Rick Albrecht, Ed Sipples, Cathy Iino

The first thing we'd like to say is that we are starting from a much better place than we were a few years ago. Superintendent Gary Mala is an honest, responsive, open-minded leader who has done a lot to restore the trust and confidence that is essential to a good relationship between the school district and the town.

Now we need to extend that relationship. As selectmen, we will go beyond the required annual presentations and consultations.

• We will all engage in a forward-looking dialogue with our counterparts in Haddam and with members of the school board. By discussing Killingworth’s long-range plans and budget forecasts with those of Region 17, we should be able to avoid such conflicts as pile-ups of major capital projects.
• We will explore ways to work together in areas such as purchasing, grant writing, and scheduling use of fields and other facilities. The more our townspeople see the schools as community institutions, the more they will understand the needs and values of the school system.
• We will look for ways to bring together students and other groups in our community. The new middle school, for instance, is almost next door to Jensen’s. Could eighth graders provide some community services to our seniors? Could our seniors provide some guidance for fifth graders? Or imagine an oral history project in which students use the high school's excellent media lab to record the recollections of our longtime residents. It takes a village to raise a child, and children give life to a village.
• We will find ways to support education as well as ways in which the school system can be useful to the town.

The town's concerns intersect with the school district's in some less obvious ways as well. Take, for example, the traffic issues we have been so vigorously debating. One factor in these problems is the large number of cars driving to the schools every day. Perhaps Killingworth and Region 17 could work together to make the buses a more attractive option for students and parents. Reducing school traffic would benefit our environment as well as our roads.

At the end of the day, the citizens of Killingworth care more about providing a good education for the next generation without breaking the bank than they care about separate lines of authority. As representatives of the people of the town, we have an obligation to participate fully in deliberations about such an important public function.