MOUNT VERNON – For the second time in the last month, parents of Wiggin Street Elementary School students voiced concerns over the school’s curriculum changes at a Mount Vernon Board of Education meeting.
Four parents spoke to the board during the ‘Public Participation’ period of Monday night’s meeting, which was held at East Elementary School. Board members and superintendent Bill Seder then attempted to address some of the parents’ concerns, which prompted a lively back-and-forth discussion that lasted approximately 15 minutes.
The parents present at Monday’s meeting raised similar concerns to those which were brought up at the last school board meeting, on August 20. They warned against the increase in classroom time spent on technology (keyboarding) and testing, as well as the decrease in time spent on recess and ‘specials’ such as music, art and physical education.
Mary Kathryn Malone, a parent of a kindergartner and a second grader who attend Wiggin Street Elementary, said studies have shown that mandated exercise during the school day is crucial to a student’s ability to learn and remain focused. She said that recess time has been cut by 33 percent at Wiggin Street this year.
“We know that children need to move to learn and I have seen that quoted by some of the board members. We know that adding recess to the school day improves test scores, reduces distractibility in the classroom and improves student attitudes towards performance on homework,” Malone, a language program coordinator and assistant professor of French at Kenyon College, told the board.
“Recess allows children a rehearsal time for learning and social growth. Rehearsal is a crucial, formally recognized phase and concept of development where children play with new ideas to see how well that they have understood them, continuously testing and re-formulating conceptual hypotheses. This is called spontaneous concept development. It happens to be my area of scholarship.”
Andrea White, a parent of two Wiggin Street students and a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Kenyon College, added that cutting recess time is unethical from a psychological standpoint. She said that while pediatricians recommend two hours of physical activity per day, students are only receiving 30 to 45 minutes at school, depending on whether or not they have gym class.
“Developmental psychologists say that in order to develop optimally, or even normally, humans need two hours a day of play. And this is based on play research with animals,” White said. “And when you deprive social animals of play, they develop anxiety and depression and aggression. They develop memory problems, and they’re not very good at reproducing because they can’t socially interact with the animals they’re supposed to be socially interacting with.
“So to deprive a child of play, frankly in the way it’s going on at Wiggin Street, would not be ethical for me as a developmental psychologist to do in research.”
Malone said that Wiggin Street students are currently sitting at their desks for three-hour and two-and-a-half hour stretches of time in the morning and afternoon, respectively.
She said the amount of recess time students are currently getting is equivalent to the amount of break time mandated by the OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) for working adults, and it “less than the amount of time allowed by most prisons.”
“Let that set in,” she told the board.
Malone recommended that students receive 50 minutes of recess per day.
“We owe all of our children better. And by all children, I mean all children at Wiggin Street, not just my two. All children at Wiggin Street and frankly, all children district-wide,” Malone said. “This is not a question of fun and games. This is a question of mental health, social justice and civil rights for your most vulnerable learners.”
White voiced concerns over the amount of time being spent on music and other specials, which she said is decreasing. White said that in 1995, schools were told to teach 80 minutes of music per week. Now, that number is down to 40 minutes at Wiggin Street.
“We lose all of this and we don’t ever get it back,” White said. “And for educating the whole child, we’re going in the exact opposite direction.”
Both White and Jami Ingledue, a Wiggin Street parent who attended the last board meeting, deemed the current curriculum “developmentally inappropriate.”
Ingledue told the board that her first-grader, who she said “needs to be active” in order to focus, has been increasingly stressed this school year because of testing. She said he took a 70-minute math test (which his teacher split up), which caused him to be so stressed that he felt he could not go to school the next day.
“I’m seeing meltdowns at home, I’m seeing all that stress-related behavior that (Malone) mentioned,” Ingledue said.
Ingledue said research has shown that a sedentary classroom environment can lead to serious emotional consequences for young students.
“I saw a study that studied the stress responses when kindergartners specifically were given developmentally inappropriate tasks, like where they had to sit for a long time or do things, and the stress responses then – they measured greater stress responses,” Ingledue said.
“And I realize that those stress responses are considered ‘acting out’ and risk behavior, when really they’re stress responses to inappropriate tasks and inappropriate testing that we’re giving them.”
Jeffrey Williams, the fourth Wiggin Street parent at Monday night’s meeting, said that since the last meeting, Wiggin Street principal Matthew Dill has been willing to meet with parents to hear their concerns in a one-on-one setting. Williams said Dill has been reluctant to hold a forum to answer parents’ questions, however, despite their desire to do so.
