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TRURO — Santa Claus (though some said it was Mike Tarvers) stopped by the Community Center on Dec. 12 to encourage singing during lunch. So, 30 students from Truro Central School piped up, accompanied on the guitar by teacher Joshua Paul. They sang to 36 people who were there for the council on aging’s annual holiday lunch, made by Julie and Frank Grande, owners of the Truro Box Lunch, who also provided hot chocolate and cookies for the carolers.
TRURO — Students at Truro Central School, be they kindergartners or fifth-graders, know that the florets that sprout at the top of kale plants are to be picked. And eaten.
Kale buds must be nipped because they divert nutrients from the rest of the leafy stalk, says school nurse and farmer-in-the-school coordinator Beth Cook. In the school garden, where those leaves could become school lunches, picking the buds is a daily ritual. A sample — proffered by Cook — confirms that kale buds, like other brassica florets, are tasty.
Kale is just one of the crops growing in small plots in the “learning garden,” an outdoor classroom behind the school.
“My motto is ‘If they grow it, they will eat it,’ ” says Stephanie Rein, who in her 11 years as Truro’s official farmer in the school has learned that “the things children will eat are remarkable.” She calls the pea shoot a “gateway vegetable.”
Rein is also Wellfleet’s farmer in the school. The program, created and supported by the nonprofit Sustainable CAPE with grants from the Mass. Cultural Council, Mass. Dept. of Agricultural Resources, the USDA, and private donors, is underway in Provincetown, too, and will be rolled out this fall in Eastham, Rein says.
On June 4, the Truro kindergartners and first-graders had a “salad party” where they munched on a medley of herbs and vegetables as they decorated paper bags that would soon hold their very own watermelon seedlings.
A kindergartner who was incidentally celebrating her sixth birthday was delighted: “My favorite part was the sweet stuff,” she said, nibbling a sprig of dill.
Rein walked around the table, offering them a sprinkle of pansies as an edible floral garnish. A student popped one in her mouth: “Good!” she said.
Recently, Rein organized the “great mustard challenge,” in which she collected five types of mustard greens grown locally for the kids to try. Students sampled them from mildest to spiciest: “Number five was like eating a wasabi pea,” says Rein, which the kids enjoyed “with a tear rolling down their cheeks.”
Growing now are gourds and beans; indeterminate tomatoes — ones that will continue to grow and produce until frost — will soon dapple the garden’s trellises. Chives stand sturdy and graceful, topped by just-bloomed pale purple blossoms. There’s also rosemary, thyme, tarragon, dill, mint, and fennel. Lemon balm is tucked away on the edge of the garden, which is steadily forcing its way down the abutting hill. Flowers blossom all around: “We need to draw the pollinators,” says Cook.
Garden coordinator Helen Grimm likes how the garden provides kids with “a sensory break” during their school days, relief from indoor overload. “We have different plants for different senses, or different ways of interacting in the garden,” she says. Grimm helps the students transform the fruit of autumn olives — high in lycopene — into fruit leather. With comfrey, yarrow, St. John’s wort, and calendula, they make salves.
The garden beds teach the kids not just about the intricacies and edibility of plants. “We live in a really fragile environment,” says Cook. “We are trying really hard to create stewards of the land.”
What happens here is different from other kinds of outdoor time, Cook says. “When they are on the playground or they’re at T-ball practice, they’re not really connecting with the land.” In the garden, the students become deliberate about where they’re walking and learn to take care of the plants they’re growing.
Various subjects are woven into the garden experience, from science in watching seedlings sprout to civics at “seed election” time. For that, before students voted on two crops to add to the garden mix, they made posters and campaigned for their crops of choice. Rein says that “they caucused, naturally.” Watermelons and blueberries were this year’s winners.
“This is the best job,” says Rein, who’s been farming on her own Truro property for more than 30 years. Rein grows beans in green, purple, and yellow, lemon cucumbers, and “very sublime and delicious-tasting” white cucumbers. Her real claim to fame? “I have a cult following for rocket.” At her place, she says, “the weirder the vegetable, the more it’s for me.”
That point of view has clearly rubbed off on her students. “If it comes out of the garden, it’s intriguing,” says Rein. “We’re eating pansies; we’re eating fennel.” In the garden, the kids ask to try straight oregano, known for its bitterness, and “they wash it down with kale.”
TRURO — As a sixth-grader at Truro Central School in 1993, Abby Roderick drew a life-size portrait of herself in a billowing purple skirt, wielding a puppet in one hand and a book in the other. Her props represented the two things she dreamed of doing when she grew up: puppeteering and teaching.
Now, 30 years later, Roderick is the librarian and media specialist at that same school. She is one of several jacks-of-all-trades who keep the single-school district operating as its own sovereign educational entity.
Roderick began working at TCS in 2003 as a substitute teacher, advancing to educational assistant, then fourth-grade teacher, then sixth. For a while, she team-taught sixth grade and was also the school librarian. When sixth-grade enrollment dwindled to five students, then even fewer, her library duties took over full-time.
On a midwinter professional development day, the school staff split into two teams: specialists (including gym, Spanish, and music teachers) and the literacy team. Roderick is on both. She conducts reading interventions regularly, she says, and spends about 80 percent of her time outside the library.
Roderick went with the literacy team and leaned on her specialist colleagues to catch her up on what she missed. The atmosphere at the school makes juggling responsibilities possible, she said. She and her colleagues rely on one another for problem solving, strategizing, and resource sharing.
There are currently fewer than 100 students enrolled at Truro Central; this is the second time the student population has dipped that low.
With the exception of the two preschool classes, each grade level from kindergarten through fifth has one class with between 9 and 13 students. The state still recognizes TCS as a school for sixth-graders, though they have not mustered a class since the fall of 2021.
Despite its low enrollment overall, the range of students’ needs is still sweeping, according to Principal Patrick Riley, who has a background in music education.
“As someone who’s worked in a larger school district before, some of the challenges are trying to provide our students with the same opportunities as a district that has more resources,” Riley says.
The school needs an English language learning specialist, for instance, but not full time. Only two of the school’s 92 current students are at the ELL level, Riley says. TCS contracted a certified part-time ELL instructor to work with those students, though she’ll be going on maternity leave this year. Once that happens, unless someone new applies, ELL instruction will be added to the plate of an existing staff member. In the past, Spanish teacher Alison Waldo has taken on that job.
TCS has also contracted with Gosnold Behavioral Health, which sends a counselor to meet with students two days per week. Those referrals can come from school staff or students’ primary-care doctors, and families arrange it, but the counseling is school-based, Riley says.
The school also contracts through the Cape Cod Collaborative for the services of occupational and physical therapists who come two days per week. The occupational therapist meets with 27 students (in groups, individually, and in classes), Riley says, and the physical therapist works one-on-one with five students while also facilitating motor groups with the preschool classes.
“The expectations of any district are the same, no matter what size you are,” Riley says. “For a small district like ours, a one-school district, to meet those expectations requires us to take on different responsibilities” than a teacher in a larger district would.
A total of 45 staff members, including full-time, part-time, and contract employees, keep the gears turning at the school, Riley says. The school is fully staffed, including a maintenance crew of two who handle custodial duties and general building upkeep. Aside from a few specific certifications, like ELL, the school has had a lot of success with recruitment and retention, Riley says.
