Our Students & Our Future

Welcome to the first post of Kids Matter, a new venture in blogging for me and, thus, an opportunity to share my thoughts and perceptions on the School District of Milton from my lens as President of the School Board.   

Over the past several weeks I have created and taken advantage of opportunities to speak directly with Milton students.  As a School Board member, I believe this is the primary group I have been elected to serve.  Sure, most of them don‘t vote, and most of them don’t pay taxes yet.  However, students are the individuals most significantly impacted by the decisions we make every other Monday night at our School Board meetings.  Our students represent our future.

During this stretch of time I’ve had the privilege to engage students on all ends of our educational spectrum.  Whether speaking with MHS kids who chose to attend and/or speak at our Board listening session in December, or reading to our youngest of students in Mrs. Well’s Pre-K class at Milton West, I am compelled to consider not only their future and the future of our community but also how both are very much related.

As I listened to their comments and answered their questions I became very reflective.  Our family has been blessed to live in this community for fifty years.  We’ve seen a lot of change and a lot of progress across those years. Some of that change was welcomed and some met with understandable resistance.  However, those in leadership positions had the courage to try to make things better for us, and for our community.  It is for those reasons that I, and fellow community leaders, choose to serve others in positions of leadership. I like to call it paying the civic rent I owe to Milton. We are trying to make things a little bit better for this generation and the next, just as others did before us.

While visiting our schools and listening to our students I am reminded of this calling and this duty. Our facilities discussion is one that has now gone on for more than a decade.  Our students and our community will forever be impacted by the decisions we make or don’t make and the actions we take or don’t take.  While the debates are often understandably intense and clouded with the intensity of adult conversations discussing concepts like need and want, affordability and taxes, and phrases like “good enough”, I believe we must never lose sight of what these discussions are truly about – a collective effort to try to make things better in our schools for our students and our community.

The coming months will provide opportunities for you to engage me personally and our entire Board of Education as we continue this important discussion.  It is my sincere hope that, as a community, we can come together to re-focus on that shared vision, and do what is best for our students and our future.

Opportunity, Achievement, Community  - created by our drive for excellence.

-Jon Cruzan

President, School District of Milton - Board of Education