At Wednesday night's School Committee meeting, veteran member John F.
Ward took a minute from the evening's agenda to acknowledge the Journal
series "Lost in the Middle" which concludes today.
"The articles in the Journal have been very uncomfortable, but I think
something good will come out of them," he said. "I hope that after the
newspaper finishes doing our bleeding for us and letting the acrimony
fly, we can come to the meeting on the 22nd with nothing but solutions."
On June 22, School Committee members will go behind closed doors with
administrators, faculty and teachers' union officials to discuss fixing
the middle school.
That's not all that's happening in the wake of this series. Principal
Donna Valentine met with her faculty this week to set goals.
Is a dialogue on how to improve the school really beginning? If so,
let's hope it's one that will go beyond the finger-pointing stage and
get to the real issue: the city's middle schoolers are getting a bum
deal.
And they know it.
In the last few weeks, I talked to dozens of teachers, officials,
students and others about ways to improve the school. Some of the most
revealing, mature comments came from the children. Their message was
this: Let the adults figure it out and let us be kids.
(It was the kids, by the way, who said, in a school survey that they
didn't have a single teacher they felt comfortable approaching for help
with their school work.)
When they sit down to talk, will the "adults" be open to meaningful
change? I hope so.
Getting a productive conversation started was the goal when the Journal
set out to do this series.
After a year of reporting one crisis after another - principals leaving,
cockroaches crawling, bathhrooms breaking, students fighting and
teachers fuming, I decided to take a closer look at New England's
largest middle school. When I pitched the idea, School Supt. Anthony
D'Acchioli, principal Donna Valentine, teachers' union president Richard
DiPardo and the faculty surprised me by letting me in the door, and, in
some cases, inside their heads.
I was blunt. I was going to write what I saw and what I heard. The
newspaper would devote a full week of stories to the crisis at the
middle school.
The public response has been remarkable. The middle school has been a
much-discussed topic on talk radio. And, more than a hundred readers
submitted comments to the newspaper's online service,
Projo.com. The responses have been thoughtful, feisty and in some cases, a
little disturbing.
One suggested that "a can of gasoline and a match would be a good start."
A parent wrote, "With a fourth grader in Woonsocket, I am frightened to
think what she may face when she enters the middle school. Is private
school our only option for our daughter to get a decent education?"
It's a question no parent in Woonsocket should have to ask. And, in a
poor city like this one, the question of private school simply isn't
realistic.
Todd Flaherty, state Deputy Commissioner for Education, says " Just
think about dropping your kid off with 1,600 kids at a school that's 90
years old with blind spots. What does that say to the kid about how much
we care about them. What kind of signal does that send?"
School Supt. Anthony D'Acchioli says he is leaving the matter of a new
school building to his successor. But, making sure the children inside
that building learn to read and write is his job.
No one argues that it's an easy task. Still, his response to the series
at Wednesday night's School Committee meeting was disappointing.
"Believe none of what you hear and half of what you read," he said each
time he was asked to explain his published criticism of teachers and
their union.
In the course of reporting the series, I spent hours talking with each
of the interest groups: the superintendent, the principal, the teachers,
the students. When comments seemed vague, I pressed further, offering
each person an opportunity to clarify or expand his or her points.
When the key players sit down on June 22, one hopes that they'll believe
what they read and, as John Ward said, they all come to the table with
solutions.
Doesn't the fate of the nine out of ten children at the Woonsocket
Middle School who can't solve a math problem depend on everyone "getting
on board"?
-- Journal staff writer Cynthia Needham may be e-mailed at:
cneedham@projo.com
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