Every day, students leave their regular classrooms for special classes like music, science, and art — each of which they attend twice weekly. This year, Stacey Klimkosky teaches both science and art: “two loves of mine,” she says.
The dual responsibility was Klimkosky’s idea. When she learned that a former colleague, art teacher Kim Possee, was retiring, Klimkosky was teaching only science. But “even when I taught only science, I was always incorporating art,” she says, recalling the garden of perennials and annuals she grew last year with the help of a Cape Cod 5 educational mini-grant. Students spent time there learning about zinnias and evergreens and then drawing them.
“Science is all about observing, and so is art,” Klimkosky says. Now she is working her way through a Mass. Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education program with the New Arts Teacher Mentoring Network to elevate her state certification in visual art instruction from the preliminary to the professional level.
Klimkosky, who grew up in Bethany, Conn., is one of several teachers at the school who hold multiple licenses. She earned a master’s degree in early childhood education (and before that, in college administration) before she was brought on as an educational assistant at TCS in 2003. She has gone on to earn a certificate in elementary education (grades one through six) and then another in library teaching (K-12).
Klimkosky preceded Roderick as the school’s librarian. And during the pandemic-tainted 2020-21 school year, when TCS needed an in-person preschool teacher, Klimkosky took that on. That year, science instruction was woven into the classroom teachers’ curricula. “It ended up being one of my favorite years of teaching,” Klimkosky says.
When it comes to teaching, “people think you’re doing the same job on day one as you’re doing when you retire,” Riley says. Instead, it’s a job that allows for a lot of different experiences.
True to her sixth-grade dream, Roderick earned her undergraduate degree in puppetry. In a job that’s included helping with after-school programs and teaching social studies, technology, and in grades classrooms, all while working as the school librarian, her career looks much like she hoped it would when she penned that self-portrait in sixth grade. She goes to work, it seems, with a puppet on one hand and a book in the other.
TRURO — Families of students at the Truro Central School have been making do without consistent after-school care since the onset of Covid in 2020. But the town announced on Nov. 17 that, after making four new hires, it has now fully staffed its out-of-school-time community sustainability program.
That initiative was funded in a Proposition 2½ override at the annual town meeting and election last spring. The $703,050 override provided funding for three child-care initiatives including the out-of-school-time program. It included $116,000 for school department salaries and an additional $337,050 for the town’s community services budget.
Adam Leiterman will be program supervisor, and the three program leaders are Robin Huibregtse, an artist and writer with a master’s degree in elementary education; recent Nauset Regional High School graduate Julia Morris; and Britta Lower, who studied elementary and special education and has been working as a teacher and curriculum specialist in Florida since 2017.
Leiterman first moved to the Outer Cape in 2005 to work for the National Environmental Education Development (NEED) Academy, a multidistrict program for fifth-graders offered in collaboration with the Cape Cod National Seashore. He then worked as a teacher-naturalist at Mass Audubon’s Boston Nature Center, where he designed programs and supervised a cohort of youth leaders, he said. His nine years at Mass Audubon “left an indelible mark on me,” Leiterman told the Independent. “I hope to use the lessons I learned there to make this the best program it can be.” He began work in Truro on Oct. 30.
Town Manager Darrin Tangeman was involved in the hiring because the positions have transitioned back to town jurisdiction from the school. It has taken time to get the program underway “because we haven’t had the personnel,” Tangeman said. “It’s taken a while to do the recruitment and hiring.”
When the after-school program kicks off in January, it will run five days a week from the end of the school day at 3 until 5:30 p.m.
In this iteration, the program will also offer child care on holidays and professional development days, said Director of Community Services Damion Clements.
On Nov. 10, the town ran a Veterans Day child-care program from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The 15 participants ranged from 5 to 11 years old, Clements said. Leiterman worked that day and was happy with how it went.
“We had a day of playing on the playground, exploring the library garden, playing games in the gym, and having some quiet, reflective time as well,” he said.
The ‘Hot Potato’
This will not be the first time the town has run after-school programming. The school took over from the town’s recreation dept. in 2019, Supt. Stephanie Costigan said, and called its version TAPS — the Truro After-school Program for Students. It served 36 students and was staffed by three educational assistants who worked in the school’s classrooms during the day.
The school staggered staff members’ hours so that they could work part of each school day and then stay on for the program, Costigan said. “Unfortunately, it was too much for the school staff to work during the school day and then do the after-school program, even with the staggered hours,” she said.
The TAPS program shut down when the pandemic began, she said, and the school struggled to revamp it. The main problem, both that year and last year, Costigan said, was staffing.
Truro parent Christine Markowski, who has twin fifth-graders, said she believes the lack of after-school care has been a problem for many families. Her family doesn’t normally need it, she said, but they benefited from it for a week in 2017 when she hurt her back. But when the same thing happened this year, there was nothing available. The back and forth between the town’s recreation dept. and the school makes the program seem “like a hot potato,” she said. “Who’s going to take care of the after-school program?”
Kolby Blehm, who stepped down as chair of the Truro School Committee this past summer, said he did so partly because he was concerned that the program never materialized. “I don’t think there was enough of an effort made to get it off the ground,” Blehm said.
Student services and this specific program had been made part of Costigan’s job, but, he added, “I don’t think anybody really paid attention to the fact that this was an expectation that came with money, and that wasn’t met.”
As of this year, Blehm’s children are no longer enrolled in Truro. They attend kindergarten and second grade in Provincetown.
“We spent an entire year searching for staff to run the program,” Costigan said. “The problem we have is that it’s a brief part of the day.” Advertising at the school and beyond, she said, drew no candidates. “That was why we went back to the town and asked for their help.”
During the summer, the town explored ways to recruit staff. Hiring a contractor was an option, Tangeman said, but expensive. And it wouldn’t have eased the staffing difficulty. “They were just going to manage the program; we were still going to have to hire the people,” Tangeman said.
Tangeman attributes the town’s recent hiring success to the program now being year-round and covering holidays and summer recreation programs.
Fewer Students, But Still a Need
Since 2012, when Truro Central School had more than 150 students, enrollment has been steadily declining. In 2022-2023, total enrollment dropped below 100 for the first time since data became available in 1987. This year, enrollment fell to 91.
The school sent a survey to the families of those 91 students last month to gauge demand for after-school care. The 30 people who responded accounted for a total of about 40 of the school’s students. More than three-quarters of the respondents said they would be interested in enrolling their children in after-school child care, and most of those said they needed child care every day.
After-school activities available at the school from 3 to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday and carpooling and sharing pickup have been stopgaps for some families, Costigan said.
Meanwhile, Leiterman is acquainting himself with the town and preparing for the new program’s January launch. “We will finalize staff training, work on planning collaborations with local organizations, and spend some time at TCS getting to know the students and staff,” he said.
TRURO — Truro Police Chief Jamie Calise is looking to add a new position to his department to serve as the “resource officer” at the Truro Central School. Calise announced his plan in the January issue of Truro Talks, the monthly newsletter published by the town manager and staff.
The proposal left the public looking for more information about what the officer’s role would be, and School Supt. Stephanie Costigan, who supports Calise’s plan, reported that some staff members at the school had raised questions about the need for police presence.
