Our Campaign Platform

 

Quality Curriculum and Instruction; Effective Engagement with All Students

 

We believe that our District's top priority must be engaging, challenging and enabling growth for every student – from struggling learners to high achievers, from disaffected students to those with special needs, and especially the forgotten middle. Doing so requires paying attention to the specific needs of every student and providing teachers with the instructional leadership and practical supports they need to sustain such efforts. We are heartened by the introduction of Dr. Ramos' proposed policy on Access and Equity. To make it effective, we need to ensure that students have the foundational skills to take advantage of the best that our schools have to offer. We will fight to:

 

• Close the persistent and well-documented racial achievement gap – an indicator of a deeper, District-wide problem of ineffective approaches to engagement, a problem that transcends race and impacts all students.

 

• Ensure that the school system adopts a child-centered approach that informs all decisions about teaching, learning, safety and security.

 

• Create a school system that fosters an inclusive culture, where every family feels welcomed, embraced, and respected.

 

• Enable teachers to succeed in building relationships with, and fostering academic success for, all their students by providing the systemic supports they need to do so.

 

• Establish effective and timely oversight by the Board to ensure that the District uses a cohesive, transparent and fair approach for assessing the progress of each child that drives appropriate placement recommendations.  Such an approach would use varied and meaningful measurements to inform instruction, promote student growth, and foster parental confidence that all students are being challenged to the full extent of their abilities.

 

• Empower and motivate teachers to create instructional approaches that engage and challenge every student, that build on the best elements of the Common Core standards and instructional best-practices, but which have, as their top priority, stimulating students' curiosity to make them self-motivated learners.

 

• Enhance our curriculum to provide a stronger focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math (STEAM), while continuing to evolve our rich offerings in all other areas.
   

• At Columbia, incorporate the use of online courses that provide college credit as a means to dramatically expand quality curriculum offerings while reducing the complexities and conflicts in an already-strained school schedule.
   

• For Columbia students, explore the use of structured internships to give them exposure to a range of professions.

 

• Put an end to the frustrating roadblocks too often encountered by parents of children with disabilities when they try to ensure that promised services are actually provided.
   

• Ensure that the District's provision of inclusion classes for students with disabilities complies with the law and is consistent with educational best-practice.

 

• Ensure that academic intervention efforts from K-12 are timely and aggressive, with staffing always matched to actual needs, seeking to ensure that all students are reading on grade level by third grade or, for older students, within 18 months of transferring into our District.

 

• Ensure that every child has a mentor and an advocate within the school community.

 

• Ensure that discipline imposed on students is based on clear, sensible and consistent District-wide rules, that student and parental rights are fully observed, and that disciplinary decisions are consistent across all schools.

 

• Identify and create the external partnerships and resources needed to establish innovative programs that meet the needs of all children through targeted before- and after-school educational activities coordinated with each student's classroom teacher and other educational specialists.

 

 

Communications and Transparency

 

We believe that District communications to families, students and the community must provide complete transparency and full disclosure for parents on decisions that affect their children. We will work to:

 

• Establish leadership and accountability as a shared responsibility of the Board, teachers and administrators.

 

• Rebuild trust by engaging families with useful, timely, complete, consistent and accessible information.
   

• Expand information on the website, ensuring that it contains timely, complete and easily searchable information on a well-defined list of topics, with that list reviewed annually by the Board and parent representatives, including the elementary Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs), middle and high school Home and School Associations (HSAs) and the Special Education Parent Advisory Council (SEPAC).

 

• Support Dr. Ramos in fulfilling his recent promise that all inquiries from parents receive an initial response within 48 hours and that nothing slips through the cracks.

 

• Empower teachers to raise issues with the understanding that their suggestions will get full and fair consideration up the chain of command.

 

• Support parental "right to know" and make full transparency a top priority in communications regarding District policies, placement criteria and the academic and disciplinary decision-making processes.

 

• Leverage appropriate technology and establish a defined, proactive communications process that is aligned to District priorities, tracks and reports progress against milestones, and documents ongoing concerns.

   

 

Budget, Finance and New Sources of Revenue

 

Our schools are essential to the long-term vitality of our towns. We believe that holding the line on taxes requires more than just adopting a tax target in September and then accepting with little question the Administration's budget proposal in March and April.  We believe in a collaborative and public budgeting process that is timely, fully informed and transparent throughout. We are committed to ending the District's perpetual budget crisis. We will work to:

 

• Ensure that the Superintendent publicly explains in detail how his proposed budget will fund all required and desired services at his proposed staffing levels.

 

• Align spending with top priorities set by the Board and Administration, rather than just rolling over the amounts on all budget lines from one year to the next.

 

• Cause the District to operate from a foundation of transparency and fiscal responsibility, specifying a business-quality approach to the District's budgetary analyses so that the spending alternatives considered during budget preparation are fully explained and documented.

 

• Ensure that the District collaborates with the towns and local non-governmental entities to maximize use of resources and achieve effective coordination of after-school, security and other services.

 

• Mobilize expertise in the community, on the Board, and in the Administration, to identify public/private grants and new sources of revenue.

 

• See that the District provides a more complete financial plan for the new Montrose facility that maximizes tuition revenue by effective marketing of the program to pre-school parents.

 

• Collaborate with municipal officials to broaden the local tax base and reduce the use of tax abatements, which ultimately impact school funding.

 

• Establish an effective, long-term planning process that lays the basis for additional operational efficiencies, takes into account the "new normal" of high enrollment, and manages facilities and capital spending over a 20-year horizon.

 

• Help spearhead a statewide campaign by community stakeholders that will build effective alliances with communities across the state to force the next governor and legislature to fully fund NJ's school aid formula, targeting 10-20% increases in our District's state aid for several years to come.

 

 

 Leadership, Board Governance and More Effective Administration

 

We believe in a culture of leadership, accountability and collaboration for Board members, administrators, teachers and students, built on a foundation of trust and respect. We will:

 

• Use the Board's oversight authority to ensure that the Superintendent pays adequate attention to the pressing issue of security, utilizing outside expertise where necessary, triple-checking that all procedures are consistently followed by all district staff and requesting any additional funding required in his 2016-17 budget request.
   

• Lead the Board to use its policy-making and oversight authority to ensure more effective leadership by the Superintendent, enable more effective management by all principals and program leaders, and guarantee more timely reporting and accountablity.

 

• Work to retain our best talent by making our District a desirable place to work – providing a support structure, organizational culture and school schedule that enable daily teacher collaboration and mentoring.

 

• Demand an aggressive recruitment approach, similar to private-sector efforts, that identifies and goes after the best talent in the field and, as part of this effort, increases the pool of highly-qualified candidates of color.