Randazzo: ‘students have to think outside the box’

New Lincoln Orens Middle School Principal Vincent Randazzo came a 350-student Island Park middle school from the massive New York City public school system because he was fed up with the constant budget cuts that took away his “beloved” art and music programs and because the lock-step management system attempted to take all of his supervisory creativity.

“Everything that was fun in education was being taken away,” Randazzo, 36, said as he looked around his new office at the Island Park school. “I was attracted to this school system by the demographics, the diversity and the fact that the numbers here were very much like the small school that I left in Queens.”

Randazzo said that he looked for a new position in Nassau County despite the fact that he was a successful administrator in the city.

“It was hard work and the parents never really got involved with their children’s education in New York,” he said. “Despite that, I took a low performing school and made it into an ‘A’ school in two years.’

At Lincoln Orens, he thinks he will see an entirely different picture.

I have already found that the parents are really involved with their children’s education here,: he said with a smile. “I also found a group of smart, dedicated staff members who are willing to work hard to educate our students.”

He said that the major challenge for both himself and his staff is implementing the state’s new Common Core curriculum.

“We have to understand where the gaps are between what our students needed to know before and what they need to know now,” he said. “We have to figure out how to align the our teaching practices with the curriculum and how to give our students the higher order skills they need to pass the new, more difficult standardized tests.”

“We have been teaching to the old tests and our kids are stuck in a box,” he said. “The Common Core is outside that box and our students have to think outside the box to answer the questions and pass the test. We have to change both what we are teaching and how we are teaching it.”

“We have been teaching in isolation — novels in English class, textbooks in social studies and science classes, without any cross-curricula understanding,” he said. “We have to marry the content area subjects, marry fiction and non-fiction. Parents have to be involved in every step along the way, and we have to insure that our students are tech-savvy as well.”

He said that the use of technology in the learning process is something that he wants the students to adopt, but that “it is hard to say how fare we can go within the spending bounds”

“I am certainly going to explore moving in that direction,” he said.

Meanwhile, he is spending time getting to know his new community.

“I am finding out what a tight-knit community Island Park is,” he said. “I know that I am looked at as an outsider, but I believe that will change with time.”

“Meanwhile, he is looking to the Sandy anniversary next month.

“I want to find a way to turn the anniversary of that devastating storm to something positive,” he said. “You have to keep a positive attitude.”