Has the truth been sacrificed? I suppose it depends on whom you ask.
As Great Neck students enter the world, tasked with meeting the challenges of the 21st century, our school district maintains a Board of Education that is subject to old structures and hidebound egos busy celebrating their rank and position.
While Great Neck’s teachers support our students as they work to excel in the classroom and prepare for what’s next in their academic careers, the Board of Education relentlessly fails even to provide statistics that show how our district measures up against others on the North Shore.
As Great Neck’s Board of Education relies on rankings by websites like www.niche.com to justify their complacency (thank you, Mr. Gross, for making that point again even if you no longer sit on the board), they ignore the fact that such websites employ unreliable methodology to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a school district. From a political standpoint, I suppose it’s fine to push out questionable propaganda, but it’s time to stop playing games with our children’s future.
What the Board of Education refuses to acknowledge is that our children’s educational advantage is not a mere product of district policy. The high standards of a Great Neck public school education are sustained by the opportunity parents provide their children by choosing to live here and choosing to fund an enormous annual school budget. When we consider the district budget again this year, maybe we should also collect data on the heavy expenses parents incur for private tutoring, enrollment at private learning centers, and test-taking preparation and support. Perhaps the Board of Education would be surprised to learn the true cost of educating our children each year!
If the past year has taught us anything, it is this: Great Neck is a vibrant and resilient community that must now sharpen its voice to ensure that parents have a seat at the table. It is our own resilient community that will guide our children and future generations in ways we can’t yet imagine. One thing is clear. If we don’t roll up our sleeves and invest in the values of this community, inertia will grow until it is the singular guiding force.
Inertia has caused the president of the Great Neck School District Board of Education to lose the pulse of this community. Inertia has led this 30-year politician not to exercise humility and courage but rather to practice self-importance and avoidance — evidenced most recently by a repugnant attempt to disenfranchise voters, followed by an empty apology that “the community misunderstood, but I did nothing wrong.” Yet this school board president regularly informs the community that there are no regrets, no mistakes have been made, nothing needs improvement, and there are no lessons to be learned.
What we need is a parent-centered, accountable, and transparent Board of Education. We need a board committed to providing our children with the skills and experience to make them productive citizens, useful adults and assets to society. We need a board president who moves beyond participation trophies and meaningless accolades. And we need a board president who embraces community voices and supports the diversity that is Great Neck.
Truth is not a zero-sum game. Neither is community engagement or the emergence of a parent-centered Board of Education. Yet, to the current leader of the school board, it sometimes seems the details are to be hidden, community voices are a nuisance, and parent-engagement belongs on the margins. (Let me remind the Board of Education that great ideas often come from those on the margins.) The governance of the district needs to change.
The president of the Board of Education is not a leader who leads the community to ask new questions and think more clearly, nor is this person an agent of change. Attending a meeting of the Board of Education is too often an exercise in futility where one hears school administrators deliver self-serving homilies to “a hard-working board” but there’s an utter lack of substantive discussion. It may be time for this community to come together to impose term limits on a school board which seems to feel anything but limited.
It may also be time to ponder the virtues of New York state’s “Sunshine Law,” as we hear of a newly formed re-election committee, whose members include a majority of the sitting board, strategizing behind the scenes to re-seat the current school board president.
In recent weeks, I have heard from parents, residents, current and former district employees, and students calling for the need to introduce new ideas, new energy and new talent on the Board of Education. It’s clear that there is a readiness to give agency to a new generation of thinkers and doers; there is an appetite to move past existing shortcomings; and there is a desire to do what is in the best interests of our children, and ultimately, our community.
I am a great believer in the capacity of the Great Neck School District and I look forward to lending my voice to achieving a district realignment that holds the Board of Education accountable, transparent, and authentically focused on the needs of our children. Had such a board existed last spring, the district might have met the challenges of our current moment without such a painful cost to our children’s education.
I suspect this coming election may turn out to be one of the most consequential elections Great Neck has faced in a generation.
Michael S. Glickman
Great Neck
