A few days ago, I reached out to district staff with a way to restore the Middle School Science Bowl program. It was a highly popular program back in my time, and its students routinely placed at the national level, but it died out at Grover Middle School after the retirement of its coach, Rae McKenna.
In response, I received such illuminating lines as “the district has done away with the program,” (after prompting) and that there were “concerns regarding the appropriate allocation of building-level resources, ” which is perplexing, since we were proposing to meet all of the costs.
Unfortunately, this speaks to a general trend in our towns. Everyone has their story of interacting with an administrator who has been more noncooperative than Gandhi, and district staffers have quietly blocked everything from hackathons to car washes.
Sometimes, their concerns are valid, but far more often they reflect an unwillingness to change the status quo. And while this attitude isn’t universal–many administrators serve their posts with clarity and candor–apathetic and uncommunicative staffers are sufficiently common to warrant concern, and correction.
Our district is full of diverse students with diverse identities. But what unites them is a fierce desire to pursue their goals–to build robots, study science, paint artwork and put on plays. And they deserve an administration that works with them to make that happen, instead of one that acts to make their school years that much sparser, that much more barren, that much less alive.
One remedy would be to institute minimum standards of timeliness and detail in administrator-student and administrator-parent correspondence. That, incidentally, isn’t just good for students and their families–better communication builds goodwill on both sides, and would lead to a more productive relationship between WW-P staffers and residents.
Another would be to give students and the community a public forum to propose events and request resources like buildings and fields. Any administrator’s objections to those events would be public and prompt and any failures to respond would be tracked. That way, the assumption would be that our students are free to innovate, instead of being free to color within the lines.
Arnav Sood
West Windsor
