Board of Education incumbent Hugo Alves, a Republican, is seeking re-election. The GOP holds a 6-3 majority on the nine-member school board. Five seats are up for election: three currently held by Republicans, two by Democrats. There are three Republicans and three Democrats running for Board of Ed.
Hugo Alves
Here’s our exchange with Alves.
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Please give us some background on you, including your history in New Canaan and your involvement with community organizations and/or local government/New Canaan Public Schools.
Hugo Alves: My wife, Maria, and I moved to New Canaan 15 years ago. We wanted to plant roots in a community that shared our values and the importance of family, culture, education, and service. Since then, we’ve built two homes, welcomed three daughters (currently two are at West and one at Saxe) and most recently added a rambunctious puppy to the mix. While I often volunteered for various events around town early on, my public service began in an official capacity in 2018 as a governor on the board of the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society. Not that I needed any convincing, but that really opened my eyes to the fascinating and rich history of this next station to heaven. In 2021, when our kids and their education frequently occupied national headlines, I decided to run for the BOE and haven’t looked back. I’m currently serving my second year as chairman. The past four Spring seasons I’ve coached house league girls’ lacrosse (2 championships!) and you can find me on these Fall weekends helping Maria on the field hockey turf. This past April, I had the honor of performing on stage with the illustrious Gridiron Club and look forward to continuing my involvement with this incredible troop. In my spare time😉 I run a national financial planning practice and frequently visit Washington DC as an advocate for the industry and our constituents. Yes, it’s a lot with a young family. I love every minute of it and plan on adding several new philanthropic and volunteer opportunities to my resume over my next 40 years in New Canaan.
What are your thoughts about the way curriculum is developed for New Canaan Public Schools and what changes, if any, would you make to the process?
This has garnered a lot of attention since my time on the board and for good reason. You’ll often hear that the curriculum is our “secret sauce. Many members of our community don’t think it should be such a secret. Good news – it isn’t and our administrators and teachers make it available for everyone to review and discuss prior to instruction. After having spent several hours reviewing and deliberating the curriculum with our administration and defending the most essential elements of it before the CT Dept of Education, I can confidently confirm it is a major contributor to our students’ success here and beyond. While discussion continues in our community, in other towns, and even at the state level about who should be involved at each stage of the process, our responsibility remains clear: parents rightly expect us to keep education and merit at the center, ensuring every child’s experience is both fulfilling and balanced while meeting state requirements. To that end, our work is ongoing, and we are leading this effort in a thoughtful, collaborative way – guided by evidence, student-centric, and committed to ensuring success for our kids today, readiness for the future, and a foundation for lifelong learning.
To what extent, if at all, will your party’s national agenda affect your decision-making at the local level?
When I ran for the board in 2021, my platform was to make sure our focus is on the kids and education and to keep national politics out of our classrooms. I maintain that stance today. It’s unfair to our students, teachers and parents to allow the political fad du jour distract us from what’s important. I appreciate that, in New Canaan, we have constituents of all stripes in nearly equal balance, and we must respect that. While I’m aware of the national political landscape, I’m far more interested, and concerned with, what we are dealing with in our own state. This may sound dramatic, but we are under attack from Hartford and not just because of housing. We must regularly deal with mandates that undermine our work, like the recent “Right to Read” legislation, and do little to improve educational outcomes. The CT Dept of Education seems less interested in our students’ amazing scores and more focused on instilling their own political ideology into our curriculum under the guise of compliance. I won’t stand for it. They say all politics is local, and I’m trying to keep it that way. And entirely out of our schools.
What are your thoughts on the proposed North School? In your view, what are the upsides to that project? What are the red flags, if any?
