GUILDERLAND — Veteran science teacher Alan Fiero, who started the popular butterfly station at Farnsworth Middle School and ran it for many years, is worried about the way it has been managed since his resignation as director three years ago. He sees a new tendency to prioritize money for teachers over money for the program, and believes that the number of kids who benefit from the program, as well the level of responsibility that students can take, have been lowered.

Fiero has received many grants to support the program. He estimates the total grants and awards that he brought in from 1995 through 2014 at more than $305,000. He helped initiate the inquiry-oriented science program at the school over 30 years ago, which was revolutionary at the time.

He said that, for the majority of the years that he directed the program, all funding came from grants that he applied for. “The school paid nothing,” he said.

However, school administrators say they are following the plans mapped out by the program’s new director, Jennifer Phillips, and are pleased with the results.

Fiero told The Enterprise, “As director, I had set aside several thousand dollars that were to prevent any cuts in the program. This was accomplished by my not taking a salary for directing the program, although I was paid to teach the program. As soon as I stepped down, I was told that the funds could be used any way seen fit by the administration.”

Fiero has been teaching for 43 years, 31 of them at Farnsworth. The current school year will be his 32nd. He started the butterfly program in 1995 and ran it for 17 years. He stepped down as director in June 2013, because, at age 63, he knows that he will retire from teaching soon; he had hoped that stepping down before retiring from teaching would ensure a smooth transition.

Fiero also ran the school’s organic garden for several years, first alone, and then in collaboration with others, and worked closely with the directors in all the years after that until he stopped directing the butterfly station, he said.

“I worked very hard over the years to establish and maintain some really wonderful programs, but I don’t see them being continued in a good fashion,” he said.

He also argues that administrators have made a number of unnecessary and avoidable missteps that have harmed the butterfly-station and organic-garden programs, and that too often administrators have proceeded without asking for input from teachers who know the programs well, or have disregarded input when it was given. Part of the problem, he says, is that once he stepped down from his leadership position, “My input wasn’t really valued.”

He applied, he says, to be the second teacher, under the director, in summer of 2015, but did not get the job; he says he was told that he was being passed over because he would be retiring soon. In summer of 2016, he says, he applied for the butterfly-station director position; he hoped to share the position with Phillips and return most of his salary to other teachers, but he did not get the job.

Butterfly station changes

Fiero told The Enterprise that the number of teachers hired for the summertime butterfly-station program represents a cut in the resources directed toward students. The program has students raising butterflies; they also show the public around their in-classroom museum and lead tours of a native-plant garden, free of charge.  

Fiero also said that the lower number of teachers raised questions about student safety. “I believe it was unsafe,” he said, “having one teacher responsible for up to 30 children working in over four rooms across the school, and in the courtyards and hallways, with hundreds of community members visiting.”

The program had always run for six weeks in the summer, with three different sets of students taking part for two weeks each. Since there are 30 students in each set, this allowed 90 students to participate over the course of the summer.

The program was cut this year from six weeks to five. Middle school Principal Michael Laster said that this was done “for a variety of reasons, particularly, this year, with the number of construction projects we had going on.”

Asked if the length of the program would be brought back to six weeks next year, Beverly Bisnett-Jenks, administrator for math, science, and technology at the middle school, said, “We’ll revise and review the calendar once we get up and running and we look through what’s happening here in the building, with our director of facilities.”

Laster and Bisnett-Jenks said that they came up with the new schedule in consultation with the butterfly station’s new director, Phillips.

Fiero’s old system had the director working each week throughout the entire six weeks, and a minimum of two other teachers — and, during some weeks, as many as four or five others — on with him each week. This was in addition, he said, to any teachers who were stationed at the organic garden.

The summer 2016 five-week program involved two sets of students, each of which came for three weeks. So, week three involved two sets of students, for a total of 60 students, and required the most staffing, Laster said. During week three, the first set of students, finished with their work, helped to train the second set, Laster said.

The staffing for 2016 was handled this way: Phillips was on for all five weeks. Additional teachers were on with her in weeks one, three, and five. During week one, this meant the director plus one teacher; in week three, the director plus two teachers; and in week five, the director plus one teacher.

