Readers Write: Great Neck school district missed mark

The Island Now

 

Last week the Great Neck School District Board of Education approved a plan to bring our children physically back to school (something I think is necessary) from the safety of their home computer screens (something I think is rather ironic).

Yes, New York state had suspended the Open Meetings provision of the Public Officer’s Law. However, that suspension did not require the Board of Education to present the meeting the way they did: that is, without genuine public participation. The opportunity to submit questions in advance of a presentation no one had previously seen does not count as public engagement or as sufficient means for parents to comment or participate in a dialogue. What the Board of Education did was invite parents to view a lecture, not join a meeting. A lecture that technologically didn’t bode well for the ability of the district to deliver outstanding remote learning opportunities to our children.

It is worth noting that most of the Board of Education’s members do not have children in our schools, yet are telling parents what our concerns should be and expecting us to take comfort in their assurances that those concerns are being addressed. But the reopening of our schools should have been presented differently, perhaps by building administrators who actually run the schools. Those administrators at Saddle Rock and North Middle, for example, did a far superior job at conveying the details of their plans and addressing parent concerns after the Board of Education meeting left parents frustrated and, in some cases, confused.

While I genuinely believe that the schools have the best interests of our children at heart, as a governing body the Board of Education seems to be out of touch and falling prey to the Great Neck peninsula’s history of ineffective leadership. This is what happens when a community allows people to maintain elected office for an excessive period of time, say 25 years or so, not through an inspired level of community support, but through apathy and neglect.

One doesn’t have to look further than Great Neck Plaza to see how a quarter-century of failed ideas, lack of understanding, limited capacity, and wide leadership gaps can damage a community.

Will Great Neck School District suffer the same fate as Great Neck Plaza? For our children’s sake, I hope not.

Perhaps this is the moment where we say, “Great Neck, we have a problem.”

 

Michael S. Glickman

Great Neck

 

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