It is no secret our schools need updating and possibly expansion. The question is, do their current footprints best serve our students and how long can we delay the work required? The schools were built 70+ years ago when student needs and our demographics were different. There’s an argument to be made for a growing community, which we’ve seen in projections, but not in reality. Also, how can we plan effectively when we don’t know what housing will look like considering recent headlines coming out of the state capitol and existing controversial developments? Some of our neighbors have already invested hundreds of millions in building and renovating. Some have not and we’ve seen schools in affluent towns close unexpectedly for repair as a result, often requiring moves to temporary space. In New Canaan, when we do anything, we do it right. That takes time and a tremendous amount of research, and we have only recently begun this process. The benefits are obvious: Bigger, state of the art facilities are good for everyone. East School is at capacity; South and West are on the brink. Saxe is big and beautiful and while most of us agree that what we’ve done with the intermediate and middle setup is fantastic, many would prefer 5th grade to be moved back where it’s traditionally found, in the elementary schools. We see this sentiment reflected in the outmigration to private schools at 5th and 6th only to re enroll in NCPS for high school. Our youngest parents would benefit from more pre-schools. This could be an opportunity for us to fill that void and do so in a way that’s cost effective for families and equally beneficial to NCPS. The biggest deterrent to a North School is obviously cost. We are already heavily indebted after investing in large projects which have been wonderful for our town. We have a diverse age demographic, and we must continue to be good stewards of our community’s tax dollars. So, while a North School sounds good, we need to gather the data to determine what we need today while planning for a relatively unknown future. Do we renovate what we have? Add on to existing structures? Build new? We must understand all the options and their respective costs to chart the best path forward for all stakeholders –those moving into town with a newborn eager to enroll them one day into the best schools in the country as well as the grandparents welcoming them back to the community in which they raised that newborn’s parents.
What is your single most proud accomplishment on the Board of Education?
I feel that over the past four years, our entire board has delivered on significant promises. We increased security measures and placed SRO’s in every school; we clarified and simplified the board goals to focus on what’s most important for our students and eliminated the risk of introducing political ideology into our classrooms; we achieved the coveted #1 ranking in the State of CT; we identified where our kids fell behind because of covid lockdowns and made sure they caught up; we added essential classroom coaches; we increased well-deserved pay for our TA’s; we empowered our administrators to meet the letter of the law while never compromising our values and what we know is best for our schools. These were among several significant wins for our board. I guess for me personally, I’d say my biggest accomplishment has been maintaining balance among the board members and understanding that while we each bring our own convictions, backgrounds and goals, we were chosen to serve the entire community. We must work together to ensure that our teachers and administrators feel supported while our parents get the transparency and outcomes they moved here for. Like my good friend Tom O’Dea likes to say, “we can disagree without being disagreeable.”
Tell us something about yourself that most people don’t know.
The cat may be out of the bag for those that watched me in the most recent Gridiron show, but when I was in sixth grade, I caught the acting bug and never lost my love for theater. I had an amazing English teacher who also happened to be the school’s theater director. She encouraged me to pursue and nurture a talent I didn’t know I had. What started as an in-class reenactment of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, led to primary roles in the school plays, grew into leads in community theaters around CT and finally signed with an agency in NYC. It all happened fast. Unfortunately, with two hard working parents and living 2+ hour train ride from the city, pursuing this dream wasn’t in the cards. At least not in High School. And while financial planning doesn’t exactly scratch that itch, I wouldn’t trade my story for anyone else’s, and I feel so fortunate to live in a community that places such a high value on the arts. I look forward to auditioning again one day when my schedule opens a bit 😊.
First, thanks to you and every member of our Board of Education for your service and hard work. Our students and faculty benefit from this every day, and as a parent of 2 students who were educated in our public schools this is no small thing. In this upcoming election cycle, let’s be thoughtful about demonizing “the other”. Hartford may not be right on everything – but to call out literacy curriculum which may not be additive to New Canaan yet is sorely needed by towns and cities with less resourcing and privilege than we enjoy – is worrisome. I trust our teachers and administrators to be both in tune with what our students need AND compliant with relevant laws.