Man wants Columbia students back in Windham
COLUMBIA — A man from Columbia will be speaking at the Board of Education meeting Monday night about how he wants to see students from the town return to Windham High School for their high school education.
Tyler Kania, who is a 2010 graduate of Windham High School, said attending WHS was one of the best choices he made. Kania said he also spoke with a 99-year-old who is a lifelong Columbia resident.
“He went to Windham High School before World War II,” Kania said. “So anybody with living memory remembers Columbia kids going to Windham High School. Statistics show that integrated schools are far more likely to produce better educated outcomes than segregated schools. I’ve seen this firsthand, one of my close friends.”
Kania said his friend had no plans to go to college.
“He didn’t come from a college household, but he met a bunch of Columbian kids in sports, and today, he’s a doctor at an Ivy League medical school,” Kania said. “Basically, what happened when Columbia in 2012 decided to secede from Windham and go to schools with similar demographical compositions, they both racially and economically isolated Windham High School.”
Kania is hoping by talking to the BOE they can figure something out.
“If the argument is a better school to place your students, that doesn’t really hold, and I think that the most important thing that you can teach a kid is to learn how to respect everyone,” Kania said. “If you’re going to a school that’s 80% white, you just don’t have the cultural understanding. You don’t learn enough from other cultures to be able to interact with everybody in the real world.”
Mark Doyle, who is on the Windham BOE, said he remembered when the kids from Columbia attended Windham High. For the last 30 years, Doyle has been on and off as a BOE member.
“There was this period where there was one or two board members, I don’t recall who they were, who tried on several occasions to get it to the town to leave Windham and go to a different one,” Doyle said.
Doyle said it had been the opinion of a few board members not to have Columbia students attend Windham High School. He added he was on the Windham Board of Education around the time this happened.
“There was an active campaign from a couple of the board members on Columbia who wanted to withdraw the students and send them either to E.O. Smith and they ended up making a deal with them,” Doyle said.
According to Doyle, Windham had a robust advanced placement program, which they still have, and when students from Columbia attended Windham High School, the district had to pay tuition.
“We benefited from the tuition,” Doyle said. “Columbia had a class size of 25 or 30 for a while. Of those 30 kids, were we only getting maybe 10 or 12?”
The Chronicle reached out to Columbia Board of Education Chair Michael Maziarz for comment, but did not hear back in time for the deadline.
The Columbia Board of Education meeting on will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the cafeteria at H.W. Porter School, 3 Schoolhouse Road in Columbia.