Proposed budget removes home ec

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NAUGATUCK — Nutrition, cooking, sewing, budgeting, using a checkbook.

These are among the skills that won’t be taught at Naugatuck’s only public middle school if the proposed education budget is adopted.

“In addition to those subject-specific skills, students learn responsibility, organization and teamwork — all skills that are utilized in any career,” said Holly Sheehy, a 29-year veteran Naugatuck public schools educator who teaches family and consumer sciences, formerly called home economics, at City Hill Middle School.

The program, which is taken by all students in the school and has been in place for decades, will be eliminated starting in the 2015-16 school year. The program is not included in Superintendent of Schools Sharon Locke’s proposed $62.5 million budget. The Board of Education will vote upon that proposal at its meeting on Thursday.

Locke had no comment, other than to confirm the program had not been included in her budget proposal.

Sheehy, who has tenure, said she would still have a job because she is certified as a regular classroom teacher for the middle school grade level. Still, she said she is fighting for the program because she believes students need it.

“These are life skills that they will use on a daily basis throughout their lifetimes and things that in many cases are not being taught in the home,” she said.

“Preparing students for their future simply cannot just include reading and mathematics,” she wrote in a letter to the Republican-American. “Being able to fend for yourself and become independent is just as, if not more, important.”

Charley Marenghi, vice president and spokesman for the Naugatuck Teachers’ League, said there is such a national push toward literacy and numeracy “that they are forgetting about the humanities.”

He said his daughter went through City Hill in recent years and got a broad education that included arts and home economics, along with core subjects.

“Middle school was intended to be like a smorgasbord where you were exposed to all of these different programs so you could get a better foundation before high school,” he said, adding that he, his wife and his now-high school-aged daughter remember valuable skills like cooking and sewing from their respective home economics classes at City Hill.

“This isn’t a situation where one side is right and one is wrong,” he said. “Running a school district is expensive and monetary decisions need to be made, but this community needs to have a philosophical discussion about what kind of education a Naugatuck parent can expect for a student at the middle school. If parents decide they want programs like consumer and family sciences, they need to stand up and fight for it. Otherwise, they will die on the vine.”