I am a former chemistry teacher and head wrestling coach at Amity. My three children are Amity graduates who have gone on to successful careers in engineering and medical fields. I have lived in the town for almost 40 years and I contributed to the community through various roles in the Boy Scouts, town sports leagues and Assumption Church.

Furthermore, I worked in the corporate world for twenty-five years before becoming an educator. After earning my Ph.D. in chemistry, I advanced through positions of increasing responsibility to become the vice president of research and development of an international chemical company. My second career started as an associate professor of chemistry at Western Connecticut State University. From there, I jumped at the opportunity to teach chemistry and coach my sons at Amity.

Begin to reverse the decay of Amity’s academic performance as measured by the falling rankings of our school. An increasing influx of time consuming, non-academic programs and policies have weakened the skills-based education our children will need to be successful.

Improve the morale of teachers and staff which is at a very low level due to failed support by the superintendent and the Amity BOE. We are losing the strong, confident teachers that made the school admired in the state. Yes, some went via retirement, but I know of others who just left or are seriously looking to leave.

Simple answer: Data. Obtain, and manage to, hard number measurements of academic performance. How are we doing in terms of preparing our students for their next level of education and ultimately their success as contributing members of society? Solid performance should be based on competencies in the traditional three “Rs” (reading, writing and arithmetic) and not on soft, feel-good issues that arguably improve the climate in the school for the students but offer very little in terms of employable skills.

Measurements? An improving ranking of Amity by the various ranking entities such as U.S. News and NICHE would be a good numbers-based assessment. Additionally, tracking the numbers of Amity graduates accepted to top ranked schools and academies would be a good measure in striving to improve this performance which seems to have been falling off our previous accomplishments. You can’t just crow about the accomplishments of the truly gifted students in the school who would be successful even in lower ranked school systems.

First off, the Amity school budget must be completely transparent to the taxpayers of the three towns supporting it. Nonsense in dealings with surplus funds must stop or we will lose the credibility needed to fund the top-notch education we desire for our students. I believe that Amity school budget should increase annually in response to the inflationary nature of the U.S. economy and for expressed investments in the education process.

Another Science Research-type program would be an additional worthwhile investment. The towns are willing to pay for excellence. It improves real estate values – the Amity school system has been a traditional draw to the BOW community.

The state sets the overall standards for education and the board is an agent of the state. The board is in a critical position to negotiate the balance between generalized state directives and the communicated specific intentions of the community it serves. The administration serves to implement the balanced objectives into the classroom. The two-way dialog is imperative.

Yes, as a teacher at the high school I witnessed a steady intrusion of non-academic initiatives and policies that substantively reduced effective instruction time in the classroom. This resulted in curtailing coverage of some topics to fit into a ~180 day school year.

I believe this began with an overreaction to criticisms in otherwise outstanding NEASC audits and such. The decay has continued through the present with ever increasing socially focused programs at the expense of critical class time. National tests such as AP exams expect a completed curriculum and the hard-number results speak for themselves.

If one argues that students don’t take the AP tests because of the cost, then let’s pay for them through the questioned budget surplus each year.

Obviously, I am biased as a former coach. However, one can correlate the infusion of soft issues and policies in the school climate to the decrease in Amity’s prowess in tough, demanding sports. Amity used to be known as a tough school. The last football championship was 1978 and the last competitive team was 2002. We have had serious struggles trying to fill all weight classes in wrestling to avoid embarrassing forfeits.

Today, we have a hard time fielding competitive squads in several tough sports; save baseball, with an excellent coach and with his semi-natural farm system in the Orange youth baseball league.

The purpose of the school library should be to augment the classroom instruction and not represent sensitive topics outside the curriculum. The Woodbridge public library, just across the street, can serve that purpose for those sincerely interested.

The board should play a role in effecting the mission of the school library as a vehicle of instruction consistent with the school’s curriculum. Granted, every kid with a cell phone has immediate access to whatever they wish to explore and it is the parent’s job to monitor such exposure and not the school’s.

My first reaction was that all this sounds wonderful. In my experience, most such programs, mission statements, guiding principles etc. look marvelous at the onset and then fade into oblivion with follow-through. Furthermore, they are created with the highest intentions and purest, all-encompassing objectives. The proof, though, is in the commitment in the implementation steps and the follow through as flaws emerge.

I have lived through grand industrial initiatives such as: Excellence, Quality Circles, Total Quality Management, and Six-Sigma. Each had lofty goals (and sold many books and funded many consultants) but always seemed to fade in time to the newest next best program when sustained results failed to appear.

First, the board itself needs to act truly independent of the members’ political parties and act solely in the interest of producing an excellent academic product from the school.

Second, the board meetings need to be more embracing and less combative to those in the community with serious alternative viewpoints. There was a community outreach in May that was a step in the right direction, although a more open format would be worthwhile.

Third, the board must find an effective mechanism to listen to the needs of the teachers and staff in the building. They are the front line and they can make or break any administrative or board driven initiatives.

Right now, I know for certain, they are not happy campers and we are losing the good (IMO, great) teachers that made the Amity school system the compelling draw to the BOW community as it has been in the past.