Truro Central School currently has 99 students in preschool through fifth-grade classrooms and 41 teachers and support staff.
Police reforms signed into state law in December 2020 require that school resource officers undergo special training. They must also maintain certification by the state’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission. The responsibilities of these officers are clearly laid out in lengthy agreements between police departments and school districts.
In his statement in Truro Talks, Calise wrote that the primary purpose of a resource officer “is to promote safety and a positive climate for all students, families and staff.” State law prohibits the officer from acting as “a school disciplinarian or enforcer of school regulations,” he said.
The catalyst behind school resource officer programs has been the increasing frequency of violence, Calise said, citing the latest government figures showing that there have been 678 school shootings with casualties at elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. since 2000.
“For the period of 2019-20, nearly one-third of school shootings reported had occurred at the elementary level,” the chief said. “There have been correlations between the presence of resource officers and students and staff experiencing increased feelings of safety.”
Supt. Costigan said this week that she has received a number of questions from her staff about the proposal. Regarding the chief’s comment about the feeling of safety a resource officer would provide, staff members asked how it had been determined that students and staff feel unsafe now, Costigan said.
“The chief’s intention in Truro Talks was to note the benefits of the SRO, not to imply that the students aren’t safe,” said Costigan.
Staff members also asked Costigan what added benefit a resource officer would provide, when 24 staff members will soon be trained in “diversion, de-escalation, and physical management strategies” as part of a school safety program.
In a phone interview this week, Truro School Committee Chair Kolby Blehm said he had reached out to the school community when he first learned about the proposal. “What I found was far from a consensus,” Blehm said.
When Calise presented his idea at a budget task force meeting in December, Blehm suggested that there should be a community forum to get public input on the plan. “I think prior to an officer being present in the school, that’s something that the community and the stakeholders within the school, whether that’s staff or families, need an opportunity to weigh in,” Blehm said at the meeting.
He continues to believe that such a forum should be held, and not just to discuss the police proposal. Another question is whether the school should continue to offer sixth-grade education. This year there are no sixth-graders at Truro Central.
Town Manager Darrin Tangeman told the budget task force that the resource officer position would be funded via an override. The public would have several opportunities to ask questions and give opinions, he said, including at the town meeting and via an override ballot question.
The Cape Cod Regional Law Enforcement Council includes a school resource officers’ network, made up of police and members of the Cape & Islands district attorney’s office. Yarmouth Police Officer Nicholas Pasquarosa, a resource officer at the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District, founded the network in 2008 and serves as its spokesperson. Almost all the departments in Barnstable County have school resource officers on their rosters, he claimed. Brewster and Truro do not, he said, and Wellfleet has a liaison arrangement with the school rather than a resource officer.
“Community outreach is a big part of the mission,” Pasquarosa said in an email. “The police presence also offers opportunities to deter and intervene before formal enforcement action is required.”
Resource officers in the network meet monthly and frequently email each other, offering support, advice, and information, Pasquarosa said.
Some police departments, particularly in smaller towns, have less formal relationships with their schools. “We don’t have an officer assigned there full-time,” said Wellfleet Chief Mike Hurley. “Throughout the year, officers and dispatchers are in the school for lunch, lockdown drills, and school-sponsored events.”
Provincetown Chief James Golden said his department “does not employ a designated school resource officer,” but Pasquarosa said Officer Jason Sullivan has historically acted as a liaison with the Provincetown Schools and has attended network training sessions.
The Eastham Police Dept. has a memorandum of understanding with the Nauset Regional School District for officers at the high school and elementary school. “We have a full-time officer assigned to Nauset Regional High School every day,” said Chief Adam Bohannon. The department also has an officer assigned to Eastham Elementary School. “The difference is that this officer is not present at the school every day but makes frequent visits to the school and is available to the school for any issues that arise,” said Bohannon.
Costigan said the plan in Truro isn’t to have the resource officer always at the school. “We don’t need an officer in the building all day,” she said. She envisions the officer being there to help with traffic at the start and end of each school day. The officers do that now unless they are out on a call. “This would guarantee they would be there every school day,” the superintendent said. “Another benefit is building a positive climate. They could drop in once a week for lunch with the students.”
Calise told the budget task force that the new position would also provide an additional officer to help out with department duties when school is out for the summer.
Truro’s police dept. currently has 10 officers, with two additional recruits currently in the police academy, according to Calise. There are also two positions vacant due to a retirement and a transfer in late fall.
Finding officers to fill the vacancies is a challenge that police departments nationwide are experiencing, Calise said. On the Outer Cape, the lack of housing has been an additional challenge. There is also salary competition from neighboring departments, he said. Provincetown pays its officers more, with the top step on the pay scale at $85,000. Truro’s top step is $70,000, which is 4.5 percent lower than the state average.
The police union is currently negotiating with the town, Calise told the budget task force in December. “There is a compensation analysis to make the wages more competitive,” he said. The department also plans to “aggressively advertise” its vacancies to attract more candidates, according to the chief. “And the town is working very hard to try to increase the housing stock so that we would have people who could afford to live locally.”
TRURO — When Caroline Townsend was finishing fifth grade at Truro Central School (TCS) in 2012, her parents asked her which sixth grade option she preferred: board the bus for Nauset Regional Middle School in Orleans or stay in Truro? Townsend, with her friends, chose the latter.
One year later, she graduated from TCS and joined other Outer Cape students at Nauset for seventh grade. “But once we got there,” Townsend said recently, “the other kids seemed to be a step ahead of us.”
She felt blindsided by her technology and engineering class, which built on topics covered in Nauset’s sixth-grade curriculum. “Everyone from Truro was like, ‘What the heck is this? We didn’t learn this,’ ” said Townsend, now a junior at UMass Amherst. “Science caught us off guard.”
The new seventh-graders found that social cliques in their class had had a year to crystallize. In the lunchroom, the newcomers were sequestered to what the middle schoolers called “the Truro table.”
Truro parents have mostly caught on to the academic and social issues associated with parachuting into Nauset in the seventh grade. As a result, sixth-grade enrollment at TCS has plummeted in recent years. But the tuition arrangement between Truro and the Nauset schools is an incentive for school administrators to keep the struggling program in place.
Truro Supt. Stephanie Costigan expected only two students in the sixth grade this year, which would not make for a “healthy-sized classroom for any age group,” she told the school committee in September.
She proposed combining the sixth grade with the fifth, with 16 students, but parents objected. The two grades remained separate.
Sixth-grade enrollment took a nosedive in 2014. The year before, TCS had 16 sixth-graders; in 2014, the class had just six. In 2017-2018 and 2020-2021, the school had no sixth-graders at all.
Whether the sixth grade stays or disappears has fiscal implications.
Under the town’s current tuition agreement, the Nauset Regional Schools offer Truro students enrollment in grades 7 to 12. The five-year pact runs through 2023-2024. This year, Truro pays tuition of $19,392 per student.
Sixth grade isn’t bundled into the deal because TCS has its own. But families can still send their sixth-graders to Nauset through the state’s school choice program. For fiscal 2021, the tuition for a Truro sixth-grader going to Nauset under school choice was just $5,000.
