Moving from Oversight to Insight

Abstract

Driving home from a 1994 town meeting, Mr. Deasy asked himself two questions: What had we come to that our community could be so alienated and disconnected from the work our schools were doing? And what could we as leaders do to change it? He shares his answers to those questions here. JUNE weather can vary dramatically in the Rhode Island town where I have served as a school administrator for the past eight years. A rainy, cold day may be followed by intense heat and humidity the next day, and as the school year draws to an end, the mood in the schools can mirror the weather's unpredictability. In 1994, a year before I moved from the high school principalship to the superintendency, those June days proved especially volatile. Throughout the school, anxious talk centered on the upcoming annual town meeting, at which voters would decide on our budget. At stake were not just the supplies, books, and equipment we needed badly as the school population grew but, in many cases, our very jobs. Town meetings have been an annual tradition in this New England community since Colonial times, and as our town has grown past the 35,000 mark, those meetings typically attract nearly 1,000 people to the high school gym. There, arguments take place in an atmosphere not unlike a Roman forum. People on both sides of an issue address the crowd from the microphone in the front of the room, and eventually the moderator calls for a voice vote. Though the idea is based on the simplest of democratic notions, the meetings themselves can be contentious and acrimonious - and the hottest issue of all is usually the school budget, which makes up 80% of the tax rate. Hurling insulting invective about the superintendent, the school committee, and even the students, citizens insist on having their say, and meetings typically go well into the night. Demoralized by the incivility of the scene, school administrators, teachers, and parents in our town look on in disbelief and dismay as their carefully wrought budget falls under the community's axe. Sadly, 1994 was no different - except that school politics had become so polarized and the citizenry so angry at school leadership and officials that, when town meeting night came, nearly 3,000 people pressed into the room to have their say. In a scene of almost unbelievable tension, they voted massive cuts in the school budget. At one point - remembered ever since by this community as the nadir of its civic discourse - a speaker refused to leave the mike and was actually wrestled to the ground and carried off by police. I drove home from that town meeting stunned, both by what I had just witnessed and by what I knew was coming next. What had we come to that our community could be so alienated and disconnected from the work our schools were doing? What could we as leaders do to change it? I hoped that the central district leadership would be asking the same question before the next Monday, when our building administrators and staff members would gather at their regular monthly meeting and hear the fate of the programs and staffing we had so carefully planned during the year. We would need a collaborative and very thoughtful approach - on the part of the district, the building principals, the teachers, and the community leaders - to put our budget and our priorities back on track after that devastating failure. But the Monday meeting only made matters worse. Without acknowledging our need to be included in any solution, the central office presented the assembled principals with the cuts it would now carry out - in everything from supplies to personnel to reform initiatives. We were not asked for our input on these decisions; they were announced as a routine agenda item, coming, incongruously, after such vital business as reviewing the monthly meeting calendar and going over the summer maintenance needs that we all knew would never be completed without funding. …