East Lyme Superintendent of Schools James Lombardo retires Tuesday
After six years as East Lyme schools' superintendent and about 30 overall as a superintendent, James Lombardo is retiring on Tuesday. He sat down with The Day last week to discuss the big issues in education and the future for the school district.
The Day: When you were first hired as East Lyme superintendent in 2009, you told The Day that you were passionate about educating "the whole child." How can school districts do that today?
Lombardo: I worry about the focus on collecting academic data on student learning, which tends to focus more on the cognitive than on the development and doesn't necessarily focus on the other aspects of human nature. When you're educating the whole child, you're not only educating the academic, but you're also addressing the physical, the spiritual and the emotional side of the human being. ... I think in East Lyme we have tried to develop goals in our strategic plan that address all four of those functions very explicitly. There's a lot of support for the physical activities side of it, whether through sports or athletics. ...
On the emotional side, we've added social workers and psychologists since I've been here, all of which are very needed in today's world to help kids get through the kinds of struggles they're learning. Some folks look at those as "that's the family's responsibility," but the trouble is that in order for all children to access learning, they have different needs. For some kids to be able to access learning means to be able to not be worried about the fact that you didn't eat last night or that your father left home or that your brother's in jail or whatever it happens to be. I think if you really talk to all the people in town who work in the social work fields, the police, the people at the youth council and so on, they'll tell you East Lyme — while we certainly have great schools and great academic successes — has all the same human problems that every other community has. You don't have to live in an inner-city community in order to have human needs: mental health needs, social needs, etc. We have to keep that in mind as we're focusing on student results. ...
The arts and music and the performing arts have always been incredibly strong. ... I love what I see access to the arts doing for kids. ... While I'm certainly an advocate for STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics], I see lots of examples in our country where in order to boost that side of the academic program, arts, music and performing arts take a hit. That's not been the case here, but you always have to be wary of that.
... At one time, I thought we should reverse the way we do scheduling. We could start by requiring kids to have four years of the arts and then everything else is second fiddle to that, because in some way the arts have a part in everything and the opportunities out there are enormous for people with artistic abilities.
The Day: What do you see as the biggest issues in education today?
Lombardo: I'm leaving education feeling great about what happens in schools. I'm also leaving education really disappointed in how politicians have really messed up the educational potential of this country. I think we have bought into a whole set of educational policy decisions at the federal, state and, in some ways, the local levels, that have ignored the knowledge that teachers and people who are working in schools really have about how to help kids learn. ... I'll give you an example: the implementation of this new teacher evaluation system. The underlying assumption of why we would create such a system is several. One is that we have a bunch of bad teachers out there, that the only way we could discover them is to require them to have this incredibly cumbersome evaluation system that includes student data in order to get them out. That's one assumption — that there's lots of bad teachers out there — and I don't see evidence that that's the case. The second assumption is that in order to identify those poor teachers, you need to have a system that relies on utilizing student data as half of the evaluation, even though to do that requires hundreds and hundreds of extra hours of work for everybody involved, because that's the only way you can do it. I would venture to say that if I sat down with any principal in this school district — or any school in the country — unless the principal was a complete idiot — they could tell you in five minutes who the teachers are in their building who are not performing up to speed. There would be few and far between, so I think that assumption about there being a lot of bad teachers is false. ...
And you know what the reality is? The outcome of this system in Connecticut is that — if you ask any principal they'll tell you — number one, teachers get higher ratings under this new system than they would have (under) our old one and that, two, the fact that we have quote-end-quote evaluated 100 percent of our staff naturally means that the rigor of those assessments has been lessened in order to get that 100 percent. Therefore the value of those has decreased. And you can find that rampant in Washington in "Race to the Top." The government said, if you would like this money you have to meet all these parameters. Some states got into it — like Connecticut — and some did not. So the underlying assumption is a number: If you hold out money as a carrot everybody's going to jump through hoops. ... That's where all these educational reforms come from. ...
The Day: What effect do you think state mandates, such as the new evaluation system and the Common Core, had on education in East Lyme?
Lombardo: I am not an opponent of the Common Core standards. I've looked at them. I like a lot of what I see there. It fits my own personal philosophy. It gives kids very challenging experiences when they have to solve complex problems and bring a lot of different knowledge to bear to solve the problems. It's not just a simple math problem where you circle the right answer. They're given situations where they have to use their brains to bring together different pieces of knowledge. It really is smart stuff.
