BrigantineNOW Letter to the Editor. Brigantine Taxpayers Association Misrepresenting Schools, by Veronica McEvoy…. As a mother of six who presently has four children enrolled in the Brigantine School system, and as a Brigantine taxpayer, I was quite dismayed at the Brigantine Taxpayers Association’s advertisement in the Jan. 31 The Beachcomber News.
The question they asked is “Are Brigantine’s schools failing their students?” I knew right there and then that they were not intimately knowledgeable with what really goes on, day in and day out, in our beloved Brigantine Schools.
I firmly do not believe our “property-tax dollars and the students’ time are wasted” by our school system. The factors are many that influence how well students do on standardized tests. They include students’ outside and after-school experiences, students’ innate intellectual ability, socioeconomic factors, parental involvement and students’ motivation. This is according to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development cited work by Freeman and Associates at Michigan State University.
A student’s report card, homework grades, and good character is much more credible evidence of overall achievement than the ASK test taken once a year. Test scores are a rough estimate of a student’s status with respect to the content domain represented by the test. See “Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Educational Quality,” by W. James Popham.
For over 10 years the BTA’s President Anne Phillips has been berating the test scores of our schools. But in that same time frame, many hundreds of Brigantine students have been going on to do wonderful things with their lives and in the lives of others. Many were in the top 10 percent of the high schools they attended, and then on the dean’s lists in college in many prestigious colleges and universities all over this nation.
They have gone off to study in different parts of this world; they have gone off to careers in engineering, science, medicine, acting, teaching, travel and tourism, accounting, aviation, the arts and the military, including our service academies, basic training facilities and Army and Navy ROTC programs. That is the true measure of success of our schools here in Brigantine.
I ask members of the Brigantine Taxpayers Association, when was the last time you attended a winter or spring concert, the school’s nationally acclaimed Arts Night, or Student Awards night? The door was always open for you. Were you afraid to look in?
Parents with children seek out and move to Brigantine just so they can send their children to our schools. They are not fooled. They are grateful for our education system, and so are my children and I.
Please stop playing politics with our children’s lives.
Veronica McEvoy
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It’s bad enough that petty politics are damaging the wonderful town of Brigantine, which my family and I are proud to call home, but to call out the school district is sinking to a shameful low.
The Brigantine School District is one of the best school’s in the entire Southern New Jersey region. It is the main reason so many families move to Brigantine and scrape together enough income to live here full time. Our family is moving in the coming weeks and we could have looked at several mainland communities, but because of the great school’s here in Brigantine, we decided to stay in town and give our children the best education and recreation opportunities possible.
If the Brigantine Taxpayers Association wants to play petty political games here in town, focus your energy on many other more meaningful battles that are truly affecting the quality of life for us residents in town.
The Brigantine School District, along with the many wonderful people who live here, are by far the greatest assets that our town has going for them.