The new school superintendent in Manchester says a recent audit taking the school district to task in several areas should be used as a blueprint to help address those issues.
Auditors visited every classroom in the district and reported finding a lack of curriculum alignment across the city’s 23 schools, as well as little progress on improving test scores or the dropout rate.
Superintendent Debra Livingston started on the job last week, coming from the state’s much smaller Fall Mountain Regional School District.
In taking over the state’s largest school district, Livingston says she embraces the findings as a roadmap to improving student achievement.
“That audit will always be at the top of my desk and a priority as far as conversations with people. Because it is very, very clear that we must do these things in order to provide a wonderful education for our children.”
The nearly 300-page report was particularly critical of the city’s school board, saying that disharmony among members has compromised the management of the 15,000-student district.
The audit also called for more diversity in the teaching staff, to better reflect the range of ethnicities in the student body.
