SAUGUS — Saugus’ new school board committee’s second meeting Thursday proved to be just as contentious as its first.
Superintendent David DeRuosi addressed a considerably larger crowd this time as he read the results of the town’s comprehensive District Review Report for the board and nearly two dozen community members.
“We’ve all read the report,” he said. “We’ve all known the district is in trouble for a while.”
The report cited excessive turnover resulting in inconsistent classroom practices, as well as irresponsible budgeting, as two particularly large culprits for the poor performance of Saugus Public Schools.
“You’re my third committee in less than three years,” DeRuosi told the new board, adding that he had been unable to analyze the district’s previous review because it had gone missing, lost in the shuffle between the town’s nearly half-a-dozen superintendents over the past seven years.
He noted that since 2012, the town has seen five superintendents, three directors of curriculum, two high school principals, two middle school principals, and several elementary school principals.
“For a district that size, that’s a hell of a lot of turnover,” he said.
He went on to criticize the way the administration has handled its budget in past years, reiterating what he insisted at the last meeting: that money wasn’t the district’s issue.
“There was a culture here that there was never enough money,” he said, adding later: “the budget tends to fit the flavor of the town it’s for.”
Although DeRuosi applauded areas where the schools had made marked improvements, including a decrease in chronic student absenteeism and the hiring of more counselors to increase support for at-risk students, the school board and DeRuosi mutually agreed that considerable work still needs to be done to bring Saugus schools up to state standards.
Committee chair Thomas Whitredge shared his frustration with what he feels is the disjointed way the district has handled its problems in the past.
“I know this is my first round on the school committee, but I’ve been a parent for a long time, and I’ve been paying attention for a long time,” he said. “Us up here, we rely on you guys to tell us what you need. None of us are educators, so if this group starts talking about that one, and that group is mad at this one, this is not going to work. We need everybody together to tell us what we need.”
Board member John Hatch agreed, adding: “Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results … if we’re going down the same path year after year, that’s not going to get our test scores up.”
