New Canaan Public Schools officials said Monday that overall enrollment expected to rise in the 2019-20 academic year, with kindergarten seeing a particularly large increase. The district as of now is expecting to get 306 kindergarteners in the fall, up from 233 last October and also up from the 247 that previously had been projected, according to Director of Human Resources Darlene Pianka.
Kindergarten enrollments haven’t been that high for “at least six years,” Superintendent of Schools Dr. Bryan Luizzi said at the Board of Education’s regular meeting, held in the Wagner Room at New Canaan High School. “If that holds and if trends continue, I would anticipate that that will become the largest grade in our district for the foreseeable future,” he said. Overall, 61 more students are enrolled in New Canaan Public Schools for the upcoming academic year than projected last year when the Board put together its spending plan. First-grade enrollments exceed projections by 16 students, and total high school enrollments by 15, according to the data cited by Pianka.
New Canaan High School’s premier athletic facility stands to get a boost of hometown pride. According to NCHS Athletic Director Jay Egan, workers this weekend will begin the project of painting a New Canaan Rams-specific message across the top of the south end of the high school, facing Dunning Stadium. The words ‘Home of the Rams’ will be painted in white on top of red paint that’s already in place, Egan told members of the Board of Education at their regular meeting, held Monday night in the Wagner Room at NCHS. “We had an exceptional year athletically,” he said during a presentation that touched on many topics. “It was quite a year for us even by New Canaan standards.”
The idea to decorate a visible structure with a positive message about New Canaan had come up in 2016 when then-Utilities Commissioner Dan Welch suggested painting “New Canaan, Home of the Rams” on the Waveny water towers overlooking the sports fields.
This Friday, New Canaan High School honored students for their academic, athletic, and extracurricular achievements and/ or service to the community at the annual Senior Recognition Ceremony. Assistant Principal Ari Rothman emceed the event. Below is a list of the awards and their recipients. National Merit Finalists
Each year more than a million high school students participate in the National Merit Scholarship testing program. Of this group, only one-half of one percent in each state is recognized as “National Merit Finalists,” a designation that comes only as a result of a record of distinguished achievement and a high potential for continued academic accomplishment.
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The chairman of the Board of Education on Monday voiced his support for a spoken word poetry presentation and workshop at New Canaan High School that’s generated some questions and criticism. Held last month, the presentation from Carlos Andrés Goméz was designed to help participants learn about and experience spoken word poetry, district officials have said, and most of the feedback from students and staff has been positive. Yet some viewed the presentation as political and slanted, promoting Board of Ed Chairman Brendan Hayes to say that he “spent some time looking at the situation and the poems that he put forth and presented and I didn’t see any political issues at all.”
Goméz’s presentation was designed to “focus on the issue of empathy and mutual respect and really just understanding various perspectives,” Hayes said during the Board’s regular meeting, held in the Wagner Room at New Canaan High School. “I saw an effort to teach kids and present in an impactful way what empathy means, what mutual respect means and I think that is very important for us to teach whether that’s part of this ‘emotional intelligence’ initiative specifically or not and I think it gets kids talking about their various interests and their various concerns and probably in a way they would not necessarily do had that speaker not come to school and given that presentation. So I think that is the type of thing that we should be doing.”
Though no video recording of the presentation exists—district officials said that’s because of copyright restrictions—Board of Ed member Maria Naughton said “it was a little edgy,” with poems addressing “controversial topics” such as “toxic masculinity” and racial profiling.
