I know that you’ve only been with our Port Washington School District a very short time and that it would be very unfair of anyone to ask you to speak up, soon, about a complex educational issue that’s already impacting our school district.
However, I believe that the issue is of such overriding importance, that I feel compelled to ask you to speak up about it as soon as you can. The educational issue is the educational philosophy, “educating the whole child” (“EWC”).
I’ve read that you’re already an expert on that philosophy, so speaking up about it soon to our Port Washington community shouldn’t be a problem for you. But first, let me tell you who I am.
My name is Joel Katz. My wife and I are oldsters, now in our 80s and we’re both in poor health. We’ve lived here in Port Washington, in the same small house, for almost 53 years now. Both of our children attended school in Port, K-12, and both graduated from Schreiber High Schoo in the late 1970s.
I am not the co-president of any PTA, HSA, Parent’s Council, SEPTA, AGATE, Ed Foundation or any other adult group associated with our school district. In fact, I’m not even a member of any of the organizations just mentioned.
I am, however, a resident of the Port Washington School District and as such, like thousands of other Port residents, I’m greatly concerned about the successes and the failures of our school district.
I think that it was about six or seven years ago that your predecessor, Dr. Kathleen Mooney, first announced at a school board meeting that the Port Washington School District had adopted the educational philosophy, “educating the whole child”.
If, along with her announcement, Dr. Mooney gave any sort of an explanation about what EWC meant and involved, it was minimal. She never explained, either, exactly how, exactly when and exactly why, EWC had been adopted and what it replaced.
From time to time, over the years, until her recent departure from our school district, Dr. Mooney would mention that EWC was being applied here, but always, without any explanation about what EWC involved.
Of course, over the years, since none of our school board members were educators, none of them could offer any explanation to our community about what EWC meant and involved.
I’ve gone onto the internet and have read much about EWC that’s been posted there. I was surprised to read that the beginnings of EWC go back to the late 1940s and early 1950s, but that EWC wasn’t actually formalized until I believe, about 2002.
I understand why the “No Child Left Behind” initiative failed and why EWC was intended to replace it. I read that EWC advocates that if a child’s family, or community, or church, fails to provide the child with the opportunity to learn from schooling, then the school will replace the family, the community or the church.
However, I still haven’t been able to find anything on the internet that explains just how and when the school can become the replacement. I also read that EWC strongly advocates for certain agendas that sound more, to me, like political agendas, than educational philosophy.
The agendas I refer to are open national borders, or no national borders at all, multiculturalism, cultural diversity and sexual diversity, of the LGBT & Q kind.
To me, those agendas sound more like the political agenda of the Democratic Socialist Party, than any educational philosophy advocated by our state Department of Education. Of course, I could be wrong about that and I anxiously await your talk about EWC, to learn more.
I’m sure that the entire Port Washington community is also anxious to hear you speak about “educating the whole child” and also, what must still be done in our school district to fully implement that educational philosophy.
Thank you for your efforts and I certainly wish you all success, as you move forward here, in Port Washington.
Joel Katz
Port Washington
