WCSU Act 46 Committee Update
Please Join us March 8th from 6pm-8:30pm in Room 128 for our meeting. Here is a brief update of our process.
The Washington Central Act 46 Committee resumed its work on January 25th, 2017 after reaching an impasse in October. We decided that we had done so much work up to that point that we owed it to our communities to complete our exploration of all issues. The decision was made not to limit ourselves to ideas explicitly allowed in Act 46 but to reexamine our goals, our hopes, and our fears in order to develop the a model of school governance that could work for us. Most critically, our main goal as a Committee is to decide how best to organize and mange educational resources efficiently to maximize student excellence across the five towns, in a manner that reflects and wins support of the voters. This general goal aligns with the goals of ACT46 to provide the framework we need to make a decision.
We have had seven meetings facilitated by a team of professional mediators. We have successfully probed more deeply into the key issues of local (town) control of what happens in our individual elementary schools and the value of a singular, vision of education for all the pre-K through 12 students in the five towns of Washington Central Supervisory Union (WCSU).
On March 8th we will determine whether the committee can agree on a one model of governance to present to the voters of the five towns. We are discussing two possibilities with details yet to be worked out:
I. A single representative board responsible for all educational policy and operations in the five elementary school and U-32. A key part of this model is (6) local School councils, one at each school, which will work with local educators and make recommendations to the representative board on key areas including policy, budget, hiring, and evaluation.
Councils will include the local members of the representative board in addition to teachers, principals, parents and non-parent community members. The local council would magnify the voice of locally elected members on the representative board while doing the hard work of assuring local involvement in each local school.
II. Six boards to include a representative board responsible for the centralized general education pre-K – 12 policy and budget with 5 local (town) boards that would be responsible for elementary budgets, hiring and other school-related issues.
Details of either model remain to be worked out. But the key decision to be made on March 8th is whether the committee can come to agreement—by a supermajority vote of 9 out of 11 voting members—on one of the general approaches. The committee at its inception, recognizing the importance of this decision and what it means to all our communities, agreed to the supermajority vote.
If the committee is unable to reach agreement about a proposal to be presented to voters, its work will be reported to the WCSU board and eventually each local school board will determine next steps under Act 46.
I am confident that on Wednesday March 8th we will be able to thread the needle through the issues that divide us. I am really proud of the way we are communicating now and how these conversations have brought our five towns together in a different light and with a stronger bond.
Respectfully,
Flor Diaz Smith
WCSU Act 46 Chair
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