During all five weeks of the 2016 program, there was also an adult — either the garden club advisor or a certified teacher — in the organic garden, working with kids there, Laster said.

Week two, when the butterfly garden opens for visits from the public — with middle-school guides showing them around the butterfly garden — was overseen by just the director and the advisor in the garden, as was week four.

“This doesn’t look exactly the way Dr. Fiero and Ms. Ford [Jennifer Ford, an eighth-grade science teacher who often taught with Fiero at the Butterfly Station and for several years helped direct it] had done it previous to when Dr. Fiero resigned, but this is the mechanization that came from our current coordinator, and I totally agree with it, because it provided more supervision when we had more kids,” said Bisnett-Jenks.

She and Laster are also both on hand in the building all summer, Bisnett-Jenks said, bristling at the idea that the program’s newly reorganized form may not be as safe for students.

The program currently, Laster says, makes use of adult volunteers as well as returning college students. “We have a lot of supervision over the course of the five weeks,” he said.

Volunteers are not the same as teachers, Fiero asserts. “When I was director, we used teachers so there would be a direct educational component to the program.” Teachers from a variety of subjects educated the children, he said, about ecology, restoration, art, writing, and public speaking.

Fiero said that he wanted to emphasize that he has no complaints about the current director, Phillips, who he said is “doing the best job she can, considering the limited resources that she’s been given.” Phillips, in her youth, was a student of Fiero’s at the butterfly station.

Organic garden

The organic-garden program was changed recently, said Fiero, into a garden club. “So, instead of hundreds of students being involved in it, only 10 or 20 were,” he said.  

Not only does this reduce student involvement, he said, but it also means that the organic garden becomes too much for 10 or 20 students to manage and maintain on their own.

So, Fiero said, “They brought in the building and grounds crew to run the garden” in 2016.

But it’s not a learning experience for students, he said, if school staff is tending the garden. “It’s supposed to be for the students, to learn how to plant and to provide a service.” The food grown in the garden is now, as it has been in the past, donated to local food banks.

“The fun,” Fiero said, “is for the kids to do the harvesting and get out there and work in the soil.” Fiero himself grew up on his family farm in Brooklyn; his grandparents were truck farmers, raising produce used in Italian cooking.

In June 2016, Fiero said, the organic garden “was in trouble.” There are eight fields in the garden, Fiero said, and, at that point, “I think at least half of them hadn’t been planted yet.”

The school’s grounds crew “stepped in to salvage it,” Fiero said.

“It was nice of them to do that,” he said. “But if it was run differently, it should be the students that are getting the experience from the garden.”

In past years, Fiero said, any teacher that wanted to could contact the garden coordinator and ask what needed to be done. His own classes — over 100 students total — went to the garden regularly, under his supervision, during study hall or tutorial. Ford also brought a total of about 100 students regularly during access.

“There was a music teacher that came out fairly often,” Fiero said, “as well as several special-education teachers.”

Laster said that he did reach out this summer to the director of physical plant management for help with getting crops in the ground, and that they had a change in the organic garden club advisor.

Christina Jager started in that role July 1, Laster said, and will continue in it through the academic year. “Between myself,” Laster said, “the director of physical plant management, and her [Jager], the garden has really flourished this summer.”

Bisnett-Jenks said, “There’s going to be growing pains” with losing “someone as talented and as experienced and as important to the FMS community” as Fiero. She said that every year, those running the program have “done a little bit of learning, taking Jennifer Phillips’s suggestions and ideas, based on her experience, of how to build the program and make it better.”

Phillips deflected The Enterprise’s repeated requests to talk to her on the phone, simply writing in an email: “I’m so glad Dr. Fiero thinks I’m doing a good job with the program, the students and I have all worked really hard this summer! We can proudly say that this has been a very successful season, with over 1,700 visitors who continue to be impressed with our hardworking and knowledgeable student volunteers.”

Laster said that he plans to identify plots in the organic garden where “our club, and any teacher, can conduct appropriate instructional activities.” He said he is working with interested staff members who want to access the garden for instructional purposes during this school year.

