Madison Superintendent Inspired at North Haven High

Did you ever have a teacher that changed the course of your life?

Thomas Scarice, Madison's new superintendent of schools, did his junior year at .

Her name was Mrs. Lenore Michlin.

"Twenty five years ago, she made me a writer," he said. "I was not a writer prior to my junior year. By the time I was a senior I was a writer."

Preparing for today's lessons and tomorrow's challenges

Scarice says the ability to have that kind of profound impact on students in something he cherishes, and is one reason why he became a school administrator, so that he could work with teachers to prepare students for today's lessons and tomorrow's challenges.

"I love being in a leadership position in a school system, because I love being able to facilitate and collaborate with others. I love being involved with all facets of the organization, from the community to the individual classrooms. But I particularly love visiting classrooms. I left the building level [of teaching and administration] earlier than I anticipated in my career and finding myself gravitating to classrooms a lot," he said.

Scarice says that he has a tremendous amount of respect for what is currently going on in Madison's classrooms. "I have admired the Madison Public School System for some time," he said.

"Students need to be flexible and creative thinkers"

Scarice says it was sufficient for students, in the past, to accumulate knowledge and facts.

"That alone is completely insufficient right now," he said. "Students need to be flexible and creative thinkers. They need to work well and communicate in a dense social media world. They need to apply their learning, as opposed to just accumulating knowledge. Madison and other districts are working on this and this is where we need to go."

Scarice said it's possible to take an already outstanding curriculum, and naturally integrate a deeper level of thinking, analysis, and application. Part of that could involve questioning the benchmarks that schools currently use, he said.

Doing it in a child-centered way

"Some of them are insufficient and we need to move beyond them," he said. "Our kids are moving on to a global world and we need to prepare them for that."

Still ... and here Scarice pauses for a moment.

"We need to do this in a child-centered way," he said. "Increasing high stakes pressure is really not the best way to prepare kids. It's really about understanding where they are developmentally."

"Letting them breath and process and not make them feel like they were on a treadmill at five years old"

"We wanted to be able to spread it out  and let them breath and process and not make them feel like they were on a treadmill at five years old," he said.

Scarice said students, whether they are in kindergarten or high school, learn better when they have time to process and reflect.

"You have to create time to process and think and reflect," he said. "Sometimes less is more when it comes to actual content. Look at the way math standards are changing. Math experts have adopted that approach. They are teaching students so that they can process and problem solve. Just trying to cram as much in as possible didn't work."

Going to the next level in an era of declining enrollment, difficult economic times

Scarice says he is cognizant of the fact that he will be working with the community to take the schools to the next level at a time of declining enrollment, a trend that is affecting not only Madison, but many other school districts as well.

"This is a problem in the entire state of Connecticut, for the most part," he said. "That's why all of these decisions have to be made through a community process. The question is, how do we best use our resources and best use our facilities most efficiently to achieve our goals?"

He said there are different ways to approach challenges created by declining enrollments and that it sometimes can involve the creative use of facilities and human resources.