News
Candidate profiles:
Tod
Bennett, Dan Maguire, Peter Pinkerton are running
for the two 3-year seats on the SAD 15 School Board.
Bennett and Pinkerton are incumbents.
The
Monument posed three questions to all the candidates:
1.
Please name the top three issues you see as facing
your Board.
2. Tell The Monument Readers how you will approach
solving the one most
pressing of the above-mentioned issues.
3. Please share your favorite quote.
Tod
Bennett,
Candidate for one of the two three-year seats on the
SAD 15 Board of Directors, representing Gray.
I
want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to
represent you these last three years. In hindsight
I realize that representing you is a job that I was
not at all prepared for. I want to thank you for the
grace you have shown me as I grew to understand the
needs of our district better. The Monument asked that
I answer two questions and share a favorite quote.
1)
Please name the top three issues you see as facing
your board.
1.)
I believe we are fortunate that our board works so
well together and is focused on the needs of our children.
I think one key element is missing. I believe the
board has to become comfortable with the idea of demonstrating
ownership this district on behalf of the citizens
of Gray and New Gloucester.
We should be maintaining your ownership of this district.
Parental effort is key to our children achieving great
results. I think that some parents, as well as others
in the community, have become less involved because
their position as owners has been minimized and their
desires and outlook have not been adopted. Group ownership
requires discussion and the board has to be the place
where discussions are brought forward. People will
only be involved if they can see the results of their
involvement.
If we do not possess our schools, someone else will.
I see my position as a proxy owner of the district,
to hold on to it as tightly as I can, and insure a
mechanism whereby you may exercise your rights as
owners.
2.) The District is most fortunate to have Superintendent
Victoria Burns. She has a vision for our district
that I, and most other board members, believe in.
As a board, we need to be involved with the fleshing
out of this vision. We need to make it clear to the
community, insure discussion, demand that it maintains
our local goals, and support the decisions. This year
the Board has done a lot of work. Most of this has
been brought forward by the district and, to me, much
of it seems driven by form and custom. I think that
so much of our time has been filled up, we have not
made the time to discuss larger issues.
We need to decide how we are to drive drugs out of
our schools. We need to decide how we respond to the
demands of the state and federal governments. We need
to decide how we balance the costs of the district
with other community needs. We need to argue, civilly,
about what our policies should be. We need to decide
where we want to go.
Our district has suffered through too much change
in management. We now have in place an excellent team
of administrators. We have a great set of teachers
and support staff. We have to build management structures
into the district that will keep all of these people
moving in concert. We need to provide for the glue
between: buildings, subjects, staff functions, curriculum,
and planning. Most of the people in administration
have an education background. The board has people
from other backgrounds: business, finance, facilities,
technology, to mention a few.
As a board, we need to contribute our talents and
guidance to this effort of building management structures.
I would like to see this district move from an oral
tradition, meeting and discussing, to a written tradition,
writing out and posting ideas and comments. This would
allow people to come to meetings prepared with an
understanding of multiple opinions and having had
some time to consider the options. This would also
allow a broader set of people to contribute to the
process even when they cannot make the meetings. We
have purchased the technology to support this, and
we need to find a way to encourage the administration
and staff to grow into this new tradition.
We have a lot of people doing a lot of work. There
are an unbelievable number of initiatives underway
in this district. I believe that we are not suitably
capturing all of the value being produced. After three
years, I am still amazed at all that is going on.
It would be fair of the owners to ask if all of this
effort was necessary, and to ask if the results of
all of the effort actually made its way into common
practice. I believe a more formal mechanism of documenting
all of the efforts and all of the results needs to
be implemented. We should require each committee to
leave a written record of their findings, in a place,
prepared in advance, that everyone can access. Our
students will be expected to live in this world when
they take jobs in our new economy. We need to start
modeling it for them now.
One of my favorite quotes:
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to
see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow, American psychologist
Thank you for your time.
Tod A. Bennett
Dan
Maguire, 
Candidate for one of the two three-year seats on the
SAD 15 Board of Directors, representing Gray.
Thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts
and answer the questions you posed. Building a broader,
stronger and expanding base of community support for
our schools is the most important task before the
Board. It has to happen if we hope to improve the
quality of education in our community. I'll also say
up front that improving the quality doesn't automatically
mean spending more money. Sure, costs will continue
to rise, but with your support and participation I
know we can get more out of our education dollars.
But it will require your participation, more on that
in a minute.
Ask anyone, "Is education important?" and
you always get a "Yes." Everyone understands
the value of education. If you asked instead "What
should we teach our kids?" there will still be
a lot of common answers but you'll start to get some
different responses too. Most people offer up reading,
writing and arithmetic as a start.
Support teaching history and science, music, art,
foreign languages and PE or sports are in there too.
But at this point it's safe to say people are starting
to feel some subjects are more important than others
and some subjects missing from my list. Still it's
fair and accurate to say there is broad support for
what we teach.