If TCS does away with its sixth grade, Truro would need to revise its tuition agreement with Nauset, and the town would be on the hook for the higher tuition. “As long as we legally have a sixth grade, we’ll continue to offer it,” said Costigan. “And if students leave, we’ll pay the $5,000.”
Families of fifth-graders generally begin thinking about their sixth-grade options in January and February. TCS advertises its program. “It’s a super individual decision for every family and student,” said Kolby Blehm, the school committee chair.
“Some students have special education needs that are better met in Truro’s smaller setting,” said Costigan. TCS contracts with Gosnold, which sends counselors to the school, where students can bee seen through their private insurance plans. “That way, families don’t have to travel 45 minutes to get to the doctor,” Costigan said.
“To entice more families to stay, we added some really special elements in 2014,” she added. Two cohorts of sixth-graders went every week to the Hyannis Maritime Museum and learned how to build a skiff from scratch. TCS had always done a four-day trip to Washington, D.C., but in 2018, the sixth-graders polished up their verb conjugations and put their Spanish skills to the test in Puerto Rico.
In 2015-2016, Helen Grimm’s twins, Anders and Ella, attended TCS for such experiences, including visiting an oyster grant and picking cranberries at a local farm. “It was wonderful to be in this intimate setting, exploring all kinds of things that wouldn’t happen in a typical middle school day,” Grimm remarked.
Despite TCS’s unique offerings, Heather Peters Reis made up her mind about sixth grade when her daughter, Nina, was in preschool. Heather teaches sixth grade at Monomoy Regional Middle School in Chatham.
“TCS is an amazing school,” she said. “But it’s an elementary school.”
By the end of fifth grade, Peters Reis felt, Nina was ready for some independence: taking the bus to Nauset, navigating crowded hallways, seeing unfamiliar faces, and making new friends.
“We recommend that students do sixth grade here,” said Shelby Williams, Nauset’s sixth-grade counselor. “It’s in their best interest. The entire sixth-grade year, teachers are guiding them through how to be a middle school student. But the seventh-grade teachers pretty much expect that they know these expectations.”
Peters Reis, who is familiar with state standards, said she “anticipated Nina would struggle with the math curriculum.” Going to Nauset for the sixth grade, she hoped, would help keep Nina from falling behind.
“I had trouble at first,” Nina told the Independent. “I’d go to other kids and ask, ‘Can you help me with this?’ ” Long division was troublesome, she said, not to mention multiplying fractions.
Until 2014, TCS used Everyday Math, a curriculum developed by the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project, but it didn’t align with Nauset’s approach. “We were getting feedback from our students that they were experiencing difficulties when they transitioned in math,” Costigan said.
TCS then switched to the Investigations curriculum, which prioritizes establishing a “solid foundation of number sense,” Costigan said, before moving on to algorithms.
“The kids get really good at manipulating numbers,” she continued, “but it doesn’t teach algorithms until later, in the fourth and fifth grade, so the kids haven’t mastered it by the time they’re moving on — which I think might be where the rub is. That’s what I hope to dig down deeper into.”
All meetings in Truro are remote only. Go to truro-ma.gov and click on the meeting you want to watch. The agenda includes instructions on how to join.
Friday, Nov. 12
Tuesday, Nov.16
Wednesday, Nov. 17
Conversation Starters
Suit Drops From $5.7M to $41
Christine Markowski and Beth Dietz, two Truro Central School parents who believe the school committee did not conduct its search for a superintendent properly, originally sought $5.7 million in a civil suit against the committee. This has since become a small-claims complaint filed at Orleans District Court on Oct. 25. The new amount of damages on the line: $41.
Markowski, one of the plaintiffs, claims that the school committee, the defendant, owes $1 for violating “its own Affirmative Action Policy and the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Law.” Should the committee lose the suit, it may also have to pay $40 in court costs.
“This thing is just symbolic,” Markowski said, “because I want the judge to mandate that they start a new search.”
Markowski is not represented by a lawyer. She was an editorial assistant for law journals at Harvard Law School.
Stephanie Costigan currently holds the position of Truro Central School superintendent. The committee, Markowski alleges, never advertised the job, apart from an internal listing.
After the public portion of the Nov. 3 school committee meeting, the board went into executive session to discuss two items: litigation strategy regarding Markowski’s lawsuit and a complaint against Costigan. Markowski said she did not file this complaint. The meeting minutes of the session are not public unless a committee member moves to release them and the committee approves the motion. —Jasmine Lu
TRURO — According to Patrick Riley, Truro Central School’s new principal, directing an elementary school band is an undertaking that requires patience — and, when a headache strikes, “a fair amount of aspirin.”
Before he became an administrator, Riley was a music instructor in the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District, where he guided fourth and fifth graders through their first forays with wind instruments. That role involved enduring the squawk of a mishandled oboe and the scream of trumpets, but the “a-ha!” moments made everything worth it. For Riley, it’s when a student puffs and sputters at the flute, making hardly a peep for days, then, finally, manages to whistle out a note. Or when antsy kids can, at long last, take a bow under bright lights, having “totally rocked it,” he said.
Riley made the leap from music to administration in 2013, when he was offered the position of dean of students at the Station Avenue Elementary School. “I really enjoyed working with different people across the school district,” he said. By 2015, he was Station Avenue’s assistant principal, and, in 2016, he became principal of Marguerite E. Small Elementary in Yarmouth. When the principal’s job at Truro Central School (TCS) was posted on the Dennis-Yarmouth district’s website, he applied. “I was really interested in getting to know a new part of Cape Cod,” Riley said. “I’d been in the Mid Cape for my whole career.”
“I have always thought music educators, conductors really, made the best school administrators,” said Michelle Conover, a former member of the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School Committee who worked closely with Riley when he was an assistant principal. “Conductors have mastered the ability to get every individual invested in their part, every instrument invested in their section, and every section invested in the whole.”
Conover also happens to play the clarinet in the Barnstable Town Band, where Riley maintains his connection to music by serving as conductor. “Nothing rattles him,” Conover said. “At a recent concert, all his music scores blew away, and the show went on.”
Riley has also directed the Cape Cod New Horizons Band, which includes many older adults looking to dust off instruments that have gone untouched for decades. Some members are newcomers to music. A band dominated by seniors, however, comes with a different set of challenges. “We’re a bit hard of hearing,” said Corey Russo, who joined New Horizons in her mid-40s as a clarinet rookie. “I could imagine that it’d be easy for older folks to give up, but Patrick was so patient.”
Even the formidable Letty Russo, Corey’s self-taught clarinetist of an aunt, couldn’t faze Riley. Letty played with New Horizons throughout her 80s, until her passing in 2019. “She was prickly and opinionated,” said Corey. “If she had something to say, she could be — I don’t want to say rude — well, okay, she could be rude! But Patrick would just let it roll off his back.”
Sept. 7 marks the first day of school, and TCS has hammered out a mask policy and stocked up on PPE. Riley has had more than a year’s worth of experience tackling pandemic policy. When Covid-19 hit in March 2020, M. E. Small Elementary scrambled to move online. For families without internet, Riley and his staff worked with Comcast to order mobile hotspots. While they waited for sluggish deliveries, they posted a drop-box outside the school, filling it with paper copies of teaching materials.
