Community Members Speak Out: LES Value Proposition, Part I - Challenges

Community member Wendy McLean has created "A Value Proposition for Keeping LES Open," which she submitted to the Katonah-Lewisboro Board of Education.  The first section of her document is presented below.

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To the Katonah-Lewisboro Board of Education,

I have a unique argument that so far has been largely circumstantial in the debate over closing an elementary school in Katonah-Lewisboro.  I offer you the research on well-being, community, values, and strengths to make clearer the thread of what so many have touched on:  Closing a school is a different decision than ending a program or a service because of its effect on the entire community.  We must be sure it is the right decision, both in timing and necessity; we must understand the ‘way’ we are getting there, to have a thoughtful plan; and we must make efforts to transition as positively as possible. 

Before I begin, I want to let you know I have a unique perspective.  I have a relatively neutral position; my youngest is in 5th grade at LES now, and so will not be directly affected.  My vision comes from a year of studying the science of well-being and success in attaining my Certification in Positive Psychology.  The excellent research in this area is still relatively new to mainstream thinking, and so my hope in this letter is to share important information, critical to this decision and to the district’s future.  

The great news is that we all have the same goals: (1) educate our students well, preparing them for a life of productivity, happiness and success; and (2) ensure fiscal health and responsibility.  Of course, ‘how’ we achieve these goals is at the core of the debate.  I appreciate the position you are in:  Years of data on rising costs and taxes, student program and enrollment declines, and now a 2% tax cap painting you into a very tight corner.  This is the very reason I’m compelled to write to you.  Everyone agrees difficult decisions must be made, but after living in this district for 16 years I’ve witnessed that finances have largely driven decisions.  It’s time to broaden the perspective beyond our bottom-line focus.  Social, emotional and mental health are as important as the district’s financial health in the short term, and actually more important to long-term vitality.  Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  It’s time to step out of the corner we’re in by approaching change differently.  I propose capitalizing on the district’s greatest strengths – love of learning, critical thinking, creativity and caring nature of faculty and staff – to lead us into making required changes with the passion, teamwork and optimism that lead to unprecedented success.   Let me explain how.  

First, we must be cautious of the current levels of stress in the district before we add more with a school closing, because it’s already inhibiting our ability to educate our students.  Admittedly, we need stress.  We thrive off stress to learn and grow, much in the same way as we stress our muscles through exercise to become stronger.  But push too much, and we are injured.  We are reminded that we are human after all, not machines.  Bigger, better, faster and more is not always good.  Constant stress, with no recovery and rest, is harmful to us.1    This was aptly portrayed in the Race to Nowhere documentary.   Parents attended those screenings at JJHS in record numbers because we have seen similar signs of anxiety, disconnection, and disengagement in our district: everything from unresolved issues of bullying, good students failing classes, consistent classroom disruption, loss of creativity and collaboration, tight clique behaviors, overwhelmed students, stressed teachers making bad decisions and great teachers leaving.  These are all signs of the community yearning for rest, for rejuvenation.  I know many dedicated public school parents who have sent a child to private school or moved out of town primarily because of this need for rejuvenation.  Because the strength of our district is more than its financial health; it is also the mental, emotional, and social health of our community.  Currently, our school community is already in a harmful state of constant stress and growing dis-ease.   

Closing a school takes away the number one resilience tool, making stress recovery take longer.  People use their social network to mitigate their stress.2,3   Joel Haber clarifies that kids who have six caring adults as sources of support show increased resilience when facing challenges.4  So closing a school, adding change and removing students’ connections, will increase stress and reduce their ability to handle stress.  This increases the time and effort of transitioning affected students.  Our own story is an example of this.  LES is certainly shining, with the best elementary scores in the district.  But years ago, LES was one of the weaker schools.  Positive change came over the past six years, in large part to the efforts of Cristy Harris’ work as our new principal, but also because of a large group of caring parents, teachers and staff working together, building trust and community over time.  It is not one person, but everyone together.  It is logical to think that closing a school will dismantle this social network and realistic to assume it will take years, not months, to reestablish a community of students, parents, staff and teachers that is thriving. 

Closing a school under such tight timeframes will certainly cause more anxiety, frustration, and confusion and will harm the district’s long-term vitality.  It will naturally draw parents, teachers, and administration away from building connections with the children to focus on the practicalities of moving, reorganizing, establishing new locations, new traditions and new routines.  It is imperative to point out that the costs for closing will be the same for reopening.  So it is crucial to ensure a closure is not followed closely by a reopening or we will have doubled our costs to the community, with little financial gain to show for it.  Redistricting is also a decision point that will undoubtedly be hotly debated, another source of dis-ease for the whole community for both a closing and reopening.  And then there’s the community effort spent on moving offices, discussions about plans for the open building, learning new bus & traffic schedules, working out kinks and mistakes, increasing communications, acclimating the children, etc.  While each item alone is not a concern, the totality of the tasks reduces overall well-being of our students and staff.  "Research shows you get multiple tasks done faster if you do them one at a time. It also decreases stress and raises happiness," writes Shawn Achor, researcher and author of The Happiness Advantage.  I do believe whole-heartedly that our teachers and staff are excellent and capable, but we are all human; we’ve asked a lot of them these last few years, many are overwhelmed, and there are only so many hours in the day.  If we close a school, we need more time to rise above the stress, to capitalize on staff creativity and caring, to plan our rebuilding of community, to positively transition the students, and to ensure the districts continued vitality.

