Month: January 2020

TRSU Senior Management

Our Collaborative Efforts for All

At 1 PM on most Wednesdays there is a meeting of the Superintendent, Curriculum Director, Director of Student Services, Director of Educational Advancement, Business Manager and Director Technology to focus on furthering the TRSU Vision and Goals especially in supporting the principals in becoming highly effective instructional leaders. The meeting is scheduled for an hour and we structure our work using best practices for working collaboratively.

Senior Management Team Photos

The Why

The collective towns that make up TRSU have experienced multiple transitions over the last 8 years or so. In case you have forgotten, here is a short summary.

On July 1, 2013 after the culmination of many meetings, studies and votes, Windsor Southwest SU and Rutland Windsor SU’s voluntarily merged to form Two Rivers Supervisory Union, losing Flood Brook Union School to a different Supervisory Union. The Supervisory Union Central Office was significantly downsized but the number of operating and non-operating school district boards doubled.

The ink was barely dry on all that change when Act 46 was upon us and the challenge of forming a single Unified District began to be studied. This was more difficult than hoped and during 2017 two separate Articles of Agreement eventually were approved by voters with a start date of July 1, 2018, losing Plymouth, adding Baltimore and forming two new districts that were assigned to TRSU.

Communities, board members, principals, teachers and students are still adjusting to becoming part of a larger educational community. Most still identify with their town or building, and advocate for resources specifically for their community or building first and then try to consider the larger new community.

The Senior Management Team is a group of people who see all of TRSU as a single community and look for ways to serve all staff and students equitably and without bias.

Great collaborative work begins with norms. We have agreed-to norms that are reviewed at each meeting and guide our work. This year we added some higher level norms that we are actively working on making automatic. Here are a few of the norms that help assure coherence to the outcomes we are pursuing.

Our work and subsequent recommendations are often being perceived as power plays. As we propose programs, structures or re-structuring to re-align programs and services, it comes from a motivation to better support instruction and learning across the entire TRSU community. We sincerely hope that someday, all stakeholders will value the vision and goals of the entire SU as their own. In the meantime, we will keep meeting and pursuing the goal of developing high quality instructional leadership in the whole of TRSU for the benefit for all students and their families.

Lauren Baker
Director of Technology

What Really Matters in Education

During vacation many of the conversations I had and observed with kids went like this:

“What grade are you in?” “Who is your teacher?” “Is she nice?”

I used to wonder why this was the barometer – nicety. What about competence, organization, percentage of kids passing the standardized testing? Kids couldn’t care less.

My all-time favorite teacher is a woman named Kathleen McCarthy, whom I had in fourth grade. She had a lovely round face, long shiny brown hair in a ponytail and just a hint of an Irish brogue. She was soft spoken and smelled like lotion. I have absolutely no recollection of one thing she taught me to do. I have no idea how she was regarded by her colleagues or what her class scores were, if she even had any. She was nice. That’s why I liked her.

She’s still nice. I see her now and again at a diner in Cambridge, MA, owned by a former classmate and she is exactly the same. (Now I get to call her by her first name!) She asks about my life and makes the same sort of remarks she made when I was 9. She does not ask if I mastered math enough to balance my checkbook.

The niceness is important because it is what kids remember. For some students, its what keeps them working hard and enjoying the ten months of the school year. For some, its what makes them show up at all. I hated school most of the time as an elementary student, but Miss McCarthy made it bearable. I looked forward to seeing her, hearing her read aloud using different voices and watching her do cursive on the board so perfectly every time.

I don’t have a problem with the notion of being held accountable in some way. As skilled professionals, teachers should be able to produce growth from Day 1 to Day 175. The challenge is that in trying to do just that sort of magic for the data, something may fall to the wayside if we are not careful. The notion of the classroom as a pleasant place first and foremost can get lost in all those numbers.

Learning clicks for kids at different times and that’s when it changes from ‘I have to do it’ to ‘I want to do it’. It has nothing to do with which party is in power, what testing measurement we are using, or anything like that. It is the relationship between the students and the adults who are guiding their learning. Children will learn more and do better with teachers who they like and who like them.

Not all of my teachers would have predicted my success as an adult based on my performance when I was with them. Most only saw one dimension of me, not the fully rounded person I would become. When I told Miss McCarthy that I was myself a teacher, she said she was not surprised. She knew I had it in me all along.

So, now, after nearly twenty years, I have a much more balanced approach to teaching and learning. The data is part of the conversation and so are collaboration, cooperation, compassion, communication and just plain fun.

I live in NH so, during the Presidential Primary season, I run into candidates literally all over the place. Lately, none are talking about elementary education. The first and only time I saw Barack Obama was in the gym at Stevens High in Claremont, NH in 2007. He talked about education in ways that made sense to me and also in ways that showed me he had an understanding of the challenges teachers face, but he didn’t mention teachers being nice; after all, he was a Fed, too. He talked about data. If I ever meet him again, I am going to ask him who his favorite elementary teacher was and what he remembers about her the most. I bet I know just what he’ll say.

Deb Beaupre
Cavendish Town Elementary School Principal