In the fall of 2020, 80 percent of M. E. Small students went back in person, but some immunocompromised teachers had to continue working remotely. Others needed impromptu days off when medical concerns arose. In the classrooms, windows occasionally wouldn’t open. The ventilation system refused to cooperate. Even worse: positive Covid-19 tests would send entire classes into quarantine. “It was a situation where you had to take care of people first,” Riley said.
Some Truro parents question whether Riley is the right pick for principal. “Despite requests for diversity, Mr. Riley is a white man from Dennis,” wrote parents Beth Dietz and Christine Markowski to the school committee. They complained that he wasn’t a Truro native — unlike Megan O’Leary, the school’s veteran fifth-grade teacher who applied for the principal’s job and was one of four finalists for the position. Supt. Stephanie Costigan picked Riley.
Under state law, the superintendent appoints the principal. To assist her, Costigan appointed a screening committee of teachers, parents, and community members who read applications, interviewed finalists, and provided their advice. Their discussions were not public because advisory committees appointed by the superintendent are not subject to the Open Meeting Law. Riley and Costigan are currently drafting their respective job descriptions, which they expect will be finalized by October.
“I’m trying to jump right into community building, recognizing that relationships matter,” Riley replied when the Independent asked about Dietz’s and Markowski’s concerns. “The first day of school is too late for the kids to meet their principal.” Two weeks ago, he held a “meet and greet” with families at Puma Park, “which was attended by many, evidenced by the 150 popsicles he gave out,” said Costigan.
Riley was doubtful. “We certainly didn’t have 150 kids there,” he remarked. “Some of them were going back for seconds or thirds. The record, I heard, was five.”
TRURO — Beth Dietz and Christine Markowski, parents of eight-year-old twins at Truro Central School (TCS), have filed two complaints with the state over the school committee’s hiring earlier this year of Stephanie Costigan as superintendent.
In one complaint, submitted to the state attorney general, they argue that the committee violated the Open Meeting Law. The second complaint, to the Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), alleges a “lack of equal opportunity and equity” in the committee’s having interviewed only one candidate for the position: Costigan.
“I’ve been completely in the dark about the hiring process,” Dietz said on Aug. 19 during the public comment period of the school committee’s meeting. “It was really not responsible. It was not respectful.”
At least one member of the committee has some sympathy with the complaints. Kolby Blehm, who is also a TCS parent, said that parents’ opinions weren’t necessarily heard. “After public comment closes,” he told the Independent, “the public is just there to observe and not really participate.”
Blehm joined the school committee in July 2020. He knew that a superintendent search was slated for the coming year. “I felt it was important to have parent representation on the committee as this was happening,” he said.
On Nov. 12, Blehm said, the committee floated the idea of advertising the job as a combined director of student services and superintendent position. It occurred to him that this description seemed precisely tailored to Costigan’s credentials. She was already serving full-time as director of student services. The superintendent’s position has been part-time.
Kenneth Oxtoby, the committee chair at the time, explained that Costigan had the proper license to become superintendent, but he agreed to keep the process “fair and equitable.”
The board met on Dec. 3 to discuss a potential survey that the Mass. Association of School Committees (MASC) had prepared for Truro. Blehm said he considered this a good resource for soliciting public feedback. Committee member Christine Roderick was concerned about the length of the survey. “Holy smokes!” she said. “This is a lot of work.”
At the committee’s Dec. 16 meeting, as discussion of the superintendent search was about to start, Costigan left the room.
“What I am going to suggest is that we do the following,” Oxtoby said, “and people can let me know if you think I’m totally out of left field, or in outer space.” He proposed that the committee distribute the MASC survey and post the job internally “for a week and have [Costigan] formally apply.”
Oxtoby described director of student services and superintendent as “complementary positions” that involved similar responsibilities. A benefit of hiring Costigan, he added, was that she was accessible on school grounds five days a week, whereas an external candidate for superintendent would likely be present only two days per week.
Blehm pressed the committee to also do an external posting. But member Dennis Clark disagreed. “That sounds like a mess,” he said. “It would greatly prolong the process and complicate it.”
Oxtoby’s proposal passed 4-1, with Blehm the lone dissenter.
“I’m not going to be able to support it without some kind of guarantee that we’re going to be looking in an area where we actually have something to compare to,” he told his colleagues.
On Jan. 4, TCS families and staff received the survey. The internal posting went live among staff on the 6th. The following day, Blehm asked the rest of the committee, “What difference could any of this possibly make if the outcome of this process has already been predetermined?”
During the committee’s Jan. 21 meeting, Costigan was interviewed and her candidacy was discussed afterwards. There was no job description for the position being offered.
“I’m going to vote yes for this,” said Blehm, but he criticized the decision to delay formalizing the job description until after the hiring. “I feel like we’re continuing to do this backwards,” he said.
A unanimous vote clinched the job for Costigan.
“I was trying to figure out the best way to represent the interests of the community while making sure business got done,” Blehm told the Independent this week. “But if someone wanted to criticize that, then I feel like that would be a fair criticism.”
Costigan is now both director of student services and superintendent, she told the Independent. She and the new principal, Patrick Riley, plan to hold off on formalizing their respective job descriptions until they’ve worked together for a few weeks. “We often wear multiple hats here, so there’s a lot of overlap between the job descriptions,” she said.
When Beth Dietz filled out the Jan. 4 superintendent survey, her primary concern was diversity. According to DESE, 32.7 percent of the students enrolled at TCS in 2020-2021 were nonwhite; among Truro staff that year, there was only one nonwhite staff member for every 31.8 white staff members. “I wanted to make sure that we had a person of color or some kind of diversity represented in [the superintendent] position,” Dietz said.
The Independent asked Blehm what role diversity played during the hiring. “I don’t think you could say that it did much of anything when there’s only one candidate,” he said.
Kenneth Oxtoby maintained that the position was “posted appropriately” as an internal hiring and repeated his support for Costigan. He declined to provide further comment.
This past July, Blehm became chair of the school committee. “What I really want right now is to take these lessons and try to use them as a way to move forward,” he said. “My intention is to not repeat mistakes. They’re definitely at the front of my mind.”
TRURO — Lynne Ready says there is a sequence to teaching children how to use scissors. First, you must pick the right type of construction paper — not too floppy. It must be a light color, so the students can see the black line. Then, you tell the students, “I’m going to make that black line disappear.” With one snip, the line vanishes and the two pieces of construction paper fall into a waiting basket.
“The kids are mesmerized,” said Ready. “And with one snip, they have success.”
Ready should know how to help kids succeed. She has been an elementary school teacher for 49 years. For the last 20, she has been head of the preschool program at Truro Central School.
Ready is retiring at the end of June, having taught generations of human beings how to use scissors and much more.
“Part of being a teacher is trusting kids to learn even if you don’t think they are learning,” Ready said, as a wild box turtle lumbered toward her impressive vegetable garden. “Yes, we want them to be successful with the curriculum, but there is more to life that they can learn in their time with us. They can learn a lot about themselves.”
Ready lives at the bottom of a hollow in Wellfleet in a little house she bought and maintains on her own. The grounds are impeccable. This is where she raised her adopted son, Mateo, who is now 30.
