It’s about 9:45 a.m. Thursday in a third-grade classroom at Seymour’s Chatfield-LoPresti School.
Teacher Joan McCasland quietly roams around, answering questions from students and offering suggestions for their work. Then Principal Dave Olechna brings a tour of about a dozen people into the class.
His timing couldn’t be better.
“Do you want to dance?” McCasland asks him. “It’s time for an energizer.”
At McCasland’s instruction, the 20 or so students calmly put away their work and make their way to the center of the room.
A dance video game appears on a smart board at the front of the classroom. One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful“ starts playing.
“This is part of the Valley Health Initiative,” McCasland explains as she and her students gambol to the tune. “We have to incorporate 20 or more minutes of exercise every day. So we dance here.”
Click play on the video above to see a snippet of the exercise.
Thursday’s tour — of Chatfield-LoPresti and the town’s three other schools — was part of the inaugural Seymour Public Schools Citizens Academy, which began in November and wraps up later this month at a “Graduation Ceremony” during a Board of Education meeting.
The goal of the academy is simple: to give residents a look into the inner workings of what is essentially the biggest business in town, with hundreds of employees, thousands of customers, and a budget of more than $30 million.
The first run of the academy was essentially a pilot program with about 10 participants invited by town and school officials. Superintendent Christine Syriac says the next session, tentatively scheduled for March-April, will be open for any resident to apply.
Sessions ran the gamut from “The Buck Stops Here,” a discussion of finances and budgeting, to “The Wheels on the Bus,” an overview of transportation services and nutrition programs.
A brochure for the program is embedded below. Article continues after the document.
The tour was eye-opening, even for this reporter, who covers events and functions inside schools on a fairly regular basis.
A slideshow of photos from the four-school tour appears at the end of this story.
It wasn’t just all fun and dancing to pop sensations.
For example, minutes after the exercise break in McCasland’s class, Olechna led the group to the a room in the school’s basement with shiny new PVC piping sprawling in all directions — the heart of a state-of-the-art geothermal HVAC system.
Assistant Superintendent for Finance and Operations Rick Belden explains how the district’s facilities director can, using an app on his phone, control the temperature of most of the school buildings without leaving his office.
He recalled a recent meeting in a conference room at the middle school during which someone said it was too warm. He sent a text message.
“Ten minutes later we could hear the A.C. kick on,” Belden said.
Incorporating cutting-edge technology was a constant theme — at Bungay Elementary School, for example, students use iPads for literacy instruction using apps like “Little Speller” and “ABCs and Me.”
Outside Bungay’s computer lab, a tree painted on a hallway wall has QR codes on each branch. When scanned on a smartphone, a story by a student pops up.
And at the middle school, students work in computer labs on building their own animated videos. Down another few hallways in the same building is another computer lab where students are hard at work composing music and sound effects for videos.
At the high school, a new 3D printer allows students to draw complicated schematics on CAD programs and see the things they design fabricated in minutes.
Another room houses the school’s nascent “electrathon“ project, which will ultimately produce an electric vehicle.
But not everything is newfangled gadgets and doo-dads. The high school, for example, has a construction processes program where students spend time at different stations that focus on drywalling, electrical work, roofing, siding, even basic plumbing.
And though student art projects in the 21st century can now incorporate sophisticated audio and video components, walls in all four of the district’s are covered with more traditional — but just as impressive and inspiring — art, from still lifes to paintings of mascots to a mural in the middle school that runs the length of an entire hallway.
Thursday’s tour ended in a way many great tours do — free lunch.
But this meal was prepared in-house, by students in the school’s culinary program. Diners got a choice of ham salad on pumpernickel, egg salad pitas, or chicken salad wraps for an entree, with a starter of either potato salad or a Mayonnaise-less cole slaw the recipe to which is a secret.
Somehow, dessert was even more delectable, with trays full of student-prepared brownies and cookies — and a handful of apples, for those more nutritionally inclined.
It’s easy to reduce Seymour’s schools, or any town’s, for that matter, into a set of terms and numbers on a spreadsheet during budget season — reporters do so every year, after all.
But to those who don’t regularly spend time in schools — and even for those who do — the citizens academy offers an informative look into the inner workings of what all those numbers and terms mean, regardless of one’s thoughts or opinions are at the outset.
Information about how to apply for the next session of the academy will probably be advertised next month, Syriac said.
The Valley Indy advises any resident who can make the time for it to do so.
