Troubling sign of the times. The following letter sent to all GHS parents from headmaster speaks for itself:
Dear Parents/Guardians,
Over the past few months, there has been a spike in the number of students being arrested for possession of marijuana and possession with the intent to sell both on school grounds and throughout the community. We are not sure if the increase in the number of arrests is a result of increased marijuana use by our students or the result of better surveillance and enforcement by our security and the Greenwich Police. Regardless, the situation is not acceptable.
Substance abuse and risky behaviors are problems that exist beyond Greenwich High School. They are community-wide issues that will only be addressed effectively with a community-wide response from parents, schools – public and private – Town agencies and departments (Police, Social Services, etc.), religious and community organizations, and the students themselves. The District hopes to engage the collective community in a discussion about and action towards addressing these issues.
Greenwich High School has a zero tolerance policy for drug possession or drug use on campus. The intent of this letter is to inform you of additional steps we will be taking to enforce our zero tolerance policy and to educate our students about the dangers and consequences of drug use. Our ultimate goal is to educate students to make healthy and safe choices regarding illicit substances and to ensure that these substances are not brought onto the GHS campus.
On the enforcement side, we are working in partnership with the Greenwich Police to bring the canine unit onto campus. The Greenwich Police have a State of Connecticut certified canine. The dog can detect any illicit drug. We will use the dog to sniff cars in the parking lot. If the canine detects an illegal substance in the vehicle, the student who drove the vehicle onto GHS property will be subject to a search of his/her person and belongings by a GHS administrator. Parents/guardians should be aware that the person to whom a car is registered is liable for anything in that car, even if their child is the primary user of the car. We will use the canine to sniff lockers and any other locations we believe may have been used to hide drugs. We will continue to use the dog in random searches for the remainder of the year.
Alongside this stepped up enforcement, we are planning additional education for our students about the dangers and health implications of drug use. Each grade will have an assembly where Greenwich Police and GHS educators will help students understand the potential implications of drug use and of bringing drugs on campus. We will use these assemblies to highlight other risky behavior that some students engage in: sexting (the practice of sending sexually explicit pictures of oneself or others via cell phones), bullying, date violence, and alcohol consumption.
GREENWICH HIGH SCHOOL
Please know that our ultimate intent is to deter students from engaging in high risk behavior. Our Vision of the Graduate calls for students who “conduct themselves in an ethical and responsible manner,” and who are “responsible for their own mental and physical health.” We will work with you, the parents or guardians, the students and other partners to ensure that GHS is as free of illicit drugs as possible.
Sincerely,
Chris Winters
Headmaster
So Chris Winters gets the jobs.
That’s a good thing.
Last June I wrote that the school administration should have saved the money on the search firm for a new headmaster. It was obvious that Chris was the guy. The only people who didn’t know that was the school board. They spent $17,600 to find out.
Oh well, at least the dithering Weissler administration is finally history.
But reading between the lines of the Greenwich Time story – click here – you can see the monumental challenges facing GHS.
At least four major issues were mentioned in the article – special ed, weighted AP grades, preparing the non-college bound student and attendance policy. Separately, they all seemed worthwhile. But taken in total, they represented the conflicting constituencies at GHS, which has no apparent strategy and no priorities. The school administration simply caves in to the loudest group – whether it’s special education, science classes or school bus routes.
This is no way to run a school district. You may or may not agree with the Friars of Field Point Road, but at least I know the priorities there: Keep the mill rate low at all costs and don’t borrow long term. Whether you like it, that’s a clear strategy in Greenwich and for many generations, it has served the town well – most of the time.
So what are the schools’ priorities?
Winters said his top priority is moving GHS closer to the “Vision of the Graduate,” a document outlining the ideal skills and traits that Greenwich students should have when they graduate.
Ideal graduate?
Achieving those goals means making GHS more “rigorous, innovative and responsive,” Winters said.
Huh?
Okay, Chris. You got the job. Your don’t have to run for office any more. Now stop with the psycho babble. Who can argue with “rigorous, innovative and responsive?” What are you really saying?
How about going to work to get GHS to rank occasionally in some Top 10 list other than FCIAC standings? Okay, I’ll settle for Top 100. No, I’ll actually settle for Top 1,000.
In the absence of any discernible strategy or measurable goals for the Greenwich school district, here are my recommendations:
1. GHS should be consistently one of the Top 10 high schools in the state as measured by the annual Grade 10 standardized tests. (It now ranks No. 26)
2. GHS’s main priority should be college prep. Too many studies have shown the success gap between college graduates and people with only a high school education. If someone wants a vocational education, fine. But that shouldn’t be GHS’s job. McDonald’s and Burger King have fine training programs for those who don’t want to go to college. I don’t want to spend my tax dollars educating kids to flip burgers. And if you do, we will all be heavily punished in our declining real estate values.
(By the way, someone should tell Peter Tesei that an 89 percent college admission rate from our high school graduates is not something we want to make public – let alone brag about. Most towns like Greenwich should be well north of 90 percent … see Tesei remarks on the town website)
3. Close the performance gap. Implement state-of-the-art remedial learning programs at Ham Ave, New Lebanon and Julian Curtiss elementary schools. Chris Winters cannot do this alone. By the time kids reach GHS, they already have been sliced, diced, tested, sorted and corrugated. Chris Winters is a good headmaster, but he is not a miracle worker. Greenwich needs to ensure that all all kids can read, write and do math with proficiency by Grade 3 (when the Connecticut Mastery tests are first taken). Let’s try and bring the western part of the town up to par with Old Greenwich and Riverside.
4. Support special ed. GHS is actually lucky that only 11 percent of its student population requires special education. Some inner city high schools have special ed populations exceeding 20 percent. This is a highly charged and emotional area. Greenwich has the resources to ensure that our special needs students get the best education. This is the promise and responsibility of a public school system.