That’s the story behind this gentle rebel of a preschool teacher. Though she giggles at the adorable passions of four-year-olds, she’s dealt with the seriousness of adulthood quite well.
Ready was born to a working-class family in Norwalk, Conn. She spent two years at the University of Connecticut at Storrs before quitting school — which she said she never liked, anyway — to live in a barn and raise goats, chickens, and a donkey.
She considers herself an old hippie, not a former hippie, but, she says, she was never the type to drop acid or drop out. Immediately after leaving school, she took a job as a part-time teacher in a Montessori school in Storrs.
“In a year, I paid off my $1,000 student loan,” she said. Four years later, at age 24, she was the director of that Montessori school.
Her next move was to earn a master’s in education with a minor in environmental science. Working part-time in Storrs, she commuted to Antioch University in New Hampshire. During the summers, Ready volunteered aboard the Clearwater, a sloop owned by Pete Seeger, educating students about the Hudson River.
And then, by the mid-1980s, tired of the way Montessori schools seemed to attract only elite families, she began pursuing jobs in public education.
Ready applied to districts in the two areas where she had enjoyed vacations — Vermont and Cape Cod. When the Provincetown Schools hired her to teach first grade, “I was so nervous,” she said.
She was a passionate believer in the Montessori method, and she was unsure if public school bureaucracy would be a fit.
But Provincetown Elementary welcomed her, she said, and people there understood her love of nature and her ability to try different educational approaches. She taught a multi-age classroom, which gave her the opportunity to have some students for five years straight.
“Montessori’s idea was, ‘You don’t do the teaching, you let the materials do the teaching,’ ” Ready said.
When students are drawn to a particular material, it is the teacher’s job to create a “prepared environment,” bring the tools to the child, and “watch them to see what they need,” Ready said.
Nola Glatzel, 30, said she remembers what Ready taught her at the Provincetown multiage classroom, which Glatzel attended for three years, more than any of the lessons in middle and high school.
“She was just an amazing teacher,” said Glatzel, now the owner of the Earthstar Play School in Truro. “Everything was so hands-on. She really taught us to be critical thinkers. We wrote a petition about ending Columbus Day.”
When the Provincetown Schools held Middle Ages Day, Ready’s students dressed up not just as Europeans but as people from every continent.
“She was always questioning the Eurocentric focus of history, and so when I’d go to other classes I was already looking out for the story of the unrepresented group,” Glatzel said.
Truro Central School, Ready said, has been supportive of her practice: Brian Davis, the former principal, made sure the preschool playground and classroom were large enough and stocked with the essentials of the Montessori toolbox.
Ready said she had no idea that her first year of teaching in 1972 would be the most open, learn-by-doing time in education. Now, she said, the pendulum has swung “far, far in the other direction.”
Whether that’s a positive direction or not, Ready would not say. But, she added, “In 49 years, I feel like I’ve watched the evolution of our country. But what kids need is exactly the same. They need to know they are safe and that we’re looking out for them. And they need to know there is something interesting for them to do.”
TRURO — The school committee on April 29 approved a plan to expand the town’s free preschool program so that it can accommodate all the three- and four-year-old children of residents and town employees on a five-days-a-week schedule by the next school year.
Currently, due to limited space and staff, three-year-olds rarely get full weekly slots. The vote comes after more than three years of back-and-forth discussions between the school committee and Truro parents, many of whom came to believe that the committee was unwilling to collaborate with them.
“Anytime the select board or another official asks the school committee to do something, they’ll do it,” said Kate Blehm, the mother of two children at the Truro Central School and a schoolteacher in Orleans. “Not when it comes to parents, though.
“It hasn’t felt very welcoming to families,” she continued. “It’s been like a part-time job coming to meetings and writing letters and inviting other parents.”
Blehm is married to Kolby Blehm, who is a member of the Truro School Committee. He abstained from the April 29 vote because of his conflict of interest on the issue.
“Well, technically, schools are there to provide an education,” said Michelle Jarusiewicz, the vice chair of the school committee. What the state requires regarding the education of young children is narrower than what parents have been asking for, she said, adding that programs “for three- and four-year-olds, five days a week, is not one of those requirements.”
Many early childhood educators nationally, however, have argued for universal free public preschool, based on extensive research showing its benefits.
Even though it’s not required by the state, local parents have argued that the expansion of the preschool program is a necessary step toward making Truro a more viable year-round community. Proponents hope it would encourage young families to put down roots here.
A March 2019 article in the Cape Cod Times assembled Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education data to show that, in the decade between 2009 and 2019, enrollment in schools in Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet dropped from 444 to 336 students — a 24-percent decline.
This year, presumably due to the economic and domestic hardships of the coronavirus pandemic, Truro had an exceptionally high demand for preschool, said Stephanie Costigan, the acting principal of Truro Central School. Costigan will become Truro’s superintendent starting next year.
Provincetown, Wellfleet, and Eastham all have adopted early childhood programs or child-care vouchers to assist young families with the costs of preschool and child care.
In 2018, Provincetown had already begun to try to support younger residents by offering free child care and preschool for all infants, toddlers, and three- and four-year-olds of residents and town employees. When Provincetown town employees who live in Truro began sending their children to Provincetown for preschool, Truro responded by announcing its own free preschool program. However, unlike Provincetown, Truro did not aim to accommodate all families who wanted to participate. Now it will.
The next steps in the expansion process, Costigan said, are hiring the two additional teachers and educational assistants. Additionally, in the coming weeks, school administrators will work with staff to figure out how they are going to use the limited classroom space they have.
At the April 29 meeting, current Supt. Michael Gradone gave a presentation about the plan in which he lamented that, because of the preschool expansion, Truro’s art, music, and Spanish classes will have to happen off the cart — meaning these teachers will visit other classrooms rather than having their own. He hopes the town will be able to add a portable classroom in September 2022.
Everyone — even those who expressed reservations about the expansion — seemed to agree it will, on balance, benefit the town.
“There are downsides to the expansion,” Gradone told the Independent. “But there isn’t much in public education that isn’t a mixed blessing. You make your choices and serve kids as best you can.” Gradone is retiring at the end of the school year.
“I’m very excited about the plan. I think all of us need to support families and people in our communities,” Jarusiewicz said. “We’ve been losing people for decades. Families and individuals struggle to stay here because of the high cost of living. Anything we can do to support them is a good thing.”
Meetings are held remotely. Go to truro-ma.gov, click on the meeting you want to watch, and open its agenda for instructions on how to watch or take part online.
Thursday, April 29
Friday, April 30
Monday, May 3
Tuesday, May 4
Wednesday, May 5
Thursday, May 6
Conversation Starters
Preschool Expansion Could Happen
On Thursday, April 29 at 5:15 p.m., the Truro School Committee will hear a presentation from the principal and superintendent on a way to answer the call for expanded free preschool for three-year-olds.
Currently, Truro offers preschool to three- and four-year-olds at no charge to children of residents and town employees. But due to limited space and staff, the three-year-olds rarely get full weekly slots. This has made it necessary for many working parents to put their children in costly child-care programs if they can even find them. Child care is in short supply on the Outer Cape.