Nothing could be more important than creating change that is positive: High anxiety is directly harmful to the students.  Constant stress impairs our ability to learn.5   We require relaxation as an essential part of our ability to function.  Mawhinney and Sagan  write, “We now understand that higher-level thinking is more likely to occur in the brain of a student who is emotionally secure than in the brain of a student who is scared, upset, anxious, or stressed.”6  Under stress, our pre-frontal cortex shuts down, making learning and creativity impossible.  Of course, it is obvious:  When children are happier, healthier and engaged, they learn better.  When they are stressed, fearful, overwhelmed and withdrawn, they struggle to learn.  Emotional problems are also an issue in a community like ours.  Madeline Levine writes about how students from affluent societies are at higher risk for emotional problems because of the anxiety of high expectations and low connection.7,8   Kim John Payne, author and lecturer on stress and simplicity, explains that kids today exhibit signs of PTSD because of the low-grade, under-the-radar stress from our go-go, too fast, too much, too soon, too sexy culture.9  Our community is so accustomed to stress that we fail to recognize the signs, and therefore the harm, it is causing.  We must be careful to listen to all these warnings because the costs of constant stress are high:  Lower psychological and physical health and reduced creativity and productivity.10,11      

Let’s hope we don’t need a tragedy to wake us up to these stats and to think differently about how we make decisions in the district:  By age 18, approximately 11 percent of adolescents have a depressive disorder according to the National Institute of Mental Health.12  Approximately 8 percent of adolescents have a major depressive episode in any given year and 20 percent experience depression in the teen years.13  The average age for the onset of depression in the US has declined sharply in the last three decades and is now 24 years old.14  Suicide is the third leading cause of death for 10- to 24-year-olds, affecting thousands of families in the US each year.15  Tal Ben-Shahar, expert in the field of happiness, has said that stress is at pandemic levels.  A National Survey of 13,500 college students found that 45% report being so depressed that they have difficulty functioning, and 94% reported feeling overwhelmed by everything they had to do.16  These stats should alarm us.  But we are so often used to stress ourselves that we don’t realize what we are doing to our kids.  We think it is a ‘normal’ part of life.  We are wrong.  The prospect of closing a school has the strong potential to trade increased financial health for decrease in social, emotional, and mental health.  It is not wise to make decisions that trade social, emotional, and mental health for greater financial health.  If we choose this, failure is in our future:  As constant stress increases, research shows that success decreases for our community on all levels.17

We need assurances and time to rise above the stress. If there is a closure, we need to be sure it won’t be reversed in short order.  We need to be sure that it is absolutely necessary, and that it will be done with a plan in place for a mindful transition and rebuilding of teacher, staff, parent and student relationships with their new school and new community.  We require a plan of coordinated action for events and relationship building.  The LES PTA, seeking to do just this, found that the state provides such a suggested plan for school closures.  Only to realize in October that there was already not enough time in the year to implement most of the suggestions.18  

For Wendy's proposed approach, see Part II - Opportunities, coming tomorrow.

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Source Material (Part I):

1. The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz. Free Press; (2005).
2. Antonovsky, Aaron. Unraveling the mystery of health: How people manage stress and stay well. Jossey-Bass, 1987.
3. Cohen, S., & Wills, T. A. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological bulletin,  98(2), 310.
4. Haber, Joel David. Bullyproof your child for life: Protect your child from teasing, taunting, and bullying for good. Penguin. com, 2007.
5. Joëls, M., Pu, Z., Wiegert, O., Oitzl, M. S., & Krugers, H. J. (2006). Learning under stress: how does it work?. Trends in cognitive sciences, 10(4), 152-158.
6. Mawhinney, Thomas S., and Laura L. Sagan. "The power of personal relationships." Kaleidoscope: Contemporary and Classic Readings in Education (2009): 13.
7. The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids. Madeline Levine. HarperCollins: 2006
8. Also written about in of material wealth." Child development 74.6 (2003): 1581-1593.
9. Payne, Kim John, and Lisa M. Ross. Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids. Random House Digital, Inc., 2009.
10. Antonovsky, Aaron. Unraveling the mystery of health: How people manage stress and stay well. Jossey-Bass, 1987.
11. Donald, I., Taylor, P., Johnson, S., Cooper, C., Cartwright, S., & Robertson, S. (2005). Work environments, stress, and productivity: An examination using ASSET. International Journal of Stress Management, 12(4), 409.
12. http://www.spencerdailyreporter.com/story/2024645.html, “Identifying, preventing adolescent depression” by Hanna Russmann, Saturday, November 16, 2013. 
13. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (2009). Screening and treatment for major depressive disorder in children and adolescents: U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation statement. Pediatrics, 123, 1223-28.
14. Lewinsohn, P. M., Clarke, G. N., Seeley, J. R., & Rohde, P. (1994). Major depression in community adolescents: age at onset, episode duration, and time to recurrence. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 33(6), 809-818.
15. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS): http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html 
16. Kadison, R. (2005). Getting an edge—Use of stimulants and antidepressants in college. New England Journal of Medicine, 353(11), 1089-1091.
17. Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. (1993). A dark side of the American dream: correlates of financial success as a central life aspiration. Journal of personality and social psychology, 65(2), 410.
18. As reported by Emily Wein, LES PTA Co-President, during the Hearing on Oct 21st, 2013.    

Wendy McLean teaches Conscious Parenting Seminars with Ellie Kirk in the NY/CT area.  She is at her best when sharing wisdom born from the intersection of science and spirituality. Wendy infuses her workshops and classes with a decade of self-study in Positive Psychology, yoga, relationships, and health. She believes in the positive ripple effect created when each person lives into their fullest potential.  Wendy lives in NY with her husband, two girls and two cats.