News & Events
Melrose School Committee’s role, philosophy discussed at debate
October 27, 2009Melrose Free Press, By Daniel DeMaina Melrose
A debate Monday night between three Melrose School Committee candidates evolved into a discussion about what role the School Committee should play in guiding the school district and how its policies should shape interaction with both school administration and with the public.
The debate was held at the Melrose Veterans Memorial Middle School auditorium, and was hosted by organizers of two local online Web sites — Melrose Cares, hosted by Melrose resident Patricia Wright, and North Shore Tab, a site written and hosted by Revere resident Richard Ireton, who also hosts an online bulletin board at melrosemessages.com.
School Committee incumbent Christine Casatelli and challengers Carrie Kourkoumelis and Jean-Daniel “J.D.” LaRock — the only candidates of the six running for seats on the committee who agreed to participate in the debate — each staked out distinct positions on what the School Committee should undertake, while hammering home themes they’ve repeated throughout their respective campaigns.
Questions were posed to all three candidates and each candidate had 2 minutes to answer. After each candidate gave his or her answer, all three candidates then each had 2 minutes for a rebuttal on that same question. Questions asked by debate moderator Sean Murphy, a Boston Globe reporter, were submitted by the public, according to the organizers. In addition, a two-member panel, which included John Cinella, a Melrose attorney and former member of the Board of Alderman, and Jeffrey Trubisz, the former Melrose High School English Department chairman, asked questions formulated by Trubisz.
Three candidates declined to participate in debate
Three of the six School Committee candidates seeking seats in next month’s biennial city election on Tuesday, Nov. 3, declined to participate in the debate hosted Monday night by Melrose resident Patricia Wright, creator of the Melrose Cares Web site, and Revere resident Richard Ireton, who hosts the North Shore Tab Web site and also hosts melrosemessages.com, an online bulletin board.
In explaining their reasons for not participating in the debate, incumbent Joseph Spinale and challenger Scott Conway both cited what they said is “divisive” and “offensive” content on the North Shore Tab and melrosemessages.com sites, which they further described as bordering on “cyber-bullying,” including the mostly anonymous postings on the melrosemessages.com site.
Incumbent Don Lehman declined participation in the event after questioning the neutrality of the debate, citing Wright’s School Committee candidacy in 2007 (she did not win a seat) and, this year, Wright’s criticism of one of the current candidates to the media.
A question asked by Murphy about the biggest change needed in the way the School Committee conducts business led to a back-and forth between the candidates that centered on whether or not the committee delves deeply enough into certain topics.
LaRock brought up to his theme of increasing “the level of depth and urgency” of committee discussions dealing specifically with student achievement, adding that the committee needs to imbue a sense of transparency and accountability. He said that in watching school committee meetings over the past few months, he has sometimes been struck by the extent to which the committee delegates details of student instruction to the superintendent.
“I believe that comes from a desire not to micromanage, which is a very good thing,” he said. “At the same time, the School Committee shouldn’t be a dispassionate overseer. Let the public hear our conversations and even disagreements.”
Casatelli responded that that the committee delegates instructional policy to the superintendent and other school officials as a matter of letting the experts determine what’s best for students.
“Anyone who knows me knows I’m passionate; it doesn’t mean I have to take off my shoe and hammer it on the desk,” she said, adding that the recent debate over the committee’s public participation policy — which Casatelli voted against — brought respectful, but passionate debate among the committee members.
“We’re not in the business of micromanaging the superintendent,” she continued. “There are education professionals out there. We give them their missions and they do their jobs. None of us have master’s [degrees] in education or work in a classroom, so we let them do what they do best.”
LaRock responded that he was not suggesting that “we replay Khruschev at the U.N.” — referencing the historic moment when the Soviet Union leader banged his shoe on the desk at a United Nations meeting in 1960 — and instead said that he wanted the School Committee to engage in deeper discussion on issues, such as the middle school not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the federal No Child Left Behind Act for special education students and the Lincoln School not meeting AYP for special education and free lunch/low income students.
“If we don’t act quickly, the federal law quickly develops into harsh sanctions that could lead to changes in the schools that none of us would want,” he said. “This is what happens if we don’t address these problems … when I talk about adding a level of depth and urgency about student instruction in a deeper way, it’s not micromanaging or doing the superintendent’s job and the educator’s job.”
Engaging the public
During her campaign, Kourkoumelis has often invoked the issue of how the committee works with the public. On Monday night, she noted her difficulties in obtaining executive meeting minutes and finding out what is on the committee’s bi-monthly meeting agenda. She said that while she did not know if the difficulty she’s faced in obtaining this information is intentionally caused by committee, “it seems that we’ve slipped into a mode where the public is often viewed as adversarial,” and said she would want to make sure the committee does not run afoul of public records and open meeting law.
“I think that the strategic plan is fine … but I don’t think we need to wait five years,” she said, referencing the five-year strategic plan for the school district, for which the superintendent and School Committee are currently seeking volunteers from the public to serve in focus groups. “I think we can start today — immediately — having a better relationship with the public and doing the business in the public eye.”
