Saluting Eight Years with Dr. Clark

As the 2009-2010 school year closed this week, it also effectively ended Dr. Ann Clark's tenure as superintendent of schools. On Thursday, she turns the reins over to Dr. David Title.

Dr. Clark has been feted throughout the year, as she richly deserves, given what she has done during her time in Fairfield.  When the superintendent first arrived in 2002, the town was caught up in the divisive one high school/two high school debate which paralyzed the Board of Education and had town officials in a tizzy. One thing was clear: the population was rising and space needed to be found for the children.

Her predecessor, Dr. Carol Harrington, did not seem to know how to work the public, coming off as cold, so Clark's smiling presence was certainly most welcome. Few students ever saw Harrington and she was not much of a presence at town board meetings or an outspoken advocate for the children. She was oddly mum, for example, when the ninth grade center notion was floated as a solution to the population issue.

What's interesting is that around the time Clark took over, the school enrollment was climbing quickly, with 8,480 students in the 2002-03 school year. She leaves with 10,051 students, an 18.5 percent increase, crowded into our schools.

To her credit, Dr. Clark was an outgoing presence, and a tireless advocate for the students. It was always about the students and any time the Representative Town Meeting even conceived of reducing the education budget, she was the first to take the microphone and worry aloud how this would impact programs and the students. Not staff, not infrastructure, not technology…but the students. Yes, at times it sounded alarmist or using the children as a bargaining chip, but her passion trumped political maneuvering.

As Mary Hogue, the new PTA Council president, noted at Dr. Clark's retirement dinner, "The well-being of the children is absolutely vital to Ann."

For the last eight years, Dr. Clark has overseen an amazing growth in our schools including the opening of Fairfield Ludlowe High School and Roger Ludlowe Middle School and the addition of Burr Elementary School. And when mold decimated McKinley, she was there to shepherd the reconstruction process while minimizing stress for dislocated students. When Dr. Clark arrived, the goal had been to spend all this money to eventually eliminate the portable classrooms which swelled to 65 scattered across town and as she leaves, there remain 15, so she got close to this goal.

She even inaugurated the town's first pre-school system adding to the number of children she focused on. It's telling that when she announced her retirement, Dr. Clark explained that the last year her administrative duties had grown to the point she no longer could get out and meet the students. That was her clue that the time had come to move on.

When Dr. Clark arrived, she proclaimed she intended to raise student performance and while she did not hit her promised numbers, she came pretty close and deserves a lot of credit for that. Some of the stats to keep in mind include SAT scores exceeding the state averages and the graduation rate continuing to remain high while the dropout rate remains under 1 percent.

"She had been a director in the state Department of Education in Hartford so she really overhauled the curriculum in the schools and that was a primary focus of hers, the meat and potatoes of education, the curriculum," former Board of Education member David Weber said during her retirement dinner.

Some 85 programs were written under her supervision. "She followed through on rewriting it step by step, each level of instruction from elementary to high school," he said.

Dr. Clark pushed hard for increased availability of technology, adding more computers and finally introducing Smart Boards into the classrooms, pushing both teachers and students to embrace new ways of learning. The addition of Chinese as a language choice certainly was a forward-thinking program and unfortunately, was her last new program as the budget crunch forced her to postpone several other goals. The one we'll miss the most is revamping the high school schedule to increase the number of instructional minutes each student receives.

Personally, I enjoyed Dr. Clark's open approach to dealing with the town bodies. She made herself and/or her staff available for conversations, providing information as quickly as was possible.  Even after I ended my tenure as an RTM member, she still made a point of reaching out and offering up a hug whenever we crossed paths. Her empathy when my son was ill, and sharing some of her own personal experiences, helped make a trying time a little easier. For that, she has my unyielding gratitude.

While Dr. Clark ends her successful career as a superintendent, the town will continue to benefit from her presence as her attention now shifts to older children. She'll be teaching fulltime at Sacred Heart University, continuing to exert a positive influence over the next generation.

Dr. Clark leaves Fairfield in far better academic shape than when she found it but there's a lot left to be accomplished, made all the more difficult by the lingering economic climate. Dr. Title takes over her office on Thursday with not only large shoes to fill, but expectations from parents, students and educators to maintain this level of excellence and build upon it.

Robert Greenberger, a former RTM member, is vice chairman of the Democratic Town Committee.