SAUGUS — Saugus’ lacking MCAS scores were the focus of tense debate during the new School Board’s first meeting Wednesday night.
“I knew you were in MCAS trouble when I got here. You were in deep trouble,” said Saugus School Superintendent Dr. David DeRuosi as he addressed the committee and about a dozen attendees during his district review report.
“Having been an urban superintendent and an urban high school principal, working in communities like Chelsea, Revere, Malden … check the tapes, I told [the previous] committee: Saugus fell asleep at the wheel.”
While he updated the board’s five members on the district’s current situation, DeRuosi stressed that playing the blame game wouldn’t help this new committee going forward.
Instead, he asked them to go through the paperwork and read what other agents and auditors have found, and, finally, get to work fixing some of the district’s most pressing issues he felt the board’s predecessors let slip through the cracks.
“This is not something I don’t know how to do, however, I do need support … I need people who understand that MCAS is a complex formula,” he said.
In response to board member Arthur Grabowski’s question of how DeRuosi expects to put his plans into action while working within what he called an “underfunded budget,” DeRuosi explained he didn’t believe “throwing money” at the problem would solve it. Instead, he referred to previous districts where he’d helped raise scores, citing slow but steady growth over time as his main focus.
In response to the tension in the room, board member Ryan Fisher reminded the superintendent he was talking to an entirely new committee that was still learning the ropes.
“Please don’t yell at us,” Fisher told DeRuosi. “This is our first meeting.”
DeRuosi responded, “I apologize sir. I get passionate.”
However, in a later response to the superintendent’s comment about Saugus “falling asleep at the wheel” when it came to the district’s scores, School Committee ChairmanThomas Whittredge agreed that the committee has its work cut out for it and will need to work as a team going forward to accomplish their goals for the district.
“He’s right about that,” he said. “I think the new educational plan will wake us all up as a community.”
