposal is neither the only nor the best option for meeting even your narrow goals. There was an alternative redistricting map that the committee rejected due to a supposed imbalance in student incomes. However, that problem could have been fixed simply by keeping students from East Hadley apartments in their current districts. In other words, with less disruption to students’ lives we could have an alternative map with balanced numbers and less isolation for these families. Instead, the latest plan buses a large group of mostly low income students out of their neighborhood to a school which with significantly HIGHER levels of such students than are in their neighborhood school. Clearly, the plan needs more thought.
The strongest reason for waiting is what you have heard tonight and last week.
· The Cambodian community has asked to preserve the program at Fort River that serves their children.
· Members of the Hispanic community have called for the Spanish language cluster at Crocker Farm to be saved.
· The parent organization FAIR has proposed a two-way bilingual program for Crocker Farm that addresses the equity issue while building on, rather than destroying, existing programs.
· East Hadley Road families have requested that you not treat their children differently from all the others.
What are your options?
1. You can ignore us, parents, taxpayers, teachers and just steamroll ahead.
2. You can fiddle with the edges of the proposal and do nothing to address the core problems.
3. Or you can reject this plan, postpone closing Marks Meadow, and involve the entire community in determining the values and approaches that will achieve the best plan for all our children.
Thank you
[Note: The second and final public forum on the School Committee’s redistricting plan is tomorrow, Wed. Oct. 14, 2009 at 7:00pm at Crocker Farm elementary. Childcare is available.]
There are any number of reasons why the School Committee's poorly thought-out decision to close MM should be revisited.The closing of MM also forces a redistricting that is being driven by the bizarre concept that "equal" and "fair" are the same thing-i.e. if we simply have the same percentage of students receiving free or reduced lunch at each school, we have achieved equity. Never mind how this destroys the important and well-functioning cohorts of Cambodians at Fort River, Spanish-speakers at Crocker Farm, and the cohesive and high-performing community at MM (gee, isn't it odd the district is closing the only school that's getting really high scores on the MCAS exams. In fact, this destroys well-developed communities at all four elementary schools, with an aim at equity that is blind to what's fair as opposed to what's equal.)
Has anybody asked the "community" that represents the students receiving free or reduced lunches if they want their children "equitably" redistributed as opposed to remaining with school communities of which they are currently an active and comfortable part? It's not clear the School Committee's goals for redistricting are echoed by the affected populace. Certainly not based on what we're hearing at these public forums.
Just yesterday, we read of UMass' ambitious plans for renovation of the MM facility. The chair of the school committee has a direct affiliation with UMass and the UMass School of Education, which stand to be the biggest beneficiaries of the town giving up MM as a school. While this may or may not have affected his decisions, it does have the appearance of conflict of interest, and Mr. Churchill should have recused himself from all discussions relating to closing MM and turning it back over to UMass. That he did not is wrong, and that none of us called him on it until now-more's the shame.
More's the shame on Mr. Churchill that at last week's public forum on the redistricting plan held at Mark's Meadow, he had copies of the text from the editorial that had appeared that day in the Gazette regarding the redistricting, which included a direct statement that it hoped that those still trying to change the decision to close MM wouldn't "waste time" at that meeting. The choice of a committee official to distribute a copy of a local newspaper editorial at a public meeting seems wholly inappropriate to me, more so given the content. (see Appendix below.)
Of the town's four elementary schools, this year, only Mark's Meadow is considered as meeting the AYP (Average Yearly Progress) standards determined by MCAS and the Federal NCLB act. Federal law allows that any parent of a student in an underperforming school has the right to request a transfer to a school that is not underperforming. The closing of MM may be a deliberate act that flies in the face of this right - a questionable choice, at best. It would be forcing not only MM parents to send all their students to schools that are lower-performing (in fact, not meeting the AYP standards) than MM, but eliminating the Federally-mandated right of choice for parents in the other schools.How does any of that make sense?
The closing of MM was a sacrificial lamb offered up by the School Committee to placate the gods of the Town Reserves, who insisted on some token of fiduciary responsibility. It has yet to be clearly demonstrated how much the town will actually save with the closing of MM. And is it not coincidental that the surprise "surplus" that was discovered was about the same amount as that being claimed as the cost savings for closing MM (and such savings will not occur this year, but next year!)
Something is rotten in the state of Amherst, and it would behoove Town Meeting to get to the bottom of it, before it alienates large segments of the populace by closing a high-performing school. It will alienate not only MM parents, but parents all over the district whose children will be moved around, separated from friends, removed from their affinity cohorts. Sowing such high levels of disaffection, does the School Committee or Town Meeting actually believe people would be inclined to vote in favor of a prop 2-1/2 override? I can tell you right now that many I have spoken to feel that if the School Committee does not heed the public outcry it is receiving, they would certainly oppose any call made for a tax increase. That may be short-sighted, but it's a reality. Why approve more funding for a system that isn't using what is has wisely?
APPENDIX
Part of the text of the editorial entitled “ In Our Opinion: School lines in Amherst” which appeared in the Daily Hampshire Gazette on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009, copies of which were distributed at the direction of School Committee chair Andy Churchill at the public forum on redistricting on Oct. 8 at MM:
“The closing of Mark's Meadow next year is prompting the redrawing of district boundaries. The School Committee voted 5-0 last spring to close Mark's Meadow after extensive public discussion. Elementary enrollment in Amherst has dropped 17 percent in the last 10 years. The committee needed to find a way to save money, and Mark's Meadow is the smallest school.
We hope speakers tonight don't waste time going over this decision.”
