News

Letter: ‘Thank You’ to New Canaan Health Department

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As we prepare for Thanksgiving, give a special thanks to the New Canaan Health Department. I want to give a special shout out to Jenn Eielson, and the entire healthcare team in New Canaan (school nurses, EMT’s, doctors, CERT and numerous volunteers) for an incredibly well managed and positive experience last Thursday afternoon and evening at the High School. I am talking about the mass vaccination that took place for 1,000 kids aged 5 to11. The reality that 1,000 doses were administered in New Canaan, within a week of authorization, is a real testament to the health team New Canaan has, and the town in general. In the entire U.S. around 1 million doses had been administered to that age group when the New Canaan kids got their shots, so this town is definitely over performing.

News

Letter: Should New Canaan Accept the Board of Ed Budget As Proposed?

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The New Canaan Board of Education has recently proposed a school budget which incorporates changed school start times costing in excess of $900,000 on an annual basis, and then escalating annually even if enrollment decreases. 

This proposal will allow New Canaan High School and Saxe Middle School students to start school approximately an hour later than today, and will require 500 Elementary students to start 30 minutes earlier than today, and 950 Elementary students to start 80 minutes earlier than today. 

Changes are projected to start in January 2022. 

Much focus has been on this issue for the last year’s coinciding with a national initiative to delay High School start times, in line with CDC guidance related to developmental changes in children starting around age 11 for girls and around age 13 for boys. Little focus or study has been paid nationally, or in New Canaan, on the impact to our youngest learners by making substantial start time changes to prioritize older students. 

The question for New Canaan residents is if the BOE proposal is a good incremental investment for the town, or if the town should do as it did last year and cap the school budget at a lower total than requested, and ask the BOE to prioritize within that budget. 

The projected number of students in New Canaan next year is 1,452 Elementary Students, 665 in Saxe 5-6, 662 in Saxe 7-8 and 1,317 in High School. Despite the much-heralded exodus from New York City, this number of students is budgeted to be down 80 compared with this year. To improve start times for older students we are moving more students to suboptimal starting times than benefit from improved start times (i.e. 2,117 vs 1,979 students). 

No peer schools in Connecticut are starting Elementary students at 7:45 – actually they average starting at 8:45, with South School today the earliest at 8:15. When looking at approximately 220 similar schools to New Canaan’s nationally (i.e. top public Elementary schools in each state – many with similar Blue-Ribbon standards) the average start time is 8:21.

COVID-19 New Canaan

Letter: Time To Plan for Summer School in New Canaan

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First a huge debt of thanks to the entire school district for getting us ready and launching e-learning. Well done. Second kudos to the team for keeping up the spirit—absolutely vital—again fantastic. 

We now, however, need to start talking about how we can minimize the long-term effects of this situation on our kids and community. The governor recently floated the idea of kids not coming back to school until the fall—i.e. they would be out of school from March 11 to Aug. 31. I am not sure if people suggesting this were serious, or if they have outlined why this would be a prudent course of action, in my view this would be terrible for just about everybody. The kids don’t need more time away from educators and friends, they don’t need to graduate on a pass-fail basis, and they don’t need to be promoted or held back a year based on vague guidelines and crisis thinking. What kids need is an education (and society needs educated kids). We can accomplish this, also in these times. My proposal is very simple. For each day of e-learning we add back half a day of school (if we think e-learning is the same as real school—we should have a larger discussion about how we educate our kids and the investments we are making going forward). If we stick with the April 20 return we should be able to get out around July 1—not too bad considering. If we go longer in closure, we just go longer into July and August (this will be very simple to administer, and for people to understand).