“Missteps” in rehabbing the butterfly garden

Reorganizing the school’s central courtyard was a great idea, said Fiero, but in the course of doing it, a section of the Memorial Garden was destroyed.

He explained that the Memorial Garden was erected to honor the astronauts who died when the Columbia space shuttle exploded in 2003. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had accepted a proposal from Fiero’s students to send some seeds from Pine Bush native plants on the shuttle, and the students planned to plant them, after their return to Earth, and compare those plants to a control group grown from seeds that had not ventured to space. The Pine Bush seeds meant for the control group were planted in the memorial garden.

Fiero said at the time that his students learned a profound lesson from the tragedy of the Challenger’s disintegration. He said, “The kids understand scientists take risks because they value science and man’s quest for knowledge ... Every time we look at our garden, we hope to reflect on that.” He also said, “The garden will be forever a tribute, and it will inspire others.”

Laster explained that the reorganization of the courtyard included installing new walkways that increased access for people with disabilities, as well as putting in new butterfly nets and a new sign.

But, Fiero said, “They destroyed a section of the garden. And it was a section that had some of the original plants from the original experiment.”

Administrators — Laster and Bisnett-Jenks — agreed to fix the problem, Fiero said, but “that was when all the trouble started, with failure to follow through on their promises.”

Laster and Bisnett-Jenks called in a horticulturalist, who suggested getting sand from the Pine Bush, since the plants needed native soil. The administrators offered to do this, but Fiero “waited and waited,” and it was not done. He called the administrators, who told him they had tried, but had been unable, to get sand.

Fiero then called contacts that he had and immediately got two offers of sand and gave the contact information to the administrators. Again he waited. Finally he learned that the sand had been delivered weeks before, and simply placed behind the school and left there.

He waited again for the administrators to have it brought to the garden, but finally carted it himself, one wheelbarrow at a time, to the butterfly garden. Kids planted lupine in it “on like the last day of school,” he said, but by then it was too late, and the lupine didn’t take.

Asked about all of this, Laster said simply that the district did get sand — “like a dump truck’s worth of sand,” and that they then worked with Fiero to get it in, and that “some of the lupine did not take, and some of it did take.”

The memorial garden is overgrown, Fiero says; he is hoping this can be remedied before next summer. “A butterfly habitat needs to be open, with a great deal of sunlight,” he said.

Salaries

“When I left,” Fiero said, “they raised the salary of the director of the butterfly station by almost a third.” He added, “And yet they cut two weeks of teachers from the program,” referring to the two weeks — weeks two and four of the five-week program — in which the director of the butterfly station is the only employee inside the Farnsworth Middle School building tasked directly with supervising kids in the program.

It isn’t that Fiero wishes he had gotten more money. He never did it for the pay; he did it for his students, he says. He is alarmed by what he sees as a trend of the administration paying more for fewer services to kids.

Fiero described a grant received in 2014, of which $1,000 was set aside to pay as many as nine teachers, from various subjects, to develop curricula related to the butterfly station. Each teacher, he says, had agreed to work for $150, no matter how many hours they worked; Laster agreed to this too, Fiero says.

But this decision was never relayed to the district, and so each teacher was paid for actual hours worked, with very little money left over to give to Phillips to put toward butterfly-station activities. Laster said that this was not a mistake, and that teachers were simply paid at the rate specified in their contracts.

Lin Severance, the district’s assistant superintendent for human resources, told The Enterprise in an email that staffing of the butterfly station has been changed somewhat to increase efficiency and ensure sustainability.

Severance also said that “the Coordinator [director] position now begins work in April and extends now through October.”

Fiero said in response, “As director, I worked throughout the entire year preparing for the summer program. This included recruitment of students, ordering of materials, raising and maintaining butterflies, coordinating teachers, and maintaining the courtyard.”

He said, “The district has never supported the program to the level it was when I was funding the program through grants.”

Laster said, “The fiscal support that the district is providing has increased. Which is great, because that’s less reliance on fundraising that has to happen.”