School shakeup continues with 2 more unexpected departures

A shakeup in the Canton Public Schools’ leadership ranks continued last week when a School Committee member and a high ranking central office administrator both announced, within a span of two days, their plans to step down — albeit for unrelated and seemingly unavoidable reasons.

Already set to lose Superintendent John D’Auria and Assistant Superintendent for Student Services Alan Dewey to retirement this summer, the school system announced last Tuesday that Robin Billing, Canton’s director of curriculum, instruction and technology for the past three years, will also retire due to what D’Auria termed as “unforeseen circumstances related to her health.”

In addition, School Committee Chairman Reuki Schutt announced on Thursday night that Tim Brooks, who recently completed the second year of his first three-year term, has decided to resign due to work-related reasons. According to D’Auria, Brooks made the decision “in order to address additional employment responsibilities that have prohibited him from serving the committee in the way he had hoped.”

For stability’s sake, the unexpected departures of both Billing and Brooks could not have come at a worse time, as the school system gets ready to welcome its eager yet relatively unseasoned new superintendent, Jeff Granatino, who will report for duty next Thursday, July 1.

Fortunately, the procedure for replacing a town official mid-term is well established and clearly spelled out, while D’Auria, in consultation with Granatino, has already secured an interim replacement for Billing by tapping a pair of in-house candidates to share the responsibilities for the upcoming school year.

In an email sent to staff last week, D’Auria announced his appointment of Jen Henderson, currently the principal of the JFK Elementary School, to the position of interim director of curriculum and instruction for the 2010-2011 year. He also announced that technology integration specialist Colleen McCarthy will serve as interim director of technology.

To fill the void left by Henderson’s appointment, D’Auria selected JFK assistant principal and fifth grade teacher Jan Chamberlain to serve as interim JFK principal, leaving only Chamberlain’s position unfilled as of last Friday afternoon.

“These personnel changes,” D’Auria wrote, “will ensure that people who are knowledgeable about instructional leadership and about Canton students and families will assume important roles and thus provide us with continuity and positive momentum during an important transition time. This will also give our new superintendent a chance to learn about the district before he mounts a search for a key position such as the director of curriculum and instruction.”

While acknowledging that sudden change can be “anxiety producing,” D’Auria assured staff members that the three people he selected to take on these new roles are all “extremely skillful and dedicated professionals.”

“Their constructive and generous response to the needs of the district is testimony to their character and to the vitality of our school community,” he said.

Meanwhile, to fill the seat vacated by Brooks, the School Committee will solicit residents who are interested in serving out the remainder of his term through a notice in this week’s Citizen (See page 3). A final decision will then be made on July 13 by a joint vote of the Board of Selectmen and the School Committee.

In other school news:

School Committee members last Thursday approved three of the four policy changes recently proposed by CHS Principal Doug Dias — two of which were amended slightly — and opted to postpone action on the fourth change until their next meeting, scheduled for Thursday, July 29.

The policy change in question involves the inclusion of a new mark, a W for “withdrawal,” on the transcripts of students who elect to drop a course after a certain point in the semester. Committee members had expressed concern over the potential impacts that such a mark would have on college admissions, and after further discussion, they were still not ready to put the proposal to a vote.

The committee did, however, support another component of Dias’s recommendation, which establishes clear guidelines that students must follow in order to add or drop a course once their schedules have been finalized.

Committee members also voted to eliminate class rank as a reporting measure and to instead send colleges a graph showing the GPA distribution of the entire graduating class, which is a model that many other local high schools have adopted.

Other changes approved by the School Committee included a provision allowing for the possibility of having up to three students recognized in the event of a statistical tie between two potential valedictorians or two salutatorians, and a new method of calculating weighted grade point averages that is similar to the system used by the state Department of Higher Education.

The new GPAs will distinguish between Advanced Placement and honors-level courses, while the lowest level courses, identified as College Prep 2 or CP2, will receive a “slight bump” in weight that, according to D’Auria, is reflective of the “increased quality and quantity of work that will now be expected of those students.”

The proposal was also amended to exclude the upcoming seniors in the Class of 2011, who will continue to have their GPAs calculated under the old system while next year’s freshmen, sophomores, and juniors all transition to the new system.

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Posted by Jay Turner on Jun 24 2010. Filed under News, Schools. Both comments and pings are currently closed.