5. Sports are secondary. I would pay for the above priorities by de-emphasizing sports. There are days when I wonder whether GHS is actually a giant sports complex instead of a school. As my friend Bob Horton pointed out in his inaugural column in the Greenwich Time, do we really need 14 football coaches? Is water polo really more important than our standing in Advanced Placement?
Let’s build a pedagogical palace and not a Cow Palace.
Speaking of AP, it seems to me any student willing to take an AP course and then score at least a 3 on the AP exam has earned the right to have his or her grade weighted. I think that’s a simple decision.
Those are my recommendations, what are yours?
P.S. To the reader who invited me to move back to the shanty I grew up in, I can only reply that even if I wanted to, they tore down that shanty in Taipei years ago and built a luxury condo complex. I didn’t spend that much time in the shanty anyway because while growing up in Taiwan in the Fifities, I went to school six days a week, 10 hours a day. Since then Taiwan had one of the fastest growing GDPs in the world.
The next time you see a fire truck roaring down Putnam Ave with sirens and lights ablaring, the chances are better than even that you’re witnessing a false alarm being played out.
No one seems to know for sure – not the nice woman who oversees the alarm ordinance, not the chairman of the alarms appeal board – but everyone agrees that a huge percentage of the 4,000 annual fire responses in Greenwich are false alarms.
Jim Lash once told me it was as high as 90 percent.
Imagine the enormous waste of fuel and equipment, not to mention the real threats to the firemen and others who are endangered every time a fire truck and ambulance peel out onto the busy streets of Greenwich in response to a false alarm.
First of all, let us attempt to define what constitutes a false alarm. If someone burns a piece of toast and it triggers a smoke alarm – and that alarm then is picked up by the town’s central alarm office sending emergency equipment – it is technically not a false alarm. But it is still an unnecessary use of our fire fighting resources, in my opinion.
There are 6,900 businesses, offices and residences in Greenwich tied to the town’s automated central alarm system. Greenwich has about 23,000 households. That means a vast majority of Greenwich households do not use the automated alarm system.
I think we should increase the monetary penalties for false alarms dramatically in Greenwich. A lot of the veteran fire professionals worry that some residents will disconnect their alarms to which I respond, “So what?” They can call 911 like the rest of us. If they want the piece of mind of having automated responses from firefighters every time they burn their toast, let them pay for it. I shouldn’t have to subsidize their desire to sleep better at night.
The town just raised the registration fee from $10 to $20 to be tied to the central alarm system. That’s peanuts. They had no problem tripling my mooring fee from $35 to $100, and yet my boat doesn’t infringe on other taxpayers. No one is subsiding my irrational desire to float in a big piece of plastic on Long Island Sound. I pay the town more than $900 for storage and other usage fees for my nautical addiction. Seems to me we should be looking for the same kind of fee from those who have already spend thousands on fancy alarms.
Right now, the town does not charge for the first false alarm of the year, only $50 for the second, $100 for the third, $150 for the fourth and $200 for the fifth.
Here is usage fee schedule I would implement:
$200 annual fee to connect to the system; $100 for the first response regardless of cause; $1,000 for the second false alarm; $1,500 for the third; $2,000 for the fourth, and $5,000 for the fifth.
I’ll bet you’d see a rapid decline in the number of false alarms.
I am still in total denial about the value of my home in Riverside. Like many Greenwich residents I harbored a false sense of security about local real estate. When I moved here 10 years ago, I was told that Greenwich values held better than virtually any other town in Connecticut. There was only one year – 1991 – that suffered an actual decline in Greenwich home values during the Post-war era.
So what we’re seeing now is a significant structural adjustment, owing to the over-heated marketplace over the same 10 years since I moved here. I peeked at the Greenwich home values page of Zillow.com recently and it was ugly. Click here
Take a close look at how we compared with neighboring towns and it reflects the effects of the upward spike we enjoyed before the crash in 2007. Whatever goes up fast, comes down harder. Same story for Darien, which shows a 20 percent decline year over year.
Someone please put a restraining order on the local Republicans for self protection so that they don’t injure themselves banging their heads against the wall. They must be apoplectic after being awaken from the sweet fantasy of a November victory by a rude, late night attack coming from no less than another Greenwich resident.
So instead of licking their chops over the carcass of an ambulatory Chris Dodd, they are suddenly looking up at the hulking presence of the most popular member of the opposite party looming over them like a bad dream.
Moreover, a smackdown primary between the wrestling diva and the former congressperson from the Second District looms. It would be divisive, expensive and extremely entertaining.
I covered Richard Blumenthal when he was one of the youngest U.S. attorneys in history back in 1978 and I was the New Haven bureau chief for the Hartford Courant. No reporter then – and I am guessing now – ever had to go through an intermediary to talk to Blumenthal. No flaks. No aides. Richard Blumenthal always took your call. He was one of the most accessible politicians I ever covered. I left Connecticut in 1983 for the Boston Globe and followed his career in absentia.
Like may folks, I found Blumenthal a little too publicity hungry as AG. But boy, he sure made good copy. And over 19 years as AG he also scored a lot of chits with the little people of Connecticut – the out-of-work single mother who battled her insurance company, the working class Joe who got a raw deal from a used car purveyor.
My guess is that as candidate for the United States Senate, Richard Blumenthal is going to try and cash in on those chits. And the people will deliver them by the buckets full.
I shot this on Christmas Eve and meant to post it earlier. It makes a good case for making a generous donation to the Sound Beach Volunteer Fire Department especially if you are a resident of Old Greenwich or Riverside. The department is trying to raise $100,000 in its current drive.
