School Superintendent Linda Rozzi’s abrupt resignation last spring after two of three members of the district School Board refused to offer her a contract extension set off a wave of conflict and interpersonal strife within the typically quiet school district that continues today. That strife has led, directly or indirectly, to an ongoing effort by a group of parents to force a vote that could dissolve the sitting School Board entirely.
Early on, School Board members refused to answer questions from angry parents about why Ms. Rozzi, who was with the district for nine years, didn’t get the contract extension. They said a legal agreement with her prohibited it.
But amid the turmoil that has embroiled the district in the months since—it reached a crescendo at an anger-filled board meeting in January—School Board Chairwoman Sharon Grindle has hinted at the reasons.
In a series of interviews in recent weeks, Ms. Grindle has confirmed that she and board member Susan Riccardi refused to offer a contract extension to Ms. Rozzi because, she claims, the popular administrator ignored an instruction from the board regarding the district’s eighth grade mathematics curriculum that left at least two years of matriculating students—Ms. Grindle’s son among them—at a disadvantage when they reached high school.
Ms. Gindle said Ms. Rozzi disobeyed two specific orders from the School Board during her final two years at the school to instruct eighth grade students at Tuckahoe using a math curriculum directed exclusively at the algebra Regents exam. Instead, Ms. Grindle claims, Ms. Rozzi instructed the eighth grade math teacher to use a curriculum geared toward the state assessment tests given in March for the first half of the 2007-08 and 2008-09 school years, and then to teach the Regents curriculum in the second half of those years.
As a result of what Ms. Grindle says were Ms. Rozzi’s instructions, at least two years of matriculating Tuckahoe students did not receive the full algebra course instruction and, despite largely passing the Regents exam, struggled with math during their first year of high school, because many of the math concepts taught in ninth grade lacked the necessary foundation.
Ms. Rozzi is vehement that she never gave instructions to former math teacher Marc Nardin, who died unexpectedly in January, that the eighth grade math curriculum be split in any year since New York schools returned to the regents system in 2007. She said that Tuckahoe’s students were being taught according to the Regents curriculum and that no instruction to prepare them specifically for the annual March state assessment test was made.
“The curriculum was the curriculum,” Ms. Rozzi said in an interview in March. “As administration, we supervised the math teacher, but that was the extent of it. There’s nothing that we told the teacher to do differently than what the curriculum told him to do. He was an outstanding teacher and he taught to the algebra curriculum.”
