Hamilton Avenue School is by far the worst performing school in Greenwich in standardized testing, ranking 387 out of 544 elementary schools in last year’s Connecticut Mastery Test. Greenwich’s best – Riverside School – came in at No. 19.
That’s quite a delta between 19 and 387. It’s Greenwich’s version of East Egg and West Egg.
Moreover, Hami Ave was recently cited by the state as failing to make adequate yearly progress on state achievement exams under the federal No Child Left Behind act.
This week, lost in the elections coverage and assorted other stories like the latest scandal at Greenwich Hospital was this article in the Greenwich Time. It was the most important story this year in my opinion.
Click here for Greenwich Time article
It shows our new superintendent Sidney Freund taking aggressive action to fix the single biggest problem in Greenwich – the troubled schools as measured by every standardized test available which are dragging down the reputation of the entire school district. From what I read in the story, Freund wants to shift $38,000 from a swimming program to fund the development of a new science lab. He also questions the wisdom of busing kids to the Boys and Girls Club in Greenwich during the school day. He’d rather have them in school boning up on their math and reading.
Now, anyone who reads my blog regularly knows my views on the schools. I am a Greenwich resident with no child currently attending the public schools. By all accounts, I should be part of the big vocal conservative voice of empty nesters in Greenwich who do not want their tax dollars increased to support the schools for which they get no direct benefit. Greenwich has an unusually small public school population (about 8900 students) for a city – sorry town – with 62,000 people, owing to the fact that 18 percent of the kids go to private schools. This year the town whacked $4 million from the school budget forcing the new superintendent to do things like shift money from one bucket to another.
Personally, I am appalled and embarrassed that I live in a community where the median price of a home is $2 million but we act like we live in some shanty town in West Virginia, forcing our head of schools to beg for pennies. But that’s another story. This is an overwhelmingly Republican town, and if I don’t like it, I suppose I can always move to Westport.
But this post isn’t my usual rant about the school budget. It’s about some of the parents at Hamilton who don’t want Freund to shift the funds. As I said earlier, I am embarrassed that we have come to the point of forcing Freund to make these choices. But he is acting in greater interest of the children of Hamilton School. He knows we are intertwined as residents of a single community whether we accept that or not. The fact is Hamilton’s low scores bring down the average scores for the entire district and places Greenwich lower and lower in state rankings – now No. 40 out of 195. Westport, by the way, is No. 1.
Headlines blaring out our failure to comply with federal minimum standards don’t do any of us any good either. The headlines say “Greenwich Schools fail.” They aren’t parsed as “Chickahominy schools” or “Riverside schools.” It’s a blot on the entire town every time it happens.
Freund also knows that the elementary students at Hamilton will grow up to be high school students someday when they will take the Connecticut Academic Performance Test which has a science component. He is smart to try to instill a love of science at the elementary level.
These moves by Freund is the first sign that we have the right guy pulling the levers, in my opinion. The parents at Hamilton have a right to be distressed about the loss of the skating and swimming programs. But they live in a town where on Tuesday it was decided overwhelmingly that those things are unnecessary and frivolous. Given the hand he has been dealt, our superintendent is doing the right thing. He deserves our support.