Dill is in his first year at Wiggin Street after previously serving as the principal at Columbia Elementary School.
Williams’ told the board on Monday that he simply wants to know why these curriculum changes have been made. While Williams and Dill have met to talk, Williams said Dill has still not provided answers.
“The changes that were made directly to specials and to recess is staunchly (contradicting) to educational research right now. All education research says the opposite of the changes that’s happened,” Williams said. “So if there is a good reason for it, if there is a research-based reason for these changes, that’s fine. But what is it?”
Williams and the other parents in attendance wondered why Dill felt the need to implement curriculum changes, given Wiggin Street’s consistently high test scores in the past. On Wednesday, Seder released Mount Vernon’s ‘Ohio School Report Card’ data, which shows that Wiggin Street Elementary was the only elementary school in the district to receive an ‘A’ overall grade for the 2017-18 school year. As a whole, the district received a ‘C’ overall grade.
Because this is Dill’s first year at Wiggin Street, Williams said Dill told him he planned to “just be hands-off and observe this year, and sort of learn.” Given the significance of the changes already instituted at the school, however, Williams believes this has not been the case.
At the last school board meeting, Seder told parents to be patient with Dill and to communicate their concerns to him. On Monday, Seder told those in attendance that he had spoke with Dill about the curriculum changes.
“I don’t think he ever purposefully thought, ‘Let’s see, I’m going to cut, I’m going to look for research or reasons why I’m going to cut something,’” Seder said. “I think he purely, quite frankly, looked at the educational, the academic pieces, the things he did at Columbia, and he brought those with him. It wasn’t about trying to find research to validate why we want to cut specials or recess.”
“No, I don’t think he found research for that, either,” Williams responded. “Pointedly, I think there is no research for that.”
Seder also disputed the idea that students are sitting for long periods of time doing work.
“We have amazing teachers and I’m telling you, we don’t have teachers with kids sitting on their butts for two to three hours. We just don’t,” Seder said. “I go to a lot of schools and I can go to Wiggin Street and I can go to East, and our teachers aren’t making them sit in rows for hours upon time to do work.”
Parents at Monday’s meeting also spoke of the stress put on students who are having to take beginning-of-the-year tests that are meant to test knowledge they will have not learned until the end of the year. Malone said that one test in particular – a math test – was given out this year, even though it was not required by the district and was not given to students last year.
Later on in Monday night’s discussion, board member Mary Rugola-Dye explained to parents the purpose behind periodic testing, which can be used to track student progress throughout the school year. She added that “a lot of times, we just have to kind of voice our opinion and voice our concerns” to school administration when situations like this arise.
“May I say that some of us are not voicing our opinions, we are speaking as experts in our field of scholarship. And it is belittling to tell female scholars that their work is an opinion,” Malone fired back. “And I’m asking the board to be mindful of that, because that is something else that we have heard in the administrative office at Wiggin Street.”
Ingledue met with Dill recently and said that while she appreciated his willingness to hear her concerns, she disagreed with his mindset in regards to the current workload standards for elementary students.
“He said, ‘You know, kindergarten now is like second grade was for us.’ And I said, ‘What’s that doing for us? Where is that getting us?’” said Ingledue, who went on to draw parallels between America’s current educational culture and rising teen suicide rates.
“What it’s got is a mental health crisis and suicide being the second rate of – there are many reasons, I’m not saying that’s the only reason. I’m just saying, what is that really doing for us?”
While Malone left the meeting before its conclusion, Williams and Ingledue seemed appreciative afterwards of the board’s willingness to listen to their concerns on Monday night.
“You know, I don’t really expect to get feedback immediately from the board because that’s not really part of the agenda for this kind of meeting,” Ingledue said. “I mean, they give a little bit. But I do feel like our concerns are being taken seriously. Them giving full answers to everything we said is not on the agenda, they don’t have time for that and I understand that.”
Ingledue believes a large number of Wiggin Street parents are concerned about the curriculum changes, although the vast majority could not attend the meeting.
Williams, still searching for answers, hopes that Dill will one day condone a parent feedback forum to discuss the issues that have been brought up at the last two school board meetings. He said that he and the rest of the concerned Wiggin Street parents are willing to wait.
“A number of folks here have just said, you know, give it some time. And we’re not going anywhere, we live here. Our kids are in the schools, so we’ve got nothing but time,” Williams said. “So we’re going to keep engaging, we’re going to keep advocating for our kids and what our kids need and what’s in the best interest.”
