March 2009

Maintaining the Wandell School Culture in Economically Challenging Times

David Goldblatt

 

Spend time in any school and you quickly realize that all schools have their own unique feel and atmosphere.  Although schools in New Jersey have a set of common core curriculum standards for each subject that guide teaching and learning, how that curriculum is taught and in what kind of learning environment can be quite different from school to school.  Over the last decade Wandell has developed its own school culture that makes it special for children.  Our school stakeholders try to emphasize certain core values that over time have become embedded into the school’s daily life.

 

Wandell’s mission emphasizes three central principles:  academic excellence, a positive personal self-development for every student, and providing pupils with an understanding that productive citizens have a social responsibility to their community and our ever expanding and complex society.  What makes Wandell special and unique over the last decade, however, is its learning environment or what educators refer to as “school culture.”  We believe that for each child to be productive and academically focused students need to be validated by their teacher daily.  We believe children will give us their best efforts only if they are comfortable in their school and classroom.  Thus, we promote this type of positive reinforcement and support this objective with a commitment to a comprehensive character education program.  We believe that children learn through a variety of learning modalities; therefore, we provide a wide range of teaching styles and teaching tools to reach every student.  We believe that children learn at different rates and have different strengths and weaknesses, and thus, we do not teach to a large group of learners but try to individualize learning as much as possible for all pupils.  Finally, we believe that children need to be prepared for a new set of challenges in a complex  expanding   global society; therefore, we are constantly expanding learning opportunities for our students that include not only developing new competencies with computer technologies but also exposing our students to new world languages (Mandarin) and advanced writing competencies.

 

This school culture did not just happen but over time, through the efforts of all of our stakeholders our learning environment, has systematically evolved.  Now we take for granted that teachers will give up their professional preparation time to work individually or in very small groups with students in their class who need extra academic assistance.  Now it is expected that children will be provided individual or small group instruction in a musical instrument when they enter fourth grade.  Now we have come to realize that Mandarin or our new writing proficiencies or our accelerated reading and mathematics programs will be provided to every pupil in our pre-school through fifth grade classes.  Now we have come to understand that we maintain low class registers in our primary grades, provide a whole bevy of service providers (resource room teachers, speech, occupational and physical therapists, and school shadows to give all of our children a strong support system to succeed and grow.  We have provided these vital services, expanded and brought our school facilities up to standard, and managed to add new pupil initiatives and interventions each year for the last nine years.  All this was accomplished through prudent fiscal management and the encouragement and financial support of our residents and school partners, the Wandell Education Foundation and the Wandell Home & School Association.

 

While we are enormously grateful for our school partners’ vital financial contributions over the years, we now enter a challenging period of trying to maintain our school’s renaissance in extremely difficult economic conditions.  As I write this article today, we find that our State Aid has been removed in this year’s budget and our excess surplus intended for tax relief for our Saddle River citizens in the next school year will have to replace our State Aid and be used for our operating expenses for the remainder of this school year.  Additionally, we expect to receive a 15% cut in State Aid next year and do not know if our four percent budget increase next year will even be permitted.  I do know, however, that in order to maintain the unique Wandell school culture and the services, initiatives, and interventions that we have come to expect at Wandell, I can count on the citizens of Saddle River and our partnership organizations, the Wandell Education Foundation and Wandell Home & School Association, to support our objectives and mission for the students of Saddle River.  After all, our children are our community’s most valuable asset and diminishing and diluting our services to our students diminishes all of us.

 

Thank you.