Ed Letter: Save Rogers Magnet School

Successful school should not close 04/16/2008

To the editor:
I was absolutely outraged with what I read in The Advocate on April 11 regarding the potential closure of The International School at Rogers Magnet. Reading between the lines, it appears from out of nowhere, the Board of Education will be closing the school, shutting down the International Baccalaureate program and moving all non-magnet students to the new school they're building with a new, untested, and unproven curriculum of study.

Worst of all, those of us with children in the school as part of the magnet program would be sent back to our district schools that we opted out of attending to begin with.

Was it not a few months ago that Rogers was being honored as the most improved school in Fairfield County? Was it not a few weeks ago that we received a No Child Left Behind Act report showing that Rogers was one of two schools in the whole city that would qualify to be removed from the "in need of improvement" lists with one more year of good test results? Was it not just the other week that we were celebrating the successes of the International Baccalaureate program to such an extent that there was consideration of extending the program to the middle school years?

And now what message is the Board of Education giving? That one of the most successful schools in the city should be shut down? That the most improved school not just in the city, but in the entire county, should be crossed out as an unsustainable success?

Should Rogers go, what will Stamford offer parents with elementary school children? The academic successes of Rogers and Westover are to be celebrated and duplicated, not shut down and discarded. Most towns celebrate their successful schools. Towns with successful school systems not coincidentally have higher property values.
Parents want to live in communities with good schools, and our school board seems to be saying that good schools are not what Stamford is about.

John C. Ross
Stamford