Improving and Equalizing Education for All Students in Lower Merion

By Ivan Haskell

In the last few years, our school district's performance ratings have dropped relative to our peer districts. We believe that the school board and administration have been distracted from educational outcomes as they have focused on the school district's capital projects. Whereas we were once considered a leader in the development and implementation of innovative curricula, in some respects we have fallen behind our peer school districts. Our top priority will be to work to improve educational programming for all of our students.

We want to make sure that we regain our leadership position and continue to attract and retain the highest quality teachers by continuing to make our school district an innovative, intellectually challenging, and supportive place to teach. Instead of resting on our laurels, we propose to increase our school district's excellence.

Building a 21st Century Curriculum

By the end of 2010, construction on both new high schools will be completed. We want to make sure that our district has a state of the art curriculum to go along with our state of the art buildings. We want to make sure that we build a 21st century curriculum at the elementary, middle, and high school levels that promotes not only the mastery of academic skills, but also focuses on promoting critical thinking and problem solving skills.

As the world grows increasingly complex and interconnected, interdisciplinary instruction that includes project-based and experiential learning is required in order for our students to retain their competitive edge. We believe that our schools can foster these skills while improving our students' performance in the academic skill areas that are measured by standardized tests such as the PSSAs and SATs.

As School Directors we will make sure that as curricula are revamped, attention is paid to aligning curricula among elementary, middle, and high schools. This will allow children to travel between schools in as seamless a manner as possible, building upon already acquired knowledge. In terms of the transition from secondary to post-secondary education, we will work with the administration to have our schools prepare our students to hit the ground running when they reach college. We will also work with the administration to prepare all of our graduating seniors to succeed at a high level in the independent learning environments they will experience at college.

Consistent with the National Science Board's call to improve pre-college education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields (STEM), we propose to focus on improving and aligning STEM curricula across all schools. While all children need to feel confident to participate in STEM fields, we want to help our district to focus on attracting girls and underrepresented minorities in these areas, which is one of the National Science Foundation's top priorities.

Academic Achievement Gap

Despite the district's awareness of the academic achievement gap that exists between African American and white students, we believe that the current Board has not addressed the problem as aggressively as they should. In fact, an examination of data from the neighboring Haverford School District indicates that not only do our African American students trail their white peers in academic performance within our school district, they also trail African American students in academic performance in comparison to Haverford School District. It is unfortunate that our school district has not been able to substantially close the achievement gap, especially given our resources. We strongly believe that high quality education for all students is a right, regardless of ethnic background or income.

We will work respectfully with people in all communities in our school district to identify, fund, and implement programs designed to aggressively work to close the academic achievement gap. We will work to set benchmarks for the programs and to monitor their implementation and their success.

Equalizing Educational Opportunities Among Schools

Consistent with our belief in excellent education for all students, regardless of their location in the township, we agree with the findings of the CAC report of May 24, 2004 that programming should be equivalent between the two new high schools. After all, a desire to provide equivalent educational and extracurricular activities is the reason that the two new high schools are being built to support two equal student bodies.

As School Directors, we will be strongly committed to making sure that programming is equalized between the high schools in terms of curriculum, core course offerings, electives, guidance departments, sports and extracurricular activities, and the responsiveness of administration and teachers to parents. As School Directors, we will also work to achieve greater parity at the middle school level than currently exists, especially in terms of curriculum, special programming (such as the Ancient Worlds and Waterways, Communiqué, and Voices of Change programs that are offered at Bala Cynwyd), and guidance.