Technology Program In Peril

Woonsocket’s elementary schools are on the verge of eliminating technology education to satisfy state mandates for health and physical education instruction.

The mandates require state schools to provide a minimum average of one hundred minutes of health and physical education per week, and Woonsocket elementary schools, as revealed by a recent performance audit, have been providing only forty minutes per week. To provide the additional minutes without eliminating other programs, a trio of Woonsocket elementary school technology teachers designed an innovative solution: create a technology curriculum that would focus exclusively on health studies.

“With Health-Tech, the only difference would be that instead of integrating our projects with what the classroom teacher was doing, we would teach health, and all technology projects would be health-based,” said veteran technology teacher Heather Neil.

Neil joins Jenn Morrison, and Karen Smith, technology teachers with a combined twenty years of experience under their belts, in an attempt to save the program. Among the projects they’ve worked on with students have been PowerPoints, graphing projects, tesselation, business cards, and a History of Woonsocket PowerPoint for the .

Neil contacted the Department of Education to confirm that the proposed curriculum would satisfy state mandates and presented the idea to Woonsocket Schools Superintendent Dr. Robert Gerardi this spring.

“He really liked the idea, and was going to verify that it would meet the mandate and then he was going to present it to the School Committee,” said Neil. “About two weeks ago we heard Dr. Gerardi had decided against the program and students would be receiving an additional forty minutes of physical education per week, for a total of eighty minutes each week.”

School nurses had volunteered to teach the additional twenty minutes of health education and Gerardi had made an “administrative decision.”

During eighth grade, students must pass a New England Common Assessment Program, or NECAP, examination in technology. With the elimination of the technology program, Woonsocket students will receive no formal instruction in technology before the eighth grade.

Neil offered that technology teachers could collaborate with school nurses in teaching the Health-Tech program, and suggested piloting a single sample class that could be evaluated.

“We contacted School Committee members, as well as staff and parents in search of support. I know there were many e-mails of support sent. All of the nurses expressed they could not commit to that amount of teaching time, but many were eager to collaborate with us on the program," Neil said. "Some principals had sent e-mails of support. We had one letter written at each elementary school and signed by just about every staff member in the building that day. Each letter made a different point about the benefit of Helth-Tech and urged Dr. Gerardi to reconsider his administrative decision.”

Gerardi, who will leave his position as superintendent at the end of June, considers it “an issue of balance.” Under the technology teachers’ proposal, students would receive forty minutes of health education per week, and sixty minutes of physical activity.

"I talked with my physical education teachers, and they agreed that it didn’t make much sense,” for almost half of physical education instruction to be health classes, Gerardi explained. The superintendent favors a structure that provides the required one hundred minutes of physical education with eighty minutes of physical activity and twenty minutes of health education provided by school nurses and classroom teachers.

“Forty minutes of health education wouldn’t be balanced,” he said. “The students will still have integrated technology instruction,” he said, pointing to the continued access to resources and computer labs supervised by library media specialists and classroom teachers.

Neil will speak at this Wednesday’s school committee meeting. “At this meeting, it will be approved to displace all four technology teachers, thus eliminating the position. Because we found out so late about technology being eliminated, there was no time to change what was set in motion. I will be requesting anyone who has a voice in district decision-making to help make the following happen: If after the job fair ends on Thursday, all four of the P.E. positions are not filled, to strongly consider piloting Health-Tech in the remaining positions instead of hiring new P.E. teachers, said Neil.

“If nothing else, consider it for the following year. As we spoke with all of our colleagues, just about every person we spoke to was upset with the decision. I feel if we had enough notice, people would've been able to express their opinions publicly and it would have made a difference for next year, but sadly now it is pretty much too late.”

The Woonsocket School Committee will meet on Wednesday evening at the Woonsocket Middle School, Hamlet Building, 60 Florence Drive. A closed session will commence at 6:30 p.m., followed by an open session at 7 p.m.