After the other candidates responded to the question, Kourkoumelis, in her rebuttal, said she has attended almost every School Committee meeting for the past seven years and constantly has to request that the meeting agenda be posted online in advance of the meeting. This led Casatelli to quickly add, “I send it to you!” with a chuckle.
“You do, but that shouldn’t be necessary,” Kourkoumelis responded, noting that a few years ago she asked the district for information on how much the district was spending on legal fees and consultants.
“It took a year of going through a public records request that went all the way to the Secretary of State’s office,” she said. “It should have been available had I walked into the superintendent’s office just to look. I don’t think that any of us want an adversarial relationship, but there are things that we need to be able to see readily. Mr. LaRock pointed out that having that information readily available is essential to function well. I have struggled — and I know many have struggled — to get basic information. This should not be the case.”
Casatelli pointed out some ways she said the committee is improving when it comes to interacting with the public. She said that when she first joined the School Committee, subcommittee meetings were held in the superintendent’s conference room. Those meetings were then changed to the Aldermanic Chambers at City Hall so that the meetings could be televised. She also said that in the past, the committee held meetings at various Melrose schools, something she said could be revisited as long as those meetings could be televised.
The School Committee is also launching a regular e-newsletter, Casatelli said, touching upon the need to use technology more effectively, an issue Casatelli has previously invoked during her campaign. She said that the e-newsletter would inform members of the public about the business conducted at the most recent School Committee meeting — items that were discussed, summaries of those discussions and any votes that were taken.
“It’s about time we used technology a little bit better and making what we do in the committee reach a little farther,” she said.
In response to Kourkoumelis’ stated problems with obtaining documents, Casatelli, who is currently the committee’s chairwoman, was adamant that the School Committee has followed public records and open meeting laws in the past, noting that officials from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees have come to Melrose on several occasions to speak with committee members about the state’s open meeting law.
“I, as chair, make sure that no law is ever violated,” she said.
Policy as more than public participation
Panel member John Cinella asked the candidates if there are policy issues that have been ignored or marginalized and, if so, to name those policies and explain their significance.
Kourkoumelis brought up potential problems with the way principal search committees are formed and conducted, and cited problems last year when members of the public put an item on the agenda for discussion regarding problems in the high school’s physics department. That led to parents and students showing up at a School Committee meeting en masse to address their concerns as a “measure of last resort” because they had no other method of redress, she said (“Physics friction,” Free Press, May 15, 2008).
“Large groups of families struggled to place items on the agenda, even though we had followed every step of the district policies,” Kourkoumelis said. “It just seemed really counterproductive. They [the policies] served our district well — and nobody seemed to be following them. A large group of families ended up seriously disenfranchised.”
Casatelli acknowledged that the committee “should have listened a little harder” when it came to the physics department situation last year and pointed to the current situation regarding a canceled bus route near the Ripley School as an example of progress (“Canceled Ripley School bus route has parents scrambling for solutions,” Free Press, Oct. 22, 2009).
She said that at the School Committee meeting scheduled for the night after the debate, the committee had the issue on its agenda and had invited two parents — who were representing the entire group of parents affected by the cancelled bus route — to discuss the situation with the committee and try to find a solution.
“You’ve spoken, we’ve heard, and we’re making changes,” she said.
LaRock said that questions about public participation continue to pop up when committee policy is discussed and, as the policy director for the state’s Executive Office of Education, he views policy in a different way. He again focused on student achievement, bringing up Melrose students’ 55 percent pass rate on Advanced Placement exams and SAT scores that hover near the state average.
“Policy is something much deeper than just a policy on public publication, or just rules,” he said. “Policy, at its best for education, is intimately tied into instruction and all the details of how to implement higher goals for our students. I think that policy in the way that has been spoken about [public participation] is actually less important than what I think of as policy: the plan for establishing goals, creating architecture to see them through, and the specific steps to realize those goals.”
Kourkoumelis added that in terms of policy, she has not heard discussions at School Committee meetings about current problems such as Advanced Placement classes at the high school with more than 30 students, which she called an “unworkable model” when compared to the nationwide recommendation for those classes of 10-11 students.
“If we had a district vision and philosophy that we could tie back to, it would then make sense,” she said. “We would then not spend time [during School Committee meetings] talking about minutiae.”
Casatelli responded that John Buxton, Melrose High School Guidance Department chairman, was attending the School Committee meeting this week to talk about AP scores, but said some of the deeper policy questions LaRock raised are “not the kind of issues we can solve in 2 hours at a School Committee meeting. There’s lots of business to take care of.”
With regard to those class sizes, Casatelli cited the fiscal restraints facing the district, though she agreed that 30 students in an AP class is “not acceptable.
“But when we face more cuts from the state, we’ll have to look at our choices, and not a lot of them are good choices,” she said. “I welcome the discussion and we can raise the points, but we have to look to our educators and ask them for their solutions to these problems.”