Amherst Center: Resetting school board's focus

Published on September 26, 2008

The school committees serving Amherst have had some well-publicized growing pains recently. Our colleague Andy Churchill chairs the Amherst school committee and made this statement at its most recent meeting. We think it gives a good idea of what a school committee's work is, and we thought we'd share it with you as this week's column.

Being a member of any board isn't easy. Board members provide overall guidance and direction based on their understanding of what the community wants, they hire leaders and approve budgets, but in the end they depend on professional staff to do the day-to-day work.

And so it is with us. Our job is to hire the best people we can as superintendents and give them coherent guidance and adequate resources so that they, in turn, can hire quality staff and put them to work, teaching kids and improving the schools in ways desired by the community and required by the state. We don't run the schools ourselves, but we have important work providing leaders and funding and guidance to those that do.

As chair, I would like to see us focus more on the specifics of the work we have to do and less on personalities, perceived slights, and negative characterizations.

We have to hire a new superintendent  probably the most important work a school committee does. We have to approve and pass an adequate budget in tough budget times.

And to shape the context for both of those activities, we have to come up with a coherent way of saying what our community wants, what our professional staff need, and the degree to which those wants and needs are being effectively met. I would like to see us refocus ourselves on this key school committee work of providing coherent guidance.

So what does that mean? To me, it means setting a tone of inquiry based on data, not isolated anecdotes or sweeping generalizations, with the general understanding that we are all in this together and we all care about kids. It means clarifying Amherst's mission for its schools, providing the resources teachers and principals need to accomplish that mission, and finding reasonable ways of encouraging staff to reflect on how they're doing, both to celebrate successes and to further stimulate a culture of professionalism and continuous improvement.

Let's talk about how we set our agenda. Certain important issues haven't made it onto the agenda of this committee in the past few months. From my perspective, it's not because of stonewalling  it's because over the last 5 months we've been pretty busy! We had to get the budget through Town Meeting, then spent a month or more discussing and trying to resolve the cafeteria workers situation, then lost our superintendent, searched for and hired interim superintendents, and then had summer vacations.

We can now set our agenda for this year, and I look forward to bringing all members' agenda suggestions to the committee for discussion and scheduling, based on majority approval and staff advice. I see broad interest on this board in issues of mission, communication, and evaluation, and I expect that we will be addressing those shortly.

As we look forward to hiring a new superintendent and asking the community to provide adequate support for the schools, let's always keep in mind that kids and their teachers are counting on us. Sometimes it feels like the pendulum swings widely in this town between excellence and equity goals, and that this committee in some ways represents the divisions in our community between those who identify more with one or the other of those goals. But really, when you look at it, this is a false dichotomy: equity basically means excellence for all kids, and we all care about both. We don't have to be divided about philosophy. We need to be united on getting some concrete work done.

We have both new energy and experienced perspectives on the committee, and we all would like to be able to say we've made things better through our service and not wasted our time, polarized the community, or made this a less-attractive place for teachers or families or future leaders. So, in a spirit of stewardship and continuous improvement, let's get to work.

The Town Center column runs the last Friday of each month. It is written by Town Meeting members Clare Bertrand and Baer Tierkel and School Committee member Andy Churchill.