Where it falls apart is what we do with it then. Number one, we say now we're going to create a mandatory standardized test to assess where everybody is on that, and not only are we going to make them test on that, we're going to use the results to grade the schools, the teachers and the kids. ... It could be very useful to give us information to help us improve our schools, if it weren't for the need that as a result we're going to label the school as "improving," "developing" or "successful" and we're going to label the kid and we're going to label the teacher. ... We're getting a lot of accountability out of it — everybody is accountable — but we're not getting any performance improvement, and we won't because we don't have the resources to get it. ...
The Day: The community may embark on a major project to renovate the district's elementary schools. How do you think those schools can be designed to enhance learning?
Lombardo: ... We spent several months with the principals and the teachers primarily identifying the characteristics of the new school settings, when you know you want that to be viable for the next 40 years. So what that implies is: It's got to be flexible, because we can't predict what programs and/or activities are going to be in place 30 years from now, so make sure whatever they are the buildings are designed in such a way to accommodate them. ...
The environment of the schools is very bright, lots of natural light, very well-controlled heating. You have to have a comfortable environment, and that's critical. That's where geothermal comes in, all those infrastructure pieces that ensure kids are comfortable, whether it's winter, summer or spring or whatever. ... Everybody wants to work in a climate they don't have to think about....The spaces where kids learn will be large and flexible, meaning that furniture will be moveable. That way teachers can have kids working in large groups, small groups, at tables and individually. There will be lots of access to technology available to kids.
There will be spaces in the school we call "project spaces" or "work spaces" or "make-it spaces," places where groups of kids and teachers can go to do projects, whether they're performing a skit or play they've done, to creating a structure out of balsa wood and paper that's part of a challenge they've had in another class, or coming up with a future village based on environmentally sound principles, whatever the theme is — places where kids have the tools and a place where they can get dirty and make stuff, get hands-on to complement their learning. ... Again, that whole idea of being creative and innovative is important. We want to make sure our teachers have the resources and the spaces in their new buildings to do that sort of thing. The new design will encourage collaboration. ... The more collaboration there is, the more people learn from each other. ...
I think teachers stay in East Lyme not for the financial reward. We all know that, comparatively, East Lyme's teachers are less well-paid than other area schools. In fact, we are dead last in our District Reference Group. So what keeps people here — and we have had a lot of people stay here a long time — is because they feel supported, they've got great resources, they're recognized for what they do with kids. ... Knowing that you have a quality of life in terms of the way you're treated, the way people make sure you got what you need and all that kind of stuff is what's important in keeping great teachers. ... Our teachers have been less well-paid for years and they've still stayed, but that's one of the things you have to always pay attention to.
The Day: What were some of the challenges you faced during your tenure at East Lyme, and what can the school district learn from those challenges as it moves forward?
Lombardo: I'm very proud of all the good work that has happened over the past six years. I'm not going to take credit for it, but I certainly was part of it. I think we developed a rich plan five years ago, and we have fulfilled most aspects of that plan, including a full-day kindergarten program — that was in the plan. We hopefully will have a good world language program within the next few weeks — that was in the plan. We have grown our own special education programs, which have resulted in lots of kids being educated in East Lyme that otherwise would have been on buses traveling to other institutions in other parts of the state to get educated. We have enhanced the athletic complex with the addition of the fields here. We have numbers of new exciting courses at the high school, including a whole range of entrepreneurial courses, business courses, a variety of different things to expand opportunities to kids. ...
The biggest challenges are that somewhere in that five-year mix, these outrageously onerous state mandates came into the picture. They have certainly slowed down a lot of the more creative, innovative stuff because they have sucked up so much human time to implement. You've got four in-service days on the calendar, and you're spending all four of them implementing the evaluation plan. It doesn't leave you time to do other things.
The other real challenge is the budget process. I've been a superintendent for 30 years, the last five stand out as the leanest budgets I've ever had. I've never had a five-year period like this. Our budgets have averaged — not counting this year — less than a 2 percent increase. We have thus far survived with creativity. ... I hope the whole community is knowledgeable and stays on top of the fact that we can't survive on 1- to 2-percent increases forever, without at some point having a negative impact on programing.
... The strength of this district is its teachers, and the creativity and the passion they bring to their job. In spite of all the garbage, like the state mandates, when the kids walk in the room, nobody's thinking about that stuff. They're just thinking about how I help each kid. You can see that excitement in the kids' eyes when you walk into any classroom. That's why my favorite place to be is sitting in a class interacting with kids, having some fun and watching the joy in learning. That's so much fun. I'm really grateful in the last couple of days that that's all I've been doing.
k.drelich@theday.com
Twitter: @KimberlyDrelich
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