By Andrew Walsh
awalsh@wbcowqel.com

The final BC community meeting was held at the Chatfield Fire House Wednesday night. The series came to a close with the discussion of extra-curricular activities and their importance to education and child development.

Dave Williamson had recovered from last week’s illness, and took his place alongside Andrea Presler and Superintendent Tara Meyerink as a guide to the meeting. With the topic being extra-curricular activities, new athletic director Kevin Vargyas was in attendance to provide his professional perspective.

In a different format for the final, as previous meetings have seen the attendees break into small groups for discussion, everyone stayed in one large group to work through the questions up for discussion. The questions sought to determine how important extra-curricular activities, more than just sports extra-curriculars, are to the development of a child throughout his or her school career. Do they help instill leadership? Time-management? Can they provide learning environments that may be different, but are no less useful, than the traditional classroom? In short, how much time and energy should the school districts devote to their continuance and development?

The consensus from the room was that extra-curricular activities are good for the development of a child. Important lessons are imparted to the children and valuable skills taught. They resided under the umbrella of “social skills” but were understood to mean such things as leadership, teamwork, and conflict resolution.

“I think we had fun, but it’s hard work,” Williamson said, reflecting on the whole group of meetings. He went on to elaborate that these meetings not only communicate the feelings of the people to the district, but the district to the people.

The constituent members can hear firsthand what those who are in charge of educating the children are planning to implement. Meyerink also saw this as a chance for clear communication as to the difficulty of some of the matters at hand.

“It helps the community understand the complexity of some of these issues,” Meyerink said.

Keeping with theme of communication that has been expressed by these meetings, Meyerink is planning to present the information that has been unearthed to the Board of Education after she has had sufficient time to digest in its entirety what has transpired.

“This won’t necessarily give all the answers, but start more conversations.”