Topics at Education Budget Hearing: DHS Cafeteria, Dept Chairs, Guidance Counselors

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Peter Orphanos public hearing education 02-06-17

Peter Orphanos, speaking on behalf of Darien High School parents at the Board of Education's public hearing on Thursday.

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Darien High School’s overcrowded cafeteria, the addition of academic department chairs and getting more guidance counselors were some of the more commonly voiced pleas at the Board of Education public hearing last Thursday on the schools budget.

Cafeteria Expansion

The proposed cafeteria expansion got the most comments at the public hearing of any item in the budget.

Peter Orphanos public hearing education 02-06-17

Peter Orphanos, speaking on behalf of Darien High School parents at the Board of Education\’s public hearing on Thursday.

Peter Orphanos, speaking on behalf of the Darien High School Parents Association, told the board that the cafeteria wasn’t just a place to eat, but “where our students gather with peers, and it creates an important sense of community.”

He added: “Principal Dunn has spoken of having the cafeteria evolve into more of a student center, a central gathering place for academic collaboration and social community. Darien High School students need this.”

Avery Brook DHS cafeteria 02-06-17

Avery Brook, a DHS senior, speaking at the public hearing.

Avery Brook, a DHS senior and president of the school’s community council, said that a larger cafeteria, when used for other events outside of lunch hours, would make it easier for students to get involved in extracurricular activities and events.

The proposed expansion would also help cut down the noise in the cafeteria, which makes it difficult to hear other nearby people when they’re talking, she said.

Jason Gaaserud DHS cafeteria hearing 02-06-17

Jason Gaaserud, a DHS senior, spoke at the public hearing.

“I think that transforming the cafeteria into a student center is a great idea,” said Jason Gaaserud, another student who spoke at the public hearing. “The fact is that at our high school there are not many great places to kind of hang out with friends during a free period.”

Elizabeth Borecki, a senior and member of the Community Council, said she hardly ever eats in the cafeteria. Instead, she and some friends go to a quieter place in the school, away from the crowds and the noise.

Elizabeth Borecki DHS cafeteria 02-06-17

Elizabeth Borecki, a DHS senior

“If you were to expand the cafeteria and possibly have different seating, I could definitely see myself, or perhaps future generations, utilizing the space more,” she said.

With enrollment expected to rise, enlarging the cafeteria is more important now, Orphanos said.

“It seems to have been forgotten that the school was designed with two cafeterias to meet the enrollment when it opened,” he continued. “Today’s cafeteria dysfunction originated with the repurposing of the second cafeteria space some years ago.”

Ben Olson DHS cafeteria 02-06-17

Ben Olson, a DHS freshman

Alex Swift, a junior at DHS, said, “A lot of our schedule’s demanding in terms of work and stress, and it’s a nice time of the day to just sit with your friend […] The noise level is a big problem too.”

“School is stressful enough without adding the extra stress of having a seat to find at lunch,” said Ben Olson, a DHS freshman.

Lunch bags and trash are often left behind after students eat outside the cafeteria because the spaces they go to aren’t set up for eating and often don’t have trash cans to accept the waste, Robert Garrett said.

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Some lunch “waves” (the three separate time periods in the middle of the day when students eat lunch at the cafeteria) have more students in them than others do, and part of the reason is that teachers give tests and have students eat at different times from the norm because they don’t want to interrupt the test taking with a lunch break in the middle of the period.

Ben Hayes DHS cafeteria 02-06-17

Ben Hayes, a senior at DHS

Ben Hayes, a DHS senior, told the board that “For academic integrity and to keep our train of thought, we cannot stop half-way through the test, go to lunch and then pick up where we left off. Especially in AP classes, taking longer tests is important preparation for the AP exams, and we want to be able to do them uninterrupted. I don’t think cafeteria overcrowding should affect our ability to take these long tests.”

Orphanos said that it’s been suggested that one alternative to expansion would be to cap the size of certain classes, making them smaller so that they wouldn’t be sending so many students to the cafeteria.

FULL COVERAGE of the Board of Education public hearing:

If that happens, Orphanos said, students would be less likely to get into classes that they really want or need.

“I ask rhetorically, does Darien want to tell students that their curricular needs are subordinate to the restrictions of the cafeteria?” Orphanos said. “I think not. This proves our point that maintaining the current cafeteria capacity by definition fails to meet the educational needs of Darien High School students. Expansion is the only solution, and offers our town solid value.”

More Guidance Counselors

Theresa Vogt, who has one child in Middlesex Middle School and another at Darien High School, said that while she and other Middlesex parents like the proposed budget’s addition of a guidance counselor to be shared between the middle and high schools, they would prefer adding a counselor at each school.

“There are only five guidance counselors at Middlesex, three of whom have over 240 students assigned to them, with one seventh grade counselor having 275 students,” she pointed out.

“There is so much more to the role of a guidance counselor than helping families navigate the college process,” she said. “The guidance counselors at Middlesex and DHS are the constant in our students’ lives as they navigate everyday life; and the lives and challenges of a middle schooler are very different than those of a high schooler.”

Board of Education – Budget Public Hearing 2-2-17 from Darien TV79 on Vimeo.

When guidance counselors split their time between the two schools, Vogt said, it will mean a child experiencing a problem making him or her anxious will have to go to a different counselor than the one the child’s used to seeing and is comfortable with, because the usual counselor may be at the other school at that time.

In a statement read by various members of the Special Education Parents Advisory Committee, the group said they also find it important to be adding staffing to the guidance departments of the middle school and high school.

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“Research shows that anxiety disorders affect one in eight children and that untreated students are at higher risk of performing poorly in school, missing out on important social experiences, and engaging in substance abuse,” the parents said in their statement.

“An adequate number of guidance professionals at the middle and high school levels would provide an important safety net for this vulnerable population. We can’t defer this need to a part-time schedule.”

Department Chairs

The SEPAC parents said they’d prefer to see a department chair for special education solely for the middle school and another one for the high school. The special education department chair would be involved in making sure special education students were getting a proper education in a wide variety of different academic areas, and that would be less difficult if that chair didn’t have to be stretched between two schools, they said.

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Teacher reviews (which new academic department heads would perform under the proposed budget) are done much better by someone who knows something about the academic subject, Vogt said. Currently, the reviews are done by assistant principals, who are often busy with day-to-day administrative matters or student discipline or various problems that need to be dealt with immediately, she said, mirroring an argument already made by Superintendent Dan Brenner.

Sini: Watch the Spending

John Sini, a parent of three boys, two of them in Darien public schools, the third at another school, said that as chairman of the Planning & Zoning Commission he was sure that board would make the cafeteria project a priority for a swift decision, since the project was in the public interest.

He suggested that the cafeteria construction work be done at the same time as proposed work on sports fields, the track and a storage facility on the high school campus.

“That would create the most construction over the shortest time period,” he said. (A shorter construction period makes it less likely that construction would be done when students are back in school.)

Sini said that with the state’s finances looking so bleak, Darien, as a wealthy community, is likely to see much less money coming in from state grants. Therefore, he said, “Please, please think long and hard before you increase the operating budget, introduce new programs to the budget.”

The superintendent’s proposed budget is just above 2 percent over last year’s, and the town administrator’s proposed budget is 1.3 percent higher.

2 thoughts on “Topics at Education Budget Hearing: DHS Cafeteria, Dept Chairs, Guidance Counselors

  1. Pingback: Council of Darien School Parents: Budget Statements at the Board of Ed Public Hearing: PART 1 - DarieniteDarienite

  2. Pingback: Budget Statements on High School, Middle School at the Board of Ed Public Hearing: PART 2 - DarieniteDarienite

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