On Tuesday, Sept. 5 nearly 3,000 Madison students will hop on the bus and head off for the start of the new school year. While the state budget crisis has cast gloom over many districts’ start of school, Madison Superintendent of Schools Tom Scarice said students, teachers, and parents have plenty to look forward to this year.

For all grade levels K to 12, the district has adopted a new curriculum for social studies and for world language as a part of the curriculum renewal process. Scarice asid it takes two years to update the curriculum, and that the process is a useful way for teachers to look at what they have been doing, and consider changes.

An added benefit of the process, particulary for parents, is that all of the information about the course of study is now available online via the district website.

“All of those units are up on our website and it is amazing because a parent can go on the website now and see the same exact document that a teacher is using to plan their lessons,” he said. “…This is about as transparent as you can get.”

Scarice noted that all of the curriculum work is done in house by current staff; no extra personnel is brought on board for the renewal process. In addition, some new courses are being offered up at the high school this year that will replace some courses that had low interest or needed to be revitalized. Students now have the option to take a new Intro to Business course, high-level Mandarin Chinese, and AP Latin.

“The courses are geared toward thinking and not just accumulating knowledge,” he said of all curricula. “You are doing something with that knowledge, which is so important for kids right now.”

Across the district, the new lunch program that was brought in last year will continue. Scarice said the program has been a great success.

“Satisfaction of students and staff was off the charts,” he said. “…It is very difficult financially, whether you get the reimbursements or not, but there is no doubt that we are doing more locally grown food, we are doing more education pieces where our chef is actually doing demonstrations and interacting with the kids. Our usage is up dramatically.”

Looking at the lower levels, Scarice said this year the district plans to expand a program that was brought into Jeffery Elementary school last year to support students with social and emotional needs.

“We are growing that program now into the middle level up to Brown Middle School,” he said. “That program helps kids stay in district and makes sure that we are meeting their needs in their home schools. It certainly helps us contain costs because we are delivering services with our own staff as opposed to farming them out to private groups…The first year at Jeffrey the K to 4 program was a great success and we are really excited about expanding it.”

Looking at kindergarten, this year seems to be a bit of an outlier in the declining enrollment trend. The district has 161 kindergarten students enrolled, the highest in three years and 29 more students than projections suggested. Scarice said he even had to bring back a kindergarten teacher this year because of the numbers.

“It is leading us to believe there is maybe more migration to town, which is very positive,” he said. “Last year we were slightly below where we expected to be, but this year is significantly higher. You are approaching almost two additional section of kindergarten…This may blunt the enrollment decline, but there is an enrollment decline.”

The enrollment decline did lead to a reduction in staffing this year at the lower levels, but the reduction of four teaching positions up at the high school was in response to what might happen with the state budget. Scarice said Madison has a plan for if the state does end up eliminating the town’s Education Cost Sharing money.

“If there is any decision made that will have material impact here we will do the same thing we did a year and a half ago,” he said. “We will sit with the other boards and we will come up with a solution. We did it then and we will do it again and I have complete confidence all of the boards will work together to figure it out…We anticipated a lot. There hasn’t been any mystery that the Madisons of Connecticut were probably the most at risk.”