>> School Committee: Steven M. Glovsky

Town Service: N/A

Professional Career:

Legal Practice: Business, Tax, and Estate Planning and Administration, 1979-2005

Educational Background:

Harvard College, 1976
Boston University School of Law, 1979
Boston University School of Management, 1979
New York University School of Law – LL.M.Tax, 1982

Email Steve Glovsky

Candidate Statement:

Newton’s glorious new high school will be obsolete in 10 years. Wayland got a break a few years back when it voted not to build one, and it is even clearer now that it still isn’t time to plan our own.

The point of a high school education has always been to provide the last stage in preparation of our children to enter life in the world. The Pope was recently quoted as expressing his concern over the isolating effect of computers and the resulting dampening of the human spirit. We are long past retreating from technology’s dominating role in humanity’s future. But where today’s high school students use computers as an adjunct to their education, the computer will be the central educator when our present kindergartners begin high school. Both inherent necessity and the economics of education make this conclusion unchallengeable.

The primary role of a future high school facility will be socialization; use as an educational facility per se will be at best secondary, replaced by the computer and the internet. Indeed, the lunch room will likely be a more important educational setting than the classroom.

Because while the influence of technology is destined to dominate human activity, the Pope’s concerns will meet our need to preserve humanity’s greatest strength – collective action. Fostering this will become the focus of our educational system. So we’re going to need to prepare more appealing lunches.

Our science laboratories will take top priority in any school design planning as it is hard to envision software duplicating the hands-on experience of experimentation, and a combination of small group and auditorium spaces will replace our present box classrooms. But central to the focus of our high school facility will need to be the team sport, music, theater and art programs.

While this future is within our grasp, it is still materializing. Newton, with its large, affluent population and substantial commercial base, may well afford correcting even as large a mistake as its present construction entails; Wayland could not. Even with state assistance, our share of any high school new construction will predominate all future Town options for decades.

This year we are again asked to approve spending money on planning for a new high school; money that could be used to begin repair of our existing facility. I don’t choose to believe that completing such repairs would cost the $36 million that our School Committee claims. Long years of observation have convinced me that our present School Committee will manufacture whatever negative evidence they need to discourage consideration of repair, while glossing over what might be the final costs of new construction. But even if our economic circumstances were not in such obvious dire straits, going forward with planning a new high school would be a mistake, as any building planned today will be obsolete virtually on the day it is completed.

Steven M. Glovsky
Candidate for School Committee
508-358-3540 - Glovsky@aol.com