School Daze

Heading back to school is as much ritual as it is routine. Here's something I've offered in years past as the annual rite begins again  

The weeks of summer rushed by and those ads for back-to-school clothing and supplies started showing up more often in the papers and on TV and were increasingly harder to ignore. The march of the calendar is inevitable and unstoppable. All of that has led to all of this; tomorrow school opens in earnest for the children of Norwich. 

Thousands of youngsters of all shapes, grades, sizes, and abilities from every neighborhood across our city, and in some instances from beyond the city limits, are heading for classrooms, language labs, music lessons, sports practices, cafeterias, study halls, hybrid learning environments, and virtual classroom experiences that, at least for the latter two, we had hoped would be past tense by now as restrictions and precautions from COVID started to be relaxed in the late spring only to have so many safeguards reapplied as we work our way through the Greek alphabet from delta through at least lambda and maybe beyond. 

You'll see them in front of houses bright and early tomorrow morning waiting for school buses, looking for partners to walk home with or pals to hang out with afterward. Who doesn't smile when you see enthusiastic beginners heading to kindergarten (do you remember the last time you felt about anything the way those five-year-olds will?), through those starting their final year at Norwich Free Academy and upon whom a whole world of possibilities awaits.

When all is weighed and counted our success as adults, as parents, as neighbors, and as residents isn't measured so much by the size of the Grand List (though a larger one is infinitely preferable to a smaller one), the number of businesses opening in Chelsea or expanding elsewhere or even the number of bricks piled one upon the other in any one area of the city, but rather, it is how well we can make where we live the place our children and their children want to come home to and to call their own.

With all due respect to the public works and public safety professionals, not just here but across our nation, we spend the bulk of our taxes on education-it's the largest investment we make as citizens and we should expect (and demand) the greatest of returns. 

The neighbors who serve on the Board of Education have a huge, nearly overwhelming responsibility to both us, the people who chose them as our representatives, and to the children whose education they must help oversee (And some of us wonder why so few offer themselves for office at election time?).

In recent decades. times have not been easy around here-shrinking Grand Lists forced tightening budgets helping drive cost efficiencies that closed neighborhood schools while changes in student populations and needs precipitated curriculum reassessment, alterations in instructional delivery, reorganizations, and reinventions. 

I'm not pretending to ignore the impact that COVID-19 and the responses to the challenges of the pandemic have had and continue to have on every student, teacher, and parent. I just don't think we can accurately measure something that is still unfolding when all we can do is continue to keep on keeping on. 

As a fuzzy-cheeked freshman in the Class of '74, at Rutgers College, I can still hear the voice of Dr. Edward "Fast Eddie" Bloustein, University President, as he told us, "the purpose of an education is to learn the rules of the game better than anyone else. And then to change the rules."  Tomorrow is that day. Good Luck!

-bill kenny