MOUNT OLIVE (11/17/05) Miffy Ruggiero is not your ordinary school board member. She currently sits on the Board of Education with a history like no other. She moved here with her family from Brooklyn in 1960, attended Mount Olive schools K-12, went to college and returned to teach in both the Tinc and Mountain View Schools.

After a few years, she had some ideas about changing things. She resigned from her teaching job and ran for the school board.

In 1984 she was the youngest person ever to run for the board and still is the only board member to have received her elementary and secondary education in the district, taught in it and served on the board running it. In 2003 she ran again, receiving 1,001 votes.

Most recently she’s been thinking about the history of the "accepted" September to June school year with nearly three months off in the summer.

"The pattern has been in place for years. At one time in the 1800’s there was a period of year round schooling for children of non-English speaking immigrants to learn our language..

"Most likely this pattern has been in place for so long because of the summer heat and schools not being air conditioned," she said. Summer time’s vacation time…"no more teachers, no more books…"

This past summer there was criticism from some parents about the amount of "home work" some teachers assigned their students to do during the summer months.

Many parents feel their kids have enough to do during the school year and the home work takes away from their summer, inconveniences family plans, especially if they are traveling, and overall a pain in the neck.

However, more and more thoughtful educators are pointing to the need for significant changes in the country’s education system if Americans are going to compete in world markets and the "school year" is one area that educators are looking at.

The school board members generally support what has been an emerging innovation in Mount Olive and many other districts and that is teachers giving their students summer assignments to keep their intellectual capacity "in gear" during the long summer months.

Miffy suggests the summer months are long and the kids get out of the discipline of learning. They continue to learn, with family, with friends and with the daily life of their summer schedule. But the discipline of learning is missing and for some students it’s difficult to settle in when they come back in the fall. For some it takes weeks. Many also turn off toward the end of the spring term as well so they are really out of discipline for closer to four months a year.

When they come back in the fall it takes most of them a couple of weeks to settle into the serious business of their education. A lot of them even turn off toward the end of the spring term, she said, so they’re really at loose ends for closer to four months a year, she said.

Dennis Lyons, the executive editor of the Daily Record, who has two children in Mount Olive High School, discussed the "summer homework" matter in a recent column.

His family moved here nearly six years ago from a town in Pennsylvania that had outstanding schools and he and his wife, Mary, were concerned about the Mt. Olive schools "measuring up." At the outset they felt their children were not being challenged as much as they were in Pennsylvania. "Fortunately," he wrote in his column, "things have begun to change in the past two years. Test scores up are up but more importantly there’s been a change in attitude… a goal of striving for excellence that we didn’t originally sense here. It’s not fun to push kids but that’s what parents are supposed to do."

He said he and his wife believe that projects given kids in the summer are a good idea. "In the past summer projects consisted of some reading and perhaps a written report on the reading….but last summer specific written assignments on a variety of subjects…. among them a social studies assignment to visit and write about an historical site.

Lyons suggested the change seemed a bit abrupt but phased in a little more gradually it would be making another important improvement that has been incorporated into the system under Superintendent Dr. Rosalie Lamonte. "The summer assignments are a step toward raising the achievement bar and I applaud it," he said. "Three months is a long time. There should be some needed down time but there’s nothing wrong with keeping the brain in gear somewhat too."

And Miffy couldn’t agree with him more. She believes it’s an idea worth exploring.

Before she returned to Mount Olive five years ago she taught and was an assistant principal in a K-5 school in Monrovia, California. The school year there was year round and was divided into four three month quarters….two months in school and one month off in each quarter. "It worked beautifully," she said, "they had been doing it for awhile and they found it very satisfying for everyone involved.

"Our students kept themselves involved, participatory and "out of trouble" as opposed to so many weeks with no schedule of sorts. It was refreshing for teachers to have time to plan and use real life experiences. Families were able to go away at different times of the year. It was good for school maintenance and it was cost effective to have extensive contract work done during slow times for contractors. I believe there’s a beneficial cost factor there as well," she said.

Most important it offered an opportunity to students to take part of the off months …say two weeks…to catch up on subjects in which they might be falling behind. Teachers were available for tutoring for a stipend fee.

"There’s no question it would take time for parents to get used to, if it was ever done," she said, but at this point I’m reading and talking about it with the community. I’m not sure it would work here, I just think it is worth studying.

Miffy is aware of the school board’s busy agenda…new state and Federal standards with no additional funding, a growing community, negotiations at all levels, a new addition and renovations at the high school, increased taxes and more and more homes being built.

When Miffy proposed the idea at a board meeting she didn’t get an overwhelming response from other board members. She and the other board members know too well what is expected of them time wise and the agenda in front of them. Perhaps adding something like this would be just too much at this point. So, she keeps reading and chatting with the 1,001 folks who elected her.

But she remembers another idea she had in 1983 and the faces of the board members when she proposed having counselors in the elementary schools. You be the judge, she laughed.