On the "behavior" side of the coin it's
fair to say people support instilling traits of honesty,
respect, good work and study habits and sportsmanship.
But the behavior side of the equation is a slippery
slope and it's here where public support for education
really starts to erode. Some people are comfortable
with schools teaching social skills, morals and behaviors
from A to Z, in fact they expect it.
Others, and this is the category I'm in, believe the
schools have taken on too much and they have lost
their focus. I know first hand that the growing demands
placed on our schools by our representatives in Augusta
and Washington are making it increasingly more difficult
for us to influence these issues locally. But it's
only become more difficult, not impossible. Here too
there is a role for you to play in helping to sort
through all these choices, and I'm getting to that.
Last but not least in the equation is how much are
we willing to spend. Opinions here run the gambit.
Some will contribute whatever is asked, and others
don't want to contribute much if anything. To it's
credit, the District spends a lot of time and energy
working through how much we're going to spend on Education.
Even so everyone waits and wonders, will the budget
pass? Why is that?
Here is where you and I come in. We have a duty I
learned about in school as a kid. I learned that it's
our responsibility to be our government. We're it.
Government is not a service we can buy. It is not
someone else's work to do. For quite some time now
only 10-15% of those eligible to vote exercise that
right and duty, If a majority of people voted, the
Board and the Administration would know in no uncertain
terms which direction the community want to go in.
Without that guidance, they will continue to do what
they can, but without your participation and guidance
the quality education we seek for all the kids of
our community will continue to elude us.
In closing I'd like to suggest that waiting until
voting day to express your dissatisfaction with a
budget is like letting a contractor build you a house
and then telling him he built it in the wrong place.
Obviously the time to make sure the house goes where
you want it is when the foundation is being laid.
School budgets are like houses.
The foundation is laid in March with much fan fare
and plenty of opportunity to join the conversation
and suggest changes. I support the current budget
as passed by the Board and I encourage you to support
it too. I do not support the addition of an All Day
K program. In a nutshell I'm just not convinced this
is the best use of our education dollars. I also support
more money for the maintenance of our buildings and
capital maintenance projects. If you have any questions
or would like to discuss these or any other issues
that confront the District, Please don't hesitate
to give me a call. I would appreciate your support
and ask for your vote on June 14th.
Thank you, Dan Maguire 428.3623
"The most important political office is that
of private citizen." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Peter Pinkerton, 
Candidate for one of the two three-year seats on the
SAD 15 Board of Directors, representing Gray.
Our schools should be a source of civic pride for
the towns of Gray and New Gloucester. We should all
take ownership in their fate. This board has continued
the process of dedicating monies annually in a capital
reserve fund to offset costs associated with major
capital improvements in the future, such as a new
boiler or roof for one of our buildings. But we cannot
expect to "catch up" with repairs with our
annual maintenance budget. One of the major issues
I see facing our district is the current condition
of our properties. How do we upgrade our schools to
face the demands of education in the 21st century
without breaking the back of the local taxpayers?
As many of you have been reading in this paper over
the past few months, the school board has formed a
"Facilities Renovation and Upgrade Ad-Hoc committee.
Last year the board authorized the James Sewall Company
to conduct a VFA report assessing the condition of
our properties and to help establish priorities of
repairs. This facilities study was required by the
State as part of our Comprehensive Educational Plan
for the district and the State kicked in half the
funds for the report.
Many pages of work items were generated in the report,
so the board hired PDT Architects of Portland to help
the Facilities Committee identify the process that
we need to follow to seek reimbursement from the State
for our priority 1 & 2 items on the list. These
are Life Safety and Americans with Disabilities Act
(ADA) violations.
This is when the Upgrade and Renovation committee
came to be as a group of citizens, district employees,
board members and administrators whose purpose was
to compile the information and make recommendations
to the full board. We have completed the task of going
over PDT's findings and the VFA report findings line
by line. This list has been winnowed down to all the
priority one and two items that we felt needed to
be addressed. Last week, we authorized PDT to begin
the process of filling out applications to the State
for reimbursement. Each item on our list requires
an application, so the work is intensive. Once each
application is complete, it must come back before
the full board for approval before submission to the
State. This process should begin in the next few weeks.
The other charge to the committee was to raise public
awareness and support for a bond that will hopefully
be going before the voters this November. This work
will commence in the coming weeks and intensify, as
we get closer to November.
Ultimately, it is up to the voters to determine the
fate our buildings. Our job is to demonstrate the
need for a bond and to overwhelmingly convince you,
the voters that this is the right course of action.
I believe we will do this. I believe that every citizen
has a stake in the educational system of our two towns.
Together, we will make our schools better for the
next generation of students.
As for my favorite quote, it is "Life is not
measured by the number of breaths we take, but by
the moments that take our breath away".
