At its latest meeting, Haddonfield’s Board of Education approved the addition of Lynn Howard-Hoag to its nine-member body. Howard-Hoag was selected to fill the seat vacated by Maureen Eyles, the board vice president who announced her resignation at its previous public session on Sept. 26.
“Lynn came in and interviewed with eight people … did great, and we’re looking forward to having her for a year until she has to run for office again. We really believe we have a great board going forward,” said Superintendent Larry Mussoline.
Howard-Hoag will not officially join the board until all necessary security checks are completed. Her swearing in is expected to take place at the board’s November public session.
The board also voted unanimously to approve David Siedell as the new board VP to take over for Eyles, who held the post from January through her September departure. Siedell, who is running for re-election in November, currently serves as the chairperson of the board’s curriculum committee.
“We were terribly sorry to lose Maureen, but Dave is a solid individual, and we’re really looking forward to working with him. We just kind of reloaded here, and we’re very lucky,” Mussoline added.
As part of the district’s transition to what Mussoline has termed a “21st-century learning mindset,” and regarding facilities upgrades which could achieve that end, Mussoline, as well as representatives from LAN Associates, offered a presentation on what future learning spaces might look like.
“Let me give you a litany of some things we don’t have in Haddonfield: flexible learning spaces, elementary wonder labs, thinkerspaces, digital design labs, recording studios. The future is a collaboration between humans and machines,” Mussoline said.
“We need to be playing this game. Our kids are heading to these spaces: augmented reality labs, 3D printers, open spaces with whiteboards. Let me tell you what this library should look like – those walls should be covered with whiteboards, if we have glass in the back, we should see formulas in the back. Every single one of these chairs should have casters on them, those tables should, to move space. We’ve got to look into creating change.”
Included in the presentation were six core principles of altering the overall learning experience, chief among them: greater student-teacher collaboration, redesigning the classroom environment for flexible learning, inclusion of life-skills instruction and integrating education with natural settings.
“The teacher-directed model is outdated. There are so many different learning styles now that need to be changed in school,” said Ron Schwanke from LAN Associates, “We don’t want to scare you with this; we just want to show you there’s opportunity.”
Mussoline recalled the predominant post-war model of education, as learning everything one needs to succeed for the rest of their life, then admitted all future models will serve to teach students how to learn for the rest of their lives.
“While we’re very good at what we do, we can be better,” Mussoline stated.
In other news:
- The board officially commended Haddonfield Memorial High School English teacher Kimberly Dickstein Hughes for her Oct. 2 selection as New Jersey State Teacher of the Year.
- In addition, HMHS seniors Andrew Genel, Stephen Kasko, Cole Roddy, Isabel Romea, Declan Skelly, John Soumalis, Anna Swartley and Alison Talty were commended for their performance in the National Merit Scholarship Competition.
