TRR photo by David Hulse ECS Superintendent Candace Mazur is pictured presenting outgoing school board president Norman Sutherland with a plaque last Wednesday. His term ending, Sutherland is leaving the board at the end of the month. (Click for larger image)

ECS wants test reforms and state litigation

By DAVID HULSE

GLEN SPEY — The 2001-2002 Eldred Central School Board of Education finished their year with a flourish on June 13 by resolving to support proposed litigation against the state for budgeting torpor and directing consideration of organized opposition to the state’s expanded regents examination and district assessment policy.

Board member and former teacher Bob Burrow said the issue of the expanded testing program and its linkage to graduation was one that “has been eating us for months, maybe years.”

Burrow said teachers have been forced to teach to prepare for the exams, not necessarily for the best understanding of the subject.

Interim High School Principal Al Larson totally agreed, saying “much of what’s going on [in state policy] is politically motivated.”

Superintendent Candace Mazur said the higher standards are not the problem, “the assessments are the problem.”

The testing results go into the state’s district “Report Card,” assessments, which board president Norman Sutherland said can translate small statistical samples into percentages and pit school against school when the results are published.

While Mazur supported higher standards generally, Burrow said the new policy dismisses all the changes made in the 1970’s and early 1980’s, when specialized educational needs of students were identified. He said today’s students, despite their handicaps, are all being thrown into the same mix and the practice is “fundamentally unsound.”

Exam preparation teaching is sound for about one third of the students, he said. Another third, who would not have been in an academic track earlier, won’t get it. The other third, who could do more, won’t have the opportunity because the teacher won’t have the time to help them, Burrow said.

Burrow referred to an action taken by Scarsdale High School in Westchester County. The school, feeling the state’s changes were undermining their program, decided to boycott the assessment program. Mazur said the action led to the state’s “mild disciplining,” of the Scarsdale superintendent.

The board agreed on a letter of support to Scarsdale as a first step.

In response to a letter from the Herricks Union Free School District in Hyde Park, the board voted to support their proposed resolution to the next New York State School Board Association convention, which would initiate litigation against the state for the constitutional violation of the state’s ongoing failure over 18 years to provide an on-time budget.

Late budgets regularly force local schools to borrow money against expected state aid funding.

In other business, the board approved the re-hiring of secondary school principal Ivan Katz for the 2002-03 school year.

The board will reorganize for the new school year and hold its regular meeting in the high school at 7:30 p.m. on July 11.