March 28, 2024

Let’s learn about reconfiguration

The Newton Community School District is going to reconfigure its elementary schools, and it’s going to be OK.

After more than a year of discussion, the NCSD Board of Education finally voted last spring to go ahead with a plan that involves four K-4 schools and using the Berg Complex for a grades 5-6 wing and the 7-8 middle-school wing.

The board even voted in December to press ahead with reconfiguring after board elections brought in members with new doubts and questions. The Newton Daily News and the district have made efforts throughout the past two-plus years to inform the public about meetings, public forums and decisions related to reconfiguring.

Still, our newspaper and the district continue to run into alarmed and surprised local residents who were unaware of the K-4 reconfiguration plan. Over the past few months, self-examination has revealed there isn’t much more a reporter could have done to inform our readers about this decision-making process.

Moralizing or lecturing about the importance of scrutinizing how our tax dollars are spent rarely has much impact. When there are proposed changes that directly affect which school many children will attend, it stands to reason there would be more interest than usual, and the two-plus years in which reconfiguration has been discussed has given the public more than enough time to discuss it.

There was a vocal group that opposed the reconfiguration. It’s clear to me the efforts, time and expense to hear opinions through surveys and forums didn’t change the overall view of the district administration or board of education members’ views on reconfiguring, but the input helped shape the point of view and priorities of both teachers and the community for the years ahead.

One of the important things we learned from that process, for example, was the importance of teaching teams and collaboration. This might not have come to light in the same way if not for the efforts of educators and others to make it clear the makeup and size of each teams are critical to sharing information about students and best practices, and this has been made more evident to me in the past few months through the positive attitudes I’ve seen in embracing the changes ahead.

Many area residents have not taken the time to study proposed school changes, however. They choose to instead blame administration out of hand for reconfiguring for the second time in six years (not really a short time frame, in my experience, and the second change undoes much of the first one), having not attended any regular board meetings over the past year.

I won’t fully enter the debate over the importance of smaller class sizes, other than to note some arguments against small class emphasis focus heavily on state-assessment test scores, and don’t seem to take into account intangibles, such as noise, activity and group anxiety levels in classrooms and the K-4 student’s overall attitude and approach toward school.

Reconfiguring was never really discussed in the cookie-cutter, K-6 county-wide school districts I knew on the East Coast in the 1970s and 1980s. I wonder how much more success — by various measures — would have occurred had that era welcomed more creativity.

It’s going to cost money to reconfigure, and there will be many details for parents and other community members to learn about the changes. We will do our best to get information out to our readers, but it is ultimately the responsibility of each taxpayer to seek out data on how government changes might impact their community.

• Contact Jason W. Brooks
at jbrooks@newtondailynews.com