Lincoln's Log

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.

Click here for a chart of the entire Fairfield County

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.

It was just three weeks before Christmas. The school and finance boards went toe-to-toe on the proposed education budget for next year. The finance board wanted a $1 million cut, and the school board stood its ground.
Eventually the school board got its way and the cut was voted down.
Guess which Fairfield County town it was?
Hint: It doesn’t possess the hubris to call itself the Gateway to New England.

Click here for Article

There is a reason Westport has the No. 1 school district in the state (according to a ranking of the most recent statewide test scores) and boasts of the No. 1 high school, Staples, which recently won a silver medal from US News in its annual ranking of the best high schools in the nation. Connecticut Magazine also rated Staples the No. 1 high school in the state.

Last year, Staples students packed the RTM meeting in Westport when it cut the current budget.

Elliott Landon, the legendary superintendent in Westport for the last 12 years, is no passive, get-along, shuffling wallflower. In the last two years, his proposed school budgets called for increases of 7.3 percent and 6.75 percent – in the face of severe declines in tax revenues. Landon is clear-minded about what his role is. He was not hired to build Westport a second-rate school system. He was not hired to worry about the declining tax base. (Greenwich, on the other hand, has had six superintendents in those same 12 years)

When Westport builds its school budget, it starts with the superintendent determining what he needs to give the town the best education for its children.

When Greenwich builds its school budget, it starts with the Board of Estimation and Taxation setting “guidelines” for all departments and schools are no exceptions.

I would like to use this opportunity to aver and reaffirm the truism by which we Connecticut homeowners have come to adopt – that there is a direct relationship between the reputation of the public school system and our property values.

While Greenwich has suffered a decine in its property revenues, so has every other municipality. But Greenwich stands alone in allowing its public schools to suffer a rapid decline over the last 10 years. And this will be reflected in home prices eventually.

Westport spends more than 70 percent of its overall budget on schools. Greenwich, on the other hand, spends 35 percent.

I cannot imagine any school board member in Greenwich publicly taking on the BET.

I cannot imagine GHS students packing an RTM meeting other than protesting some cut in a sports program.

Any politician in Greenwich who challenges the accepted practice of capping annual tax increases to 3.5 percent – NO MATTER WHAT THE NEED – risks total annihilation at the polls. Even Lin Lavery, who slung more mud than an old tractor, never dared to violate the sanctity of the mill rate altar that ultimately defines everything that is Greenwich.

None of this would have mattered as long as the schools maintained its facade of giving the town a reasonably acceptable school system. But it all begin to unravel during the Nancy Weissler era when the triple whammy of Betty Sternberg (the million dollar superintendent) collided with the fastest growing non-English speaking student population in the town’s history, along with a a desire to cut costs. In any other Fairfield County town, the Weissler board would have been thrown out just for the Sternberg hire. Add to that the palpable decline in test scores and every other objective measure of academic achievement in which Greenwich schools took a nose dive in rankings, and we have the makings of a disaster.

Since our school board and BET are accountable to very few people, it’s almost impossible to change this pattern of governance.

And there are other structural reasons for this. Greenwich has 35,000 registered voters – 13,000 Republicans, 12,500 independents and 9,500 Democrats. Yet, the first selectman was elected by only 8,800 voters. Moreoever, there are only 8,960 students in the public school system, with nearly a quarter of the student population attending private schools.

That is not to say you can’t get a good education in Greenwich. My son did. But it took proactive intervention by his parents as well as private tutoring. In essence, we – like many parents – subsidize the Greenwich schools.

Today, a caretaker superintendent Sid Freund – a good guy but not visionary and certainly not a boat rocker – is proposing a 4.1 percent budget increase, slightly more than the BET guideline, for next year. I think this is mostly a PR-induced budget. The challenges are so profound that a 4.1 percent increase will only prevent us from sliding more.

Greenwich needs a serious discussion on the future of its schools, and it’s not likely to come from the usual suspects. But where are the parents? The PTAs? The students? The Townies who run Greenwich are happy to have GHS contend for the FCIAC football title every year; the parents of private school students are not predisposed to spending tax dollars on the public schools; and the growing hispanic population in Greenwich have no respresentation whatsoever.

The penurious citizens who took to the polls to vote in the same cast of characters to guarantee that their mill rate will remain the lowest in the state will also suffer the absolute decline in the value of their real estate when the Greenwich brand loses its resonance as its schools fail to deliver on its promise.

Like the Mendoza line in baseball, no active participant in the game wants to fall below that fault line.

The Weissler Penalty put Greenwich below the Mendoza line in education, and the Weissler Penalty will more than eat up the misbegotten savings from keeping our mill rate artificially low.

A day of reckoning is coming. When the economy recovers, and people wonder why Greenwich is not bouncing back like its customary self, we will look at 10 years of neglect of our schools and wonder why we didn’t do the right thing at the time.

The reality of Greenwich’s new frugality is starting to show. The town with the state’s lowest mill rate is fraying at the edges.

To wit …

Almost a week has gone by since the snowstorm that dumped eight inches on Zip Code 06870. And yet large piles of snow clog up parking spaces in the municipal lots behind the stores on Sound Beach Avenue in Old Greenwich. A Pubic Works employee told me the town has cut back on clearing these piles at night because of the overtime costs.

On Sunday morning whole sections of Riverside and Old Greenwich did not get a second plow until midday. Wesskam Wood, Owenoke, Spruce, Hendrie Avenue, Terrace and the entire southbound lane of Tomac were not cleared until around noon. The crews were then told to stop at 1 p.m. leaving some streets such as Edgewater and Shore Acres unplowed.

These photos taken on Dec. 24 speak for themselves. Hate to think what would happen if we got a real snowstorm.