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The Greenwich Board of Education met last week to discuss, among other things, the three goals detailed for the Superintendent, aligned to the 2024-2025 strategic plan.
The Superintendent's goals include continuing to provide strong curriculum, ample resources and appropriate materials to maximize teaching and learning; to lead the organizational approach to ensure fidelity of the implementation of the Special Education Action Plan; and to provide oversight working towards the District and leadership priorities.
Greenwich Superintendent Toni Jones does seem to ignore several concerns the Board of Education raised in June regarding these very goals, while perhaps more important goals seem to be excluded.
For instance, the Board expressed concerns over the Special Education Program.
Yet Proposed Goal #2 does not address the concerns over staffing and academic performance of special education students. It’s merely a goal to oversee the organizational tasks required in order to "review the current effectiveness" of the program.
The concerns raised by the Board were not about checking the box to make sure a meeting was held. The growth of special education students was the issue, and the growth of these students is currently negative. Shouldn't the goal be to turn this trend around?
It also seems particularly odd after Jones spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with Boston's Public Consulting Group to help her implement "effective change in the Greenwich Special Education Program". She went on to increase special education spending to more than $50 million, growing expenditures at double the rate of the schools across Connecticut.
Weirdly, the district started the year at least six paraprofessionals short. Students clearly cannot be getting services if the district is short on staff every single day. Where is all the new money being spent?
By the way, we won't know how the Special Education Program is even performing until March, or more specifically whether meetings are being held, since that’s the goal and metric the BOE is using to test success. You'd think the goal should be about student performance, shouldn't it?
No wonder parents of special education students look at these goals, shaking their heads in frustration. There goes another year with ZERO action on concerns that the BOE articulated over a year ago.
How long will the Board let these concerns linger before it makes a change to create an equal opportunity for the district's challenged learners to succeed?
There’s nothing in the Superintendent's goals regarding communication over public concerns.
So many times last year parents were told NOTHING when a man walked into Western Middle School and hung out in the girls bathroom for 30 minutes. Greenwich Public Schools need better communication. The vague emails and Friday evening phone calls are simply insufficient.
There’s nothing in the Superintendent's goals to address the high level of staff and administrator turnover, nor the development of internal resources to strengthen educators and administrators. The priorities are directed at providing legal briefings to the Board, opportunities for the board to visit schools, and monthly check-ins with the superintendent.
Shouldn’t those activities be a given for the job, and not some lofty strategic goal? And exactly what is driving the high turnover?
There’s nothing in the goals regarding the need for administrators to collaborate with school staff, either.
Nor is there anything in the goals to address Superintendent Jones' penchant for breaking the BOE's own policies and regulations.
Once again, the superintendent who barely survived an extension vote last year is not listening to the Board of Education, and appears to have her own agenda. As long as she scrapes by, most BOE members seem to be okay with letting it slide another year.
Maybe this will be the year the BOE holds her accountable? (Don't worry, we won't hold our breath!)
What ever happened to the outrage over the change in foreign language learning in the elementary schools? Did the Board just give up? Did Jones wear the Board down? Or maybe the foreign language change didn't directly impact any children of Board members, so it wasn't a high priority?
Will the BOE even bother holding Superintendent Jones accountable to the strategic plan metrics that she herself selected (even though it didn't last year)?
Or will the Board let that slip again and just come up with another excuse to keep kicking the can down the road, tacking on another year to Jones' tenure, thereby allowing her to continue her apparent equity and social justice mission?