Truro residents with young children have been asking Truro Central School to offer more preschool. On Thursday, the school administration will present a way to make it happen.
If the school committee adopts the plan, it would cost $110,000 to $125,000 to pay for one full-time teacher and one classroom assistant. And it would require use of a third classroom for activities, according to the staff report that will be presented to the committee on Thursday.
Space constraints due to Covid, however, may require the school to also acquire and install a portable classroom, which would cost $90,000, the staff report stated.
In a related matter, voters at town meeting on June 26 will be asked to adopt a voucher program to grant $7,500 each to children of town residents and staff to be spent at licensed child-care facilities should the Truro preschool be full. That will cost $150,000. The article is petitioned by Raphael Richter, who is a father of young children.
Sharing the County Bounty
Truro looks pretty small from the perspective of the U.S. Census and that is why President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act allotted the town only $198,100 in direct funding. That’s not enough, given that the number of registered voters in the last election exceeded the 2010 Truro census population count of 2,003, said Town Manager Darrin Tangeman.
Clearly, Tangeman said, Covid-19 has brought second-home owners to town year-round. Voter registration is up 10 percent, and the transfer station is taking in a lot more household trash, he said.
So, Tangeman and a member of the select board will be working to write a proposal to tap into some of the $41 million expected to come from the rescue plan to Barnstable County.
These funds should in some way reflect the needs of the area based on the economic fallout of the pandemic, though the uses are not as well defined as with the previous Cares Act funds, he said.
Tangeman said one obvious use of the windfall is to expand broadband to the outermost reaches of the Outer Cape towns. This is Covid-19 related, he added, because the need to work and access education from home has clearly grown during the pandemic. —K.C. Myers
TRURO — Truro Central School (TCS) head second-grade teacher Amelia Rose feels, she announces, as she hurries from teaching remote addition class in the library to delivering an in-person version of that same lesson in her classroom, where indoor, distanced recess just wrapped up and a ritual mask break is next, “totally normal — really.”
When Gov. Charlie Baker shuttered Massachusetts public schools on March 16, 2020, teachers scrambled to adjust to the virtual model forced on them. Making distance learning work for elementary school students was especially challenging. Those frantic spring months saw “a lot of maintenance and a lot of activities,” says Rose. “But there wasn’t a lot of learning.”
Come fall, the schools to-open-or-not-to-open dilemma dominated Facebook groups, headlines, and the presidential campaign. “There were more questions than answers,” says Rose. Could in-person learning be safe for students? For teachers? For parents? Would remote learning leave a generation lost? Could all the head-swiveling and screen-toggling required of hybrid learning really allow for meaningful, effective teaching? In essence: no matter its form, wasn’t children’s learning this year doomed to fail?
TCS hoped the answer was no. On Sept. 28, it became the only Outer Cape elementary school to open its doors to students seeking in-person instruction. Remote learning was an option, too, both for temporary spells or for the entire year. That means that each teacher spends each day switching between in-person, remote, and hybrid learning — “which definitely took some getting used to,” says Rose.
But six months have passed. TCS allowed this reporter to spend an ordinary Tuesday in Rose’s classroom earlier this month. The experience offered up none of the madness one might expect from, say, an attempt to teach one screenful and one roomful of masked eight-year-olds about pandas. If the day revealed any fundamental truth, it was this: these times are unprecedented no more. Rose wasn’t scrambling, or beside herself, or adjusting to some new foreign system. She was just teaching second grade.
Twelve of Rose’s students come to school every day, except in the case of quarantine or other temporary illness. They walk into their classroom, stash their coats and bags in cubbies, then head straight for the all-important hand-washing station, where, if their skin seems dry from all the scrubbing, Rose keeps moisturizer at the ready.
At 8:30 a.m., every student — sitting at his assigned, six-feet-apart desk — gets out his Chromebook and opens Seesaw, a kid-friendly classroom app on which the students access their daily schedules, join online meetings, and fill out all their worksheets. Gone this year are the days of stacks of papers for the teachers to bring home. Instead, teachers comb each night through the students’ digital portfolios.
The three second-graders studying completely remotely this year open their Seesaw at 8:30, too, for a hybrid all-class greeting. On this Tuesday, the students meet with TCS guidance counselor and school social worker Nancy Winslow for Second Step, a social-emotional-learning curriculum she teaches weekly.
And then begins the academic day. Rose isn’t alone in her classroom; to adjust to a stay-in-one-place model of learning, TCS has split its teachers into so-called cohorts. For the second grade, that’s a team of five: head teacher Rose; teacher assistant Andre Lima; Jennifer Spoor, a reading specialist; Alison Waldo, a Spanish teacher; and Joshua Paul, a gym teacher and student teacher. Those five are responsible for the second grade all day.
From 9 to 10:15 a.m., as Rose leads a literacy workshop from the front of her classroom, Lima walks around, checking in on students, and Spoor leads a remote version of Rose’s lesson, then a hybrid guided reading exercise from the library nook, the second grade’s assigned remote-learning spot.
When she is done, it’s back to the classroom, where Rose projects a picture book about Chinatown (the second grade is studying a different culture each week) onto the classroom’s smart-screen.
Before Covid, reading time would happen in a circle on the classroom rug. “I think that’s what I miss the most,” says Rose. But students can’t move from their desk bubbles during class. Their lessons change; they stay in place.
After read-aloud, poetry, activities on Seesaw, and more guided reading, the students have a snack, then take their excursion of the day: to the gym, to meet cohort member Joshua Paul. They skip and jump in distanced lines and play a lot of pass — a natural six-feet-apart game.
Then Rose leads an in-person, panda-description writing lesson. Coordinated by Spoor, the remote students follow along on their own time; they upload their sample sentences to Seesaw, where all the teachers can check their progress later that day.
As Lima supervises lunchtime, Rose and Spoor get their first mask breaks of the day, in first-grade teacher Nina Picariello’s classroom. They talk about one particular joy of teaching younger students this year: flexibility. “The kids are just great about it,” Spoor says, “because they just accept that this is what second grade is like.”
“Which” — she paused — “is a little sad, that this is their reality. But I guess it’s like that for all of us.”
After indoor recess and quiet time comes Rose’s math dash. Lima takes charge of the classroom; Rose practices addition with her remote students. Then she leaves them to do some independent Seesaw work, rushes back to her classroom, and starts the same lesson over again, in person.
“It’s the best way to do it,” she says. “Not everybody is where they might have been in a typical year, but that’s OK, because the learning is happening. Everyone is making all the gains they can at this point in time. It’s worked out so well.”
Between math and phonics, the last lesson of the day, the classroom takes its daily movement break: a follow-along dance set to Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing.” The students mainly do their own dances. The teaching cohort hits every choreographed move with perfect precision.
“It’s our favorite,” says Lima. “The second grade is the place to be.”
TRURO — Over four decades ago, Michael Gradone III accepted a job as the Wellfleet Elementary School principal. In June, Gradone, 73, will retire as superintendent of Truro’s one-school district.
A soft-spoken, white-bearded figure who looks as much like a child’s image of Santa Claus as is possible, Gradone thus comes to the end of his long Outer Cape school career. He served as the Wellfleet principal for 12 years. And though he has spent the last seven years leading Truro (a district so small that this has been a half-time job), his resume includes five years as the Nauset Regional Schools’ assistant superintendent and then 17 — from 1992 to 2009 — as the district’s superintendent.
