2 Union 90 principals to resign Tension between school board, union leadership a factor in departures

MILFORD – Two Union 90 school principals have resigned their positions effective in June, adding their names to a list of administrators choosing to leave a district that appears riddled with leadership turmoil.

Calvin Cooper has resigned as principal of the Viola Rand School in Bradley, a kindergarten-through- fifth-grade school with 93 pupils.

Leslie Chambers has resigned her post at the Alton Elementary School, a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school with 60 pupils. Both principals plan to leave at the end of the academic year. They submitted their resignations shortly after Union 90 Superintendent Keith Ober resigned in December.

While the superintendent cited the inability of the four towns within the school system to work well together as key to his departure, Cooper and Chambers mentioned personal and professional reasons for leaving. Chambers added in a telephone interview that increased tensions between certain school board members and union leadership played a secondary role in her decision to resign.

“I want people to understand it’s been very difficult to work effectively when you have a school board that is so uncooperative with the superintendent, and that has played a small part in my reasoning [to leave]. I get stuck in the middle all the time,” said Chambers, 43, who has led the Alton Elementary School for three years.

Chambers also said she would be required to revert to a teacher-principal position next year at the school – a position she held the first year she arrived – and that she did not want to work in that role any longer. She worked as a half-time teacher and half-time principal her first year at the school, then assumed a full-time principal post for the past two years

In her brief letter of resignation, Chambers wrote, “It has been my pleasure to work with [Ober], the administrative team, the Union 90 staff, and, particularly, the teaching staff at the Alton Elementary School.”

Cooper, 45, said in a Dec. 20 letter to Ober that he was “at a crossroads in my professional and personal life … With so much change, this is an opportune time for me also to move on to other professional opportunities. Personally, events in the past year have made me aware of the need to spend more time with my family,” Cooper wrote in his letter of resignation.

On Wednesday, Cooper, who will complete his third year as principal at the Viola Rand School in June, said he was “moving on professionally. I don’t know if it will be in administration … I don’t have any firm plans for the future.”

Cooper leaves the Bradley school at a time when an application has been filed with the Department of Education for a new school building. “The Viola Rand School is poised to move in new directions,” he wrote in his letter of resignation. He also mentioned as accomplishments increased financial support for the school from the community and improvements in curriculum and teacher leadership at the school.

Asked if Ober’s decision to resign influenced him to leave, Cooper said, “The superintendent’s role is critical in the success of any principal, and certainly the fact the superintendent is moving on reflects on my career and where I’m headed. It gave me reason to think about it.”

Ober resigned after eight years of leading a school system of about 1,250 students and 155 staff members. The four towns in the union are Milford, Greenbush, Alton and Bradley.

School Union 90’s structure is complex, consisting of four individual school boards and a joint school board that meets about once a month. About a year ago, the joint school board split on whether to give Ober a $5,000 raise and a contract extension. There have been other disagreements, such as the adoption of new curriculums and collective bargaining agreements.

Adding to the problem is the near constant turnover of school board members. The system also has a high turnover rate among administrators and support staff, according to Ober. The differing values reflected in the union boards have translated into confusion at the education level, where statewide assessment scores are mediocre at best, the superintendent said recently.

Union 90 “is composed of four disparate towns that do not have an awful lot in common except geography,” Ober said in a recent interview.

Ober’s resignation prompted Julia O’Leary of Milford, who chaired the joint board until Dec. 12, to write a letter to the commissioner of education seeking a review of the Union 90 system.

As of Wednesday, no response had been received from Education Commissioner J. Duke Albanese. Calls to Albanese and his assistant, Yellow Light Breen, were not returned Wednesday.