Election 2023: Giacomo Landi Announces Candidacy for Board of Education [Q&A]

New Canaan resident Giacomo Landi announced Monday that he will seek a four-year seat on the Board of Education as an unaffiliated candidate. We put some questions to the father of three children in the New Canaan Public Schools. Here’s our exchange. 

New Canaanite: What is your background professionally and in terms of living and volunteering here in New Canaan?

Giacomo Landi

Giacomo Landi: I am a proud product of public schools, having graduated from my local public school in Vermont and the University of Vermont. In addition, I have an MBA from IMD in Switzerland and completed a summer work / study abroad in Singapore with Syracuse University.

My work experience includes 10 years with a large international transportation company including working for almost seven years in Europe, Africa, and South America. Subsequently I worked for a large international financial institution with regional and global responsibilities based in Manhattan for more than 13 years. After that my work has taken me to a small startup in the energy space and now independent consulting. 

My wife and I chose to purchase a home in New Canaan in 2017 as we were expecting our third child and were quickly outgrowing our New York apartment. We chose New Canaan for a variety of reasons, not least of which were the excellent public schools (my wife also graduated from her own local public high school subsequently graduating from Middlebury College and the University of Virginia with a Master’s Degree), a wonderful peaceful town setting and layout, nice people, commutability to the city, lower cost of living compared with Westchester, Long Island and New Jersey, and a convenient location to visit family and friends in the Northeast. I expect we are pretty similar to many who have chosen to move to and live in New Canaan.

Our three boys all attend West School (one in PreK 4, one in 2nd grade, and one in 4^th grade). Our kids are active in town sports, enjoy Cub Scouts, school, and we as a family take pleasure and have pride living in New Canaan. Our volunteering activities center on our kids and the activities they are involved with. 

Readers of the New Canaanite will also be familiar with my time engaging with various town issues including changed school start times, and the associated issues regarding the recent rezoning applications for proposed new large apartment buildings. 

Why are you running for the Board of Education?

I am running for the New Canaan BOE as an unaffiliated candidate because I believe my voice, experience, and perspective can help ensure that the New Canaan Public Schools continue to be among the best in the nation at educating the next generation. 

My view is that school boards should be as non-partisan as possible and really be about education, kids, families, and the community the school serves. New Canaan is full of independent thinkers and perhaps this year we will elect a person to the Board of Education not affiliated with a political party.

What do you view as the biggest issues facing our school district?

Beyond the paramount need to ensure as much as possible all aspects of safety—physical, emotional and psychological—here are key issues for me:

1. Excellence in education: Educating the next generation is vitally important to our community, our nation, and of course the children (and their families) who are enrolled in the New Canaan public school system. We need to ensure that expectations for our students remain high and that advancement standards continue to encourage substantial academic achievement. We must constantly provide opportunities, motivate, and expect each child to grow individually, and hopefully develop to their full potential. 
2. Inclusiveness: Public education is there for everyone, and each child should feel welcome. All students in New Canaan should be encouraged to attend the New Canaan Public Schools. I am a huge fan of the traditional motto of the United States: E pluribus unum – out of many, one. We are many in the town of New Canaan with different beliefs, backgrounds, financial means, and life experiences, but we are one town. We should strive to make sure that out of those many differences we are one in terms of community commitment to the public schools, school opportunities, and cultural understanding of all children in the school system. As we continue to make New Canaan even more inclusive, let’s make sure that it is an additive process (‘yes and’ compared with ‘yes but’). 
3. Transparency: We are a self-governing nation. To manage that process correctly, key decisions need to be made in the open, and regular citizens need to volunteer to be part of government for periods of time. Decisions taken by the BOE must be easily explainable to residents of the town as well as students and employees of the school system, and consistent with any public strategy documents. District initiatives that have been taken should be followed up and evaluated to see if they were successful or not. The successes and failures of such initiatives should be summarized for the community so we can learn from this work and these community investments (and, hopefully, improve upon them). Important issues originating from residents’ concerns should be brought forward and analyzed. If these proposals work for the school system, they should be incorporated and if not detailed and constructive feedback should be provided to residents as to why. 
4. Benchmarking: Key detailed parameters to measure success and progress need to be incorporated into strategy documents and transparently measured as time passes. These parameters should not merely compare New Canaan with adjacent Fairfield County towns. We should also consider if towns around the country similar to New Canaan (for example, suburbs of Boston, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and other especially high performing public-school districts) should also be incorporated in such a process. How we stack up internationally can also be very enlightening in some areas. I am especially interested in the differential of the number of school days per year between countries and if this should be reviewed for New Canaan, especially due to the learning loss issues associated with Covid school closures that will remain with us for some time to come if not fully addressed. 
5. Expand the New Canaan Public School Pre-K program: Early childhood education is very important for kids to give them a good start. New Canaan childcare options, especially for dual income parents and single working parents, can be a challenge for residents. My family encountered this resulting in our staying in Manhattan for a year longer than we had planned and enrolled our oldest child in the New York City Public Schools – where he received an excellent Kindergarten education. The New Canaan Public Schools run a very good PreK program, but it is small (around 20 kids per grade when a normal grade size in town is ~300 kids). We should see how expansion of the public school Pre-K program can help the community. 
6. Focus on Town sports for all grades and abilities: We should ensure that that kids of all ages have access to high quality and low-cost sports / recreation options. While we as a town take justifiable pride in our excellent and high performing teams and individuals, I am concerned that kids who are perhaps not on the High School Varsity Sports level track can start to lose options for more casual programs when they enter middle school. Keeping kids engaged physically in quality low-cost recreational type sports can pay many dividends for them, their families, and the community. Perhaps increased student participation in sports, especially for middle and high school kids, can decrease the time spent on and influence of social media. The public schools and town, which have excellent often publicly financed athletic facilities, should work diligently with parents, volunteers, New Canaan Parks & Rec., and other community groups to fill gaps that exist.
7. Cost Control: Running a school district is expensive and labor-intensive work. New Canaan has kept very steady student enrollment over the last ten years, whereas many neighboring towns have seen declining enrollment. In such an environment it is challenging to manage expenses. However, it is important to review all opportunities for sustainable cost savings and to eliminate non-value adding expenses. As inflation continues to work through the economic system, and with possible increased student enrollment on the horizon, managing costs, while delivering on excellence in education, will be increasingly challenging. Managing cost developments will also ensure that town residents who do not have children in the public schools continue to support the public school system and the tax costs associated with it. 

How would you describe the ideal working relationship between the Board of Ed and district administration?

I have sat on and chaired for-profit and not-for-profit boards. I view the primary role of boards as providing oversight of CEOs, delegating various authorities to management, setting organizational goals, objectives, and strategy, and measuring performance. A well-run board balances these interlocking relationships in an appropriate manner. Areas where boards can see some dysfunction is when communication breaks down between boards and management, misalignment of goals and objectives between boards and management, and boards getting too engaged in daily operations or management usurping and/or controlling boards. There is an appropriate natural tension between boards and CEOs which, when managed properly, allows organizations to flourish. When managed poorly, organizations will often stagnate or worse.

The New Canaan BOE, as a board structure, is subject to all these typical Board challenges and relationships. In addition, the New Canaan Board of Education is elected by the public (rather than shareholders) and holds statutory legal authorities from the State of Connecticut related to local public education. Critically, the role of a BOE is to make sure it represents the entire community it serves through open communication and decision making.

Finally, tell us something about yourself that many New Canaanites likely don’t know. 

In college I was on the debate team. It was a wonderful experience, coached by a founder of the Vermont Raggae Festival – Dr. Alfred Snyder who went by the name “Tuna”. In debate competitions we had to take both sides of the issue and endeavor to win over the judge(s). Just by looking at Tuna you could make a pretty good guess which side of the issue he may be inclined. Despite this, Tuna never let his personal views get between a good argument based on well researched facts and open and vibrant discourse. In my view there is no better aspiration for what we are trying to provide to our kids in public schools – expose them to different perspectives, help them seek out the facts, make them think and put together coherent arguments, and let them formulate their own perspectives. Hopefully after all of that they and we all remain open to new information as it comes along and never judge a book just by its cover.