Schools

New Wrentham Superintendent Stresses Community Relationships

Newly-appointed interim superintendent Christopher Martes wants to move forward in Wrentham and work to find a full-time leader of the schools.

Christopher Martes was selected as Wrentham’s interim superintendent for the 2013-2014 school year, as the town deals with the moving of current superintendent Jeffrey Marsden to Medfield.

Martes, who was the superintendent for Foxborough, recently just helped Norton find its permanent superintendent, and hopes to do that here..

“I think we ran a very successful search and ended up with someone who was a very good fit for that district,” he said.

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Martes said the first thing he would like to do in the Wrentham District is to reach out to parent leaders and organizations and get a feel for what they are looking for in a superintendent.

“I know Jeff very well and have had experience with some of the things that have gone on here from a distance,” he said. “One of the things I’d like to do is just get to know the community and build on what that is. I’ve actually had good success in a couple of different districts in reaching out to the parent leaders, and I’ve had great success in Foxborough. I would get the parent leaders together monthly and let them generate an agenda and I generate some of the agenda and I would start to build a relationship there.

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Martes added that he hopes he can build such a relationship in Wrentham with the parent organizations.

“Hopefully, I’m invited to meetings,” he said.

Martes went on to say that he wants to help Wrentham build by grabbing what he calls “low hanging fruit” in terms of revenue generation.

“There was a lot of low hanging fruit in Norton,” he said.

In Norton, one of the biggest problems for revenue generation involved the Foxborough Charter School.

“They ended up with more Norton students attending the Foxborough Charter School proportionally than any other district in Massachusetts,” he said.

This hurt the school system, since much of the state aid that would have gone to Norton, went to the charter school instead.

“That was a $1.8 million problem that we worked on,” he said. “I reached out to charter parents to help Norton work on that. It is a longer-term project, but I think I set the stage. It’s money for the town and the school district.”

Looking ahead for Wrentham, Martes said one of his top priorities will be seeing where the district is in terms of the new Common Core Standards the state is implementing.

“I want everybody to be clear on what the expectations are on all the grade levels and those kinds of things that would continue the district along,” he said.

Martes said though he’s had disagreements with officials and administrators in the past, he felt revenue, buildings and methods should always be subservient to another major interest.

“The bottom line is when we have disagreements as adults we have to try to make decisions based on what’s best for the children,” he said. “I think if we have that underpinning, we’re usually pretty successful.”


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