For two years, a committee for something entitled Education 2000 has met in frequent closed session and then held a number of open forums, hosting more than 1,000 Three Village residents. It has been the committee's intention to establish a consensus of community opinion about the direction of Three Village School District educational initiatives for some time to come. The process continues though its "near" final draft was completed on February 1st, 1996 and made public on March 12th at a regular Board of Education meeting. The finished product, called a "vision statement," will be a manifesto for the District's brave new world of 21st century education. With its completion and the Board's approval may go your last real chance to determine the direction of future administrative generations. With its completion and the Board of Education's likely imprimatur, it will be the teachers and unions and administrators again calling the tune, unless you scream for something to the contrary.


They will determine how best to achieve your vision. They will choose and design the curricula. They will establish standards of student and teacher effectiveness. They will again be telling you what is best for your child, your grand-children, the reputation of the community.

Inherently required in consensus building is participant belief that something needs a fixing, they have meaningful input to provide, their collective voice will be listened to and that the resultant document will have impact. Under perfect conditions, consensus developers reach all representative groups and give equal weight to equally good ideas. In the real world, administrators use consensus to dull the sword of protest, explaining "It's what the people asked for." In the real world, administrators and steering committees manipulate the input to suit their own objectives. In the real world participants are often few and not truly reflective of a broadly based community. Their strongly held and loudly vocalized opinions or covert political or economic agendas are not always in keeping with either the objectives or best interests of all stakeholders.

A draft of the committee's present "Vision/Mission Statement" has been made public. A more "vanilla," generic and politically correct document you could find nowhere. A document with less specificity you could not design. A document providing greater latitude for curricula design, fewer standards of student and, especially, teacher performance and deeper involvement in student political socialization could never be more persuasively provided.

Get a copy. Review it. Then, you decide for yourself whether it is saying how to change the education system to better our children's scholastic aptitude, or preoccupied with what the authors believe makes for a better student-citizen and adult.

As the District says its interested in your opinions: LET THEM KNOW...every chance you get. Tell the Board, the District's administrators - starting with Dr. Joyce Flynn at 474-7525 - AND the media what you think the "consensus" should include. The District belongs to more than 30,000 voters, not just a few hundred folks in community and school activity groups. The vocal minority and all those directly connected with the Three Village School District's administration must learn to acknowledge that fact.

[ NOTE: The first draft of the document was published and distributed on October 12, 1995. After numerous an allegedly constructive community forums with perhaps over one thousand residents participating, the "Vision Statement" remains unchanged in an significant way. An absolutely amazing document, indeed! Its greatest value, however, being to the teachers.]