Stratford schools policy and standards committee meets

Stratford School District’s policy and standards committee met on Thursday to develop a plan on how to update school board policies that haven’t been reviewed in several years.

The committee will now meet quarterly each year during the first week in July, October, January and April to review school board policies and possibly recommend changes to the Stratford Board of Education for approval.

Stratford School Board members Chris Dickinson and Tyler Skaya are on the policy and standards committee. Dr. Nathan Lehman, Stratford schools superintendent, joined them at Thursday’s meeting.

The policy and standards committee discussed certain policies, such as 8170 on public complaints about instructional and library materials and 3330 on parent rights and district programs & activities, including how the language can be improved so they don’t contradict each other. The school district dealt with these two policies when two school district families this past school year requested the removal of 14 questionable “free read” books that a teacher brought into the classroom.

Lehman said he didn’t feel it was “fair” to the two school district families that filed the complaint and to the ninemember advisory committee that he appointed to only have 15 days, as it currently reads in school board policy 8710, to complete its review of the 14 questionable books.

He also told the policy and standards committee that he didn’t think it should remove the last sentence in policy 3330 that reads, “Parents, guardians and/or citizen groups do not have the right to deny access to any learning materials to the children of others.”

Lehman said school board policies 8710 and 3300 didn’t provide him with any direction on how many people he should select to the advisory committee and which members in the community he should select to read the 14 questionable books.

“We didn’t stack the deck with having all teachers on the advisory committee so everyone, including the community members, were open to voting one way or another,” Lehman said. “I like how we did it but there wasn’t a lot of direction.”

Skaya wondered if the Stratford School District should adopt a school board policy like the Arrowhead School Board approved on July 12 to ban teachers from having “flags, signs and divisive propaganda” in the classroom in an effort to “create safe, even and fair environments for the academic achievements of all students.”

Arrowhead School District’s school board policy prohibits signs or wording implying that a certain area in school is a “safe place,” and it also bans flags, signs, stickers or similar display items “denoting a division of race, ideology, sexual orientation, gender preference or political afflictions” from being displayed on school grounds.

Proponents of the school board policy say it allows teachers to focus only on teaching the curriculum to students with no political ideologies so that every room in the high school is a safe space for students. Opponents of the policy say a problem didn’t exist and it hurts LGBTQ students.

Dickinson said Stratford School Board policy 5224 on staff involvement in political activities already contains some language about teachers not being allowed to exploit students in any way for political purposes. Stratford School District’s policy and standards committee plans to review school board policies 1100 on educational philosophy and 3100 on instructional goals in the future.