With many competing initiatives and improvement efforts going on in Franklin, one new committee agreed Monday that without a unified, community-wide vision for the city, success wouldn’t be likely.
“I just feel like Franklin as a community hasn’t even decided what we want to be,” school board member Susan Hallett-Cook said. Without that, she said, “We’ll never succeed. You have too many people working against each other and not for each other.”
Members of the city council and school board met for the first time Monday as part of a liaison committee after spending months coming up with a budget for the school system that balanced affordability and quality.
“When we started this whole thing about the liaison committee, we had some contentious times between the school board and the city council, to say the least,” said City Councilor George Dzujna.
There were tense meetings between the school board and council to narrow a school budget gap that threatened the positions of 22 teachers and three support staff members. By meeting several times in June and July, at least 12 of the positions were saved, and councilors and school board members decided to form the City Council/Franklin School Board Liaison Committee to prevent future budget challenges.
Dzujna said the committee wasn’t a place to make policy, but to foster communication and trust.
School board members Scott Burns and Hallett-Cook asked the committee to work on a greater vision for Franklin – not only shared by the school board and the city council – but the entire community.
The school board’s strategic committee has already been working toward that end, first hearing from city councilors and then reaching out to the community, Burns said. It plans to send out surveys and hold public forums.
“I just want to know we are taking everyone’s input,” Hallett-Cook said. “I want to know everyone’s being listened to.”
Not everyone was sold.
City Councilor Scott Clarenbach asked whether the liaison committee was the best forum to craft community goals, given that the next budget year is coming up fast and councilors and board members will soon hold joint financial committee meetings.
“I think we’re running on a fairly tight schedule to make some changes financially and otherwise,” he said. “I think we need to take a look at the bigger picture.”
Rather than tackle a greater vision for Franklin, the committee mostly discussed some small-scale goals for the school district, like providing training for local high school students.
Franklin currently has no coordinator for its Extended Learning Opportunities program, a program where high schoolers can gain education outside the classroom.
Sharolyn Fortin of My Turn attended Monday night’s meeting and explained her organization already works out of Franklin with nontraditional students ages 14 to 24 to gain job experience, a GED or high school diploma, and other life skills.
Hallett-Cook asked whether My Turn would be willing to do an in-school program.
“We have to look outside the box,” she said.
Fortin said it would be possible with some more staff. “We work with many, many local businesses, and they’re all so desperate for help,” she said. “We really try to get students to stay local.”
Dzujna said he had done a walk-through of Franklin’s downtown and found that all of the businesses there – except for Franklin Savings Bank, due to liability reasons – would be willing to provide internships and job shadow experience for local students.
And with My Turn providing liability coverage and pay for interns, a collaboration might be possible. “This looks like something that might be a good fit,” said Dzujna.
With the committee’s blessing, Fortin agreed to meet with the rest of the Franklin school board.
To give students more opportunities, the committee also agreed to look into collaborating with the city’s senior transit system for students and to try to get students to Winnisquam High School for its design, engineering and architecture AutoCAD program.
Winnisquam, just a few miles down the road, is closer than the Huot Technical Center in Laconia, where many students find transportation a barrier, Burns said.
One of the last items to come up Monday was a suggestion from school board member Bill Grimm to create an accountability system for the school district.
“This can be tremendously useful,” he said. In addition to keeping the school district on track, measurable outcomes would also provide the school board with the tools it needs to apply for grants and other funding.
Toward the close of the meeting, Clarenbach, who was the most skeptical of the committee’s usefulness, said the topics addressed Monday night – which also included the financial effect of the city’s housing and transience issues – were important.
“These are the discussions we need to have,” he said, “because we’re hemorrhaging in Franklin.”
(Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306, ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.)