Jim Cosgrove has only a few more weeks on the spot.
In early June, he will complete his service as a member of the Great Salt Bay school committee.
As he nears the end of his term, Cosgrove, the committee chairman, sat down with The Lincoln County News and reflected on his term, the school, school administration, teachers and students.
The final item on his agenda is the budget for the coming year that will be presented to the public on May 18.
“I think people will be pleased. We brought in a flat budget (the same as last year) and added a math teacher and lunch room monitors and a RIT (Response to Intervention) program,” he said.
“We did it when school systems all over the state are laying off teachers. This is because two, three years ago, we bit the bullet and cut costs. You could see the recession coming and we knew we had to do something,” he said.
It was not an easy task. Parents complained, some cried but the committee went ahead, he said. Now it has paid off.
“The first thing we had to do was replace a long time, and long loved principal. We brought in one of the most qualified people I have ever seen and it just was not a good fit,” he said. “In retrospect, I am not sure anyone could have followed Dick Marchi.
“Now we have Jeff Boston and he is great. We are lucky to have him. He is very, very talented. He understands what he doesn’t know and is trying to learn.”
Cosgrove said Boston and AOS 93 Superintendent Bob Bouchard showed their worth this spring, when a teacher was arrested for inappropriate sexual contact with some students.
“They did as good a job as they could have done. It was nothing you could prepare for,” he said. “At that moment, in that situation, they made the right decision. They focused on the most important thing – the safety of the kids – and it was the absolutely right thing to do.”
Cosgrove said he moved to Damariscotta because of the Great Salt Bay School. He wanted a good education for his three children.
Once on the board, he realized the old ways, the teaching rules he grew up with, no longer applied.
“I was raised in classes with 30 students. I thought you could do it that way here. I was wrong,” he said. “We all had stable families with two parents. I remember in the fifth grade when one kid’s parents got divorced. We didn’t know anything about divorce.
“Now many of the children come from one parent homes. A percentage of kids eat breakfast at school because they don’t get breakfast at home.”
One of Cosgrove’s pet peeves is critics who say: “In my time we…Why don’t we do it that way… Who needs all these computers anyway?”
“I’ll tell why we don’t do it the way they used to do,” said Cosgrove. “The kid who balances my new tires uses a computer. They repaired my car, and I asked him what was wrong and he said it was a ‘code 1435.’ He used his computer to diagnose the problem.
“Not long ago, an employer told me he couldn’t hire some local kids because they didn’t have the math skills to work in his shop.”
He paused for a moment, and looked out the window. “It is the way things are (today). We have to deal with it. We have to educate these children (for today,)” he said. “Education is expensive, but the alternative costs a lot more.”
In Cosgrove’s opinion, the only way to continue to meet rising education costs is to consolidate some of the smaller schools into larger ones and he knows that would cause a lot of pain.
“If we cut the five schools into three we could do it, but people must be willing to make sacrifices,” he said. “We have to do it right, not the way (Gov. John E.) Baldacci did.”
He believes the biggest problem facing schools are the teachers unions because schools do not pay the best teachers the most money. The highest paid teachers are the ones that have been there the longest.
“When we have to lay off teachers, we lay off the youngest first,” he said. “We need the energy and enthusiasm of the younger teachers along with the knowledge of the older teachers. We need a good blend of teachers. We need the young and the old.”
As Cosgrove leaves office, he is disappointed that he was not able to recruit a successor to take his place on the board.
When the filing deadline passed last week, no one had filed for his slot on the school board. A write in candidate can still be elected, according to Damariscotta Town Clerk Cheryl Pinkham.
“I spoke to a lot of people and they said they were too busy to serve. People would complain and I would say why don’t you run for the board and they said they didn’t have time. It makes me mad,” Cosgrove said. “I work 78 hours a week and still served on the board. Don’t tell me you are too busy to serve. If you want to help the kids, you have to be able to stand up.”
Great Salt Bay Consolidated School was a good school when he moved to town and will be a good school when he leaves the board, he said.
“We have a good superintendent, we have a good principal. We have a good school. They will be fine without me,” he said.
