Outreach Session on Controversial 'Common Core' Tonight

You can hear the state education department’s take on the controversial Common Core State Standards tonight at Barrington High School. 

The “Common Core Outreach” session starts at 7 pm in the high school auditorium.

It is being hosted by the Barrington Education Foundation.

“We’re taking RIDE up on their offer” to come to Barrington, said Deanna Donnelly a co-president of the BEF.

Representatives from RIDE will be joined by Superintendent Michael Messore and other local teachers and administrators, she said.

The outreach session by RIDE will “bring the discussion on Common Core to the local community,” Donnelly said. It fits well with BEF's longtime effort to bring national topics to the local level to help educate the community.

A question and answer session will follow the presentation. 

The new standards have sparked much debate in Barrington recently because of a Barrington-based citizens group, Stop Common Core RI, that is trying, at least, to slow down the implementation because of their concerns about the cost and impact on the curriculum and instruction. It was launched by Tad Segal and his wife.

The group also includes a member of the School Committee, Scott Fuller, a Cumberland math teacher and former administrator. Fuller is particularly concerned about the lack of local control and field testing of the standards before they started to be implemented in Rhode Island. 

Fuller also wrote in a Patch blog on Sunday that the School Committee's recent adoption of a resolution to  "unequivocally and without reservation" support the Common Core is premature and ill advised. The Common Core is not a done deal, Fuller said. And it’s place on the School Committee agenda is not “persona non grata.”