“By 2016, the Oshkosh Area School District shall align its schools with the district’s building and educational standards and the community-based values of equity, excellence and efficiency.”
That is the vision statement as approved by the BOE. As a member of the CRT, I questioned where the specifics were. How will this be measurable? Is this measurable? We talked about the meaning of equity, excellence, and efficiency. Untlimately, it was decided to be as open as possible to allow for flexibility in developing scenarios.
The reality is that there is no definitive definition of those concepts. There certainly is no definition that will appeal to the majority of the community. These ideals were identified by approximately 500 interviews over the year prior to the long-range facilities process beginning.
In my opinion, this vision means that we want all of our schools to have safe and maintained buildings and similar educational opportunities. Students should be able to move from one building to another without falling behind academically or suffering socially or psychologically.
To me equity means that every building has similar opportunities, quality education, quality instruction, and facilities. Note I did not say equal. If everything were equal, every building would look identical and every teacher would be robotically identical. That is not fair as students are not equal. Equal is not fair and fair is not equal. Some students and populations need different things and each building should be able to accommodate the special needs of their school community while providing a quality education. That is equitable.
As for excellence, we have to look at achievement of the students and teachers. Teachers should be continuing to improve their instruction and curriculum resources with every year of experience. Hopefully, they are continuing their educations as well for themselves and their students. Students achievement is currently measured with standardized tests. I don't agree because of the risk of teaching to the test and not to the student, but that is what we have right now. I think excellence would be a building proficiency of 80% or higher in all core academic areas. Certain factors would be accounted for like special needs and ESL populations. Another measure of excellence would be incidences of truancy and behavior issues like bullying, vandalism, and respecting teachers and staff. All of those factors should be a rarity and should flag that student as needing additional evaluation and possible services.
Efficiency is measured by our spending habits. Are we spending more than we have? In what areas? How can this be remedied? For the last question, we should not be solving our financial problems by cutting budgets to facilities maintenance and cutting student programs. We should be looking at what is working in other districts of our size and seeing if we can apply those measures here. For example, Sheboygan has over 10,000 students and three middle schools. Why and how does that work for them and could it work here? Other districts of our size have 10 to 12 elementary schools. Why is that the magic number range? Why are we cutting to seven and are we setting ourselves up for failure?
The bottom line is what does our student population need and what will our community support financially. Spend within your means assuring educational and instructional quality is not jeopardized. In addition, where we can, we should be shopping around for the best prices on supplies and services to include health insurance. However, we should not be outsourcing jobs if safety and quality are compromised.
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