character ed & open enrollment committees

fyi, here is this week's email to the principal, various supers, and Board.

These things are getting to be like a serialized novel. You know, like Charles Dickens only not literature.


back on topic: If you have thoughts about the open enrollment committee concept, I'd like to hear. This is an idea Ed and I have talked about for years, going back to the school meltdown we experienced at an autism charter school.

Hi Joe (and c.) ---

Can we think about putting together a parent/professional committee to vet the posters and slogans being displayed at the middle school?

You’re probably not aware that more than a few parents objected to the violence against women posters that were displayed in the school last semester. (“Every 15 seconds a woman is struck by her partner.”)

Boys were standing around counting down 15 seconds and then shouting BOOM!

I presume that girls were listening to this.

This means we’ve told children as young as 11 years of age that some men physically assault women with whom they are having sexual relations.

(And we can’t teach algebra in the 8th grade?? Sorry. I couldn’t resist.)

Now we’ve got an enormous display in the foyer featuring celebrities and their parents who “drank and drugged too much” ---- at a minimum this is an incredibly crude way of describing the situation of living with a parent who is struggling with substance abuse.

Leaving aside the needs of students and their families, this isn’t good for the school.

District personnel need to reach out to parents. The Board is already doing so, but it can’t be the Board’s job alone.

Starting with an open-enrollment committee on character education seems “win-win” to me.

Such a committee would give parents a say in the posters and information distributed to their children; it would help the school prevent mistakes via a more thorough vetting process; and, as is the case with any committee, it would distribute the blame when mistakes are made.

I don’t say this to be cynical. It’s important to recognize that where character education is concerned mistakes will be made. Character involves values and morals; there’s no way around it. And character education, when undertaken by a public institution, is risky business.

A committee constructed along these lines might work:

• open enrollment; invite anyone who is interested to join (I would consider opening it to the entire community, not just to parents, as I believe Dr. Matusiak may have done with the wellness committee – perhaps get some older folks with wisdom to share involved)

• ask for parents who are professionals in the realm of child and adolescent psychiatry and psychology to join, but don’t limit it to professionals – invite everyone – we have an extremely large number of highly competent, hardworking full-time parents in Irvington/Tarrytown whose expertise as parents is seldom recognized or sought

• establish a waiting list if a large number of parents apply

• set term limits for committee members
  

• publish the names of parents who are serving along with an email address at which they can be reached
  

• publish minutes, etc.

An open and transparent Committee on Character Education wouldn’t have to be a time-consuming or difficult undertaking, and it would earn the school and the district good will.

Given the fact that the majority of parents appear to support character education in the abstract, but then object to the specifics, there probably isn’t a huge potential for downside.

Even if a Committee on Character Education were to create unforeseen difficulties, that in itself would be useful information to have. Character education isn’t a core mission of the school; better to have parents and school personnel working out their problems in a non-essential realm.

It’s a thought.

Catherine J.

It's definitely time for the school to involve parents in character ed issues and decisions.

I mentioned on the old site that a couple of years back the high school split the town in two as a result of a gay tolerance assembly. The speaker apparently had a website telling teenagers that their sexual identities weren't set and advising them to experiment with homosexuality to find out if they might be gay. So I'm told.

Naturally I missed out on the whole thing, either because I'm friendless or oblivious or both.

(Since I'm not friendless, we'll have to go with oblivious.)

Anyway, even though I missed out on the whole thing, I heard about it afterwards and it was awful. This is a very small town. The high school elected to host an assembly guaranteed to stir up massive conflict amongst the citizens, and I don't think anyone said he was sorry, either. As far as I can tell it was another case of the school doing whatever it wanted to do and the town paying the bill.

Like the man said.

Now we've got wife-beating and drinking, drugging parents festooning the middle school walls.

It's time for parents to come in from out of the cold.