Former Board Prez Slams Trustees Over Math Proposal

A prominent Three Villager has accused several school board trustees of micromanagement and elitism for voting last month against a proposal which would have aligned the Three Village math curriculum with the rest of the state.

Hours after 140 Ward Melville students , David Micklos, a former six-year Board of Education member who served as president during the 2009-2010 school year, attended Tuesday's school board meeting and ripped into the four trustees who voted against the math proposal in December. The proposal would have reversed the order in which geometry and algebra II/trigonometry were taught at Ward Melville, and came recommended by teachers, administrators, and the superintendent.

That proposal was rejected with a 3-4 vote following a lengthy debate at the Dec. 14 board meeting, which Micklos said he did not attend because "everybody thought it was going to pass."

"You disregarded all of the best wisdom in education. My only interpretation is you did that because it was thought to be a good sequence for … the best and the brightest kids," said Micklos, who also used phrases like "the experiments are done" and "throwing the lambs to the lions."

He accused board president John Diviney of micromanagement and suggested the votes cast by trustees Susanne Mendelson and Dr. Glen Whitney framed them as elitists.

Micklos also questioned the basic legality of the vote cast by trustee Jonathan Kornreich, based on a 1987 opinion from the state attorney general which said members of a public school board should not also serve on the board of a private school due to potential conflicts of interest. Kornreich said even though that opinion was informal and nonbinding, and he regularly abstained from votes which would have created a conflict of interest, he resigned from his post as a North Shore Montessori School board member on Jan. 19.

Following Tuesday's meeting, Diviney and Kornreich defended their positions on the math proposal, which they said lacked concrete data to support the proposed curriculum change. During the Dec. 14 board meeting, math department chairperson Bill Bernhard said the proposal was largely based on teacher experiences and conversations with students and parents.

"The sequence [of courses] didn't have anything to do with the problem," said Diviney, who called for a slower thought process on potential curriculum change instead of a "knee-jerk reaction."

"Nothing's permanently set. It's going to be continuously looked at," he said.

Micklos said the effects of the students' previous difficulties with the Algebra II/Trigonometry Regents exams have trickled down to the classrooms. He has heard stories of teachers moving at breakneck speeds with new material in those classes and said many tenth graders, including his own son, are struggling to keep up. Micklos said his son and many of his classmates have outside tutors.

"In most districts, you'd be in eleventh grade taking the exam," he said. "Why buck the system?"

Editor's note: A clarification on Feb. 3 was made to remove the word "loopholes" from the paragraph concerning the legality of Mr. Kornreich's position on the board.