Our Schools, Our Call
The people who should be deciding how Scituate educates Scituate’s children are the people who live in Scituate.
Plank Two of four. The short version: elected local school committees and the parents who show up to their meetings should be making the calls about our kids — and the state’s job is to fund the schools fairly, not to run them from Providence.
Local boards decide. Parents are not a stakeholder group.
Scituate elects a school committee. Those seats exist so that curriculum decisions, budget priorities, and school policy answer to the families whose children are actually in the building. That is not a formality, and it is not a courtesy the state extends. It is how the system is supposed to work.
Parents are not one interest group to be consulted among many. They are the people with the primary responsibility for their own children, and they are entitled to know what their child is being taught, to see the material, and to be heard by a board they can vote out. Lou will oppose legislation that shifts those judgments away from the local board and toward a state agency or a statewide mandate.
The funding formula is where the real fight is
Most people assume the education fight at the State House is about curriculum. It usually isn’t. It’s about the state education aid formula — the mechanics of how much money each district receives, and on what basis. Small rural districts have particular exposure here: enrollment-driven formulas can penalize a district for demographic changes it has no control over, and per-pupil math treats a school that has to run a bus route across a rural town the same as one serving a compact urban neighborhood.
Scituate has a further wrinkle that no other Rhode Island town has to manage. A large share of the town’s land is owned by the Providence Water Supply Board and is not on the tax roll the way privately held land would be. That reality shapes what Scituate can raise locally, which in turn shapes what the schools have to work with. Any honest conversation about school funding in this district has to start there.
School choice and homeschooling families
Families in this district educate their children in a range of ways — the public schools, private and parochial schools, and homeschooling. Rhode Island law treats those families differently in some places where the difference is hard to justify, particularly around access to activities their tax dollars help fund. Lou has been involved in that issue directly and will keep working on it.
What Lou will actually do
- Vote against state mandates that displace decisions the Scituate School Committee is elected to make.
- Push for a funding formula that accounts for the structural realities of a small rural district, including the Providence Water land question.
- Defend parents’ right to review curriculum and materials and to be heard by their local board.
- Work on the disparities in how Rhode Island treats homeschool and private school families relative to public school students.
- Answer the phone when a parent in this district calls about a problem with a school — which is, in practice, a large part of the job.