Woodstock CT Café

from Trish Lustila

I just wanted to let everyone know that Tracy has lost her battle with cancer. She passed early this morning. To all that knew her and loved her, she will be forever in our hearts and forever missed.

“For those of you who don’t know her, Tracy was always the smiling face of the special education office at the Woodstock Elementary School…”

from A Student

I just found out that Mrs. Thompson has passed away…. Truly unfortunate that such a wonderful person’s life has been taken away prematurely, especially considering what she had been going through. My condolences to her family; they’ve had a rough few years. I hope that they may find peace soon.

I’ll always remember her as one of my favorite staff members at WES. I believe she was the preschool TA back in the day. She was also a good family friend.

Her service will be at East Woodstock Congregational Church at 10:00 am this Friday.

This was first published on April 25th 2006 at the Cafe in response to Wetzel’s attacks on the K-8 school system. It’s an eloquent one-time statement by an unidentified Cafe’er. Admin

by Cyssan

You ask why parents of school children did not support the Amendment (to repeal Prop 46). I’m sure parents did support the amendment- the question really is, why does it appear as if some parents voted “no” at the polls? Part of the answer to that question is that parents have limited information. The only newspaper in town is littered with inaccuracies. Both sides of an issue are never explored in any depth. Parents can’t get accurate Minutes to town meetings because they are not posted on web sites or easily obtainable. All the parents I know work for a living and can’t attend meetings that run to midnight. They hear (or hear about) uninformed ranting citizens at Town Meetings who have a questionable level of understanding of what Prop 46 actually says. This is about communication; this is not about parents sharing your opinions and questioning accountability.

You appear to be uninformed about public education in general (to Wetzel), but specifically the Woodstock education system. You are not to be blamed for this. The lack of accurate communication is an issue. Your comments suggest to me that you are a business person- with perhaps a finance backround. In my experience, an average citizen with a business backround often assumes that education is a “business”. Likening an educational system to a factory and a child as a product, as you have done, is an inappropirate analogy. Lets stop that. There is no ‘product’ as a result of education and no monetary value in a child. There is no balance sheet at the end of the term that shows profit or loss or cost of goods sold. There is merely a human being who hopefully learned to think, reason, and communicate well enough to perpetuate a responsible society that can best govern its needs. If that was easy to evaluate, there wouldn’t be as many ways to measure how well or how poorly schools live up to their primary task. Quite simply, success is measured differently for each child and schools succeed in some way every day. Some children and some schools may be ‘average’ on one scale and extraordinary on another scale. Success, however measured costs money. Please stop trying to simplify the inherent uniqueness of education. Read the rest of this entry »