“Mike is iconic on the Cape,” said Brian Davis, the retired principal-superintendent of Truro Central School. Gradone cares about students first, said Davis, and everything else stems from that. The two worked as superintendents side by side for years, then Gradone took over Davis’s position as superintendent in 2014. Stephanie Costigan was promoted to principal last year after Robert Beaudet retired unexpectedly. She will now replace Gradone as superintendent.
A Harvard graduate and the son of a Newton high school administrator, Gradone decided in college that he wanted to work directly with children. His first job was as a fourth-grade teacher for six years at Hardwick Elementary School. He came to Wellfleet from there.
At Hardwick, as he took on some administrative duties, he began to see “ways that great teachers could be brought together to increase their impact on kids,” Gradone said. “And that’s all I had hoped to do as a principal and then as a superintendent.”
Susan Hall Heinz, now the library and media specialist for the Provincetown Schools, was a student at Wellfleet Elementary School from 1975 to 1979. She remembers Gradone as a “kind, caring, and fair” principal.
Heinz said she herself was well behaved. “But I remember there were these two boys in the class who were always getting into it,” she said. “He would play the board game Uncle Wiggily with them in his office. I think that made it so he could talk to them about their behavior.”
Gradone became superintendent of the four-town Nauset district at the same time the Mass. Education Reform Act of 1993 was instituted. With it came the Mass. Comprehensive Assessment System or MCAS exams, including the requirement that all students pass the 10th-grade test to qualify for a high-school diploma.
Although the high-stakes uses of the MCAS were not popular with teachers (or with test researchers who questioned their statistical validity), Gradone supported the tests, arguing that while they were “far from a perfect measure,” they were “better than no measure.” He won praise for offering a “merit” raise to teachers if scores in the district rose. The outcome was predictable: scores go up when tests shape teaching.
Gradone’s approach turned out to give the district’s enrollment a boost. Since Nauset’s MCAS scores have annually topped all other Cape districts except for the Sturgis Charter School, school choice has attracted students to Nauset. Today, 24 percent of Nauset High’s population comes from school choice.
But improvements at the schools, Gradone explained, were “really a cultural change over a period of time and not test scores over two years.” Nauset’s drama club excelled at the same time, and the honors chorus sang at Carnegie Hall. “We wanted to nurture everyone,” Gradone said.
Amy Kandall, an art teacher at Nauset High School, said Gradone had good ideas. He once asked her to teach a professional development course on the use of art in academic classrooms. This validated her expertise, she said, and also helped teachers who constantly need to take such courses to keep up their certifications and find few options on the Cape.
“He’s a grandfather figure and a very sweet man,” Kandall said. “He was the rare kind of administrator you could go to with anything.”
Gradone said he learned a lot about his profession from his father, Michael Gradone Jr. He was a student at Newton North High School while his father was a house master there. He saw that his father cared a lot about his students. Rather than being a bureaucrat, he worked to make a difference in students’ lives. “He was a great role model,” Gradone said.
TRURO — In a school across from Truro’s vines, stood 113 children in nearly straight lines. It was a scene that evoked the melodious words of Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeline. The hope is that the order and regimentation imposed on the students at Truro Central School will help contain the coronavirus.
The students returned for in-person instruction on Sept. 28 to a completely transformed school, with an intense new layer of rules and sterile cleanliness in view on this reporter’s Oct. 9 visit.
“It’s all been hard,” said Principal Stephanie Costigan when asked what has been most difficult about preparing the school for classes while the virus still threatens. “Every aspect of our day has changed. I don’t think there is one single thing that hasn’t changed. That’s the hardest part.”
Costigan was the director of student services until this summer when Principal Robert Beaudet retired unexpectedly. Costigan took on the principal’s role and, with School Supt. Michael Gradone, she got to work on details large and small.
They separated each class — except for the first and second grades, which are so small they are combined for lunch and recess — into six insular pods, from preschool to fifth grade.
The coordination begins at parent or bus dropoff, when teachers and aides wait in different places to escort students through various entrances — the front door, the gym, the playground entrance — and then directly to their seats. Once at their assigned desks, someone will bring the students their free breakfasts. The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture has allowed all students to receive free meals due to the pandemic until funding runs out or Dec. 31, whichever comes first, said Heather Harper, the school’s administrator for business and finance.
The space outside each classroom has been cleared, leveled, and adorned with benches so that kids can to move in and out of doors within their allotted spaces until they go to lunch, when, as a single class with about four adult teachers, aides, and specialists, they enter a glittering cafeteria. Lunches have been cooked and packaged into Styrofoam containers and set on a cart in the middle of the room. Susie Roderick, the cafeteria manager, watches from a distance. She used to scoop meals onto trays and chat with the kids.
Each eight-foot-long table is shared by just two children, one at each end. All of the students face in the same direction, as if riding a really big bus, and then they put their masks on hooks attached to the ends of the tables to eat. The adults bring them their lunches; the kids may not leave their seats.
Afterwards, the children exit to the playground, where, finally, they can be free to play, as long as they don’t take off their masks. (Mask breaks are allowed on the sidelines.)
If, at any point, they forget about the masks, an adult will say, “I see your nose.”
Every seat is assigned, even at lunch, Costigan said, so that if someone tests positive for Covid-19, school nurse Helen Grimm can do contact tracing. Although, Costigan added, no child or adult should ever become a close contact — meaning no one at Truro Central School should ever be unmasked within six feet of another person for more than 15 minutes.
When the students leave the cafeteria, Joe Maroon, an 80-year-old part-time custodian, cleans the tables and the chairs with hypochlorus solution and gets ready for the next bunch.
After the kids exit the playground, the school’s head custodian, Drew Locke, squirts all the plastic and metal equipment from his electrostatic backpack sprayer. This disinfects everything but also makes him look like he is dousing the playground with insecticide.
The children cannot sing together, but they go outside and bang drums and they play the keyboards in the gym far apart from each other. Other “specials,” such as art, take place on the computer. Even the students who are in class do their art on their iPads. This allows the 27 Truro students who are staying home to get art instruction at the same time as their classmates, Costigan explained. Teachers must teach simultaneously to kids in and out of school.
“You have to hold back with the hands-on learning,” said Bruce Lampman-Perlman, a.k.a. “Mr. L.P.,” who teaches first grade. “You can’t give them books. So, you have to show (the books) to them.”
Costigan said the students are doing really well and accepting the new rules far better than she thought they would.
Barbara Braun, a clinical nurse specialist for children and adolescents and a licensed mental health counselor who practices in Orleans, said the new rules are worth the price.
“The kids are adapting to the masks because they want to see their friends,” said Braun, who works with kids age five and up. “I haven’t heard any of my kids complaining about the excessive new rules.”
At the same time, Braun said, “Kids need to be free. They need expression and socialization.”
The virus provides more reasons to be anxious, and most of her clients are already very anxious. Screen time is on overload, she said, and parents are giving up their rules about it.
“But it is what it is,” she said. “Kids are resilient. Think of what kids have been through in history.”
