The empty seats said it all. An audience of barely 15 showed up at the Portsmouth Middle School auditorium for this evening's public comment session on the Berkshire Advisors performance audit of the schools.

It seemed that most people who read the report or heard about the results in the local media — or here — didn't feel the need to speak out. The Berkshire report found the schools were generally doing a good job, suggested a few tweaks to procedure, and recommended additional resources. No smoking gun. No millions in waste.

"It's unusual for us to say thre aren't areas of fat or waste or extra spending," said Berkshire consultant Maureen Costello-Shea, describing the things notably absent in the report. "Where we did not comment, we reviewed the information and found no issue or concern. We would have had a 500-page report if we mentioned everything we didn't find a problem with."

Which probably also explains the empty seats. Of the folks who did attend, the most discussion was around the recommendation to cut a school nurse at the elementary level. "What's going to happen to these little kids when there's no one to patch them up?" asked one parent of a kindergarten student. Costello-Shea pointed out that in many other districts, schools share nurses, and that Portsmouth was providing what appeared to be excess capacity, while there were gaps in providing core services in other areas.

But Council President Dennis Canario assured the audience that the Berkshire report offered recommendations that were still subject to review. "We rely on the School Committee and Superintendent to implement what they can," said Canario. "As far as the school nurses are concerned, I personally, if they recommend we do not eliminate that position, I would trust their judgement. Know the nurse situation is a big concern to parents."

Of the questioners, only Cheshire Kathy Melvin (who has a ranting attack piece in the current PCC newsletter) took the opportunity to harangue the audience at home.

"Another thing I'm concerned about is co-teaching," said Melvin, asserting that it was an "experimental" program "not accompanied by any research or facts" and arguing that "students can't afford another 3 years of this experiment." She lamented that "The audit wasn't all I hoped it would be." You can expect to hear this as the major PCC talking point, since the results weren't what they hoped for. I didn't realize that Melvin had a doctorate in education and was so thoroughly familiar with the literature on pedagogy. Oh, wait. She wasn't.

"Co-teaching is not an experiment," said Costello-Shea. "It has been in place for the past 20 years, as have inclusion models. Especially with No Child Left Behind, districts with self-contained special education classrooms have been required to do just what Portsmouth has done in the past two years. Research has been performed over years. Research all shows that regular education students progress at higher rates because of being in co-taught classrooms." She added, by way of explanation, "We didn't talk about that because it's well known."

Superintendent Dr. Susan Lusi also rose to respond to Melvin's assertions. Seconding Costello-Shea, she noted, "It is new to us, but it is not experimental.

And then Lusi got to the nut of the issue. "In my time here, by my estimation, this community has spent $332,993 turning this system inside out looking at the data. That's the cost of the Tent meeting, the Caruolo proceedings, and this performance audit." Lusi then stated the obvious. "When we brought our budget to the Town Council, I told them that if I took all of Berkshire's recommendations, we would need another $221K. That's less than we spent over the last two years looking at the system."

So what has the PCC really accomplished? Sure, transparency is good. Sure, having a second opinion (and a third, and a fourth?) can be valuable. But we had two independent auditors, a Superior Court judge, and now a performance audit, and they all come to the same conclusion: the schools are generally well run and there is no waste or mismanagement of funds. How many times do we have to pay people to tell us the same thing before we're allowed to just spend the money on educating our kids?

There was, of course, a question about Elmhurst, and Dr. Lusi quoted from the engineering report which said "We are fine using the building. There is no evidence of structural distress." she said, adding that they did recommend keeping the area with the wall cracks locked. President Canario added, "There you have it, right from the source, school is not falling down."

And then Tailgunner Gleason got up to the mike to both claim that she was the person who proposed the audit, and, bizarrely, become the only member of the Council to attack the results. She said they made a "great error regarding nursing situation," and went on to criticize the thoroughness of the Berkshire's analysis. "What I see missing is numbers, fiscal information," she said. "I guess I was just looking for something different. Strictly from the Council point of view, I'm thinking fiscal analysis." Costello-Shea replied that they were logically focusing on performance and resources, but that they had reviewed all the financials, and as with other areas, if they found no problem or recommendation for improvement, there was no comment.

Councilor Len Katzman offered a minor correction. "Councilor Gleason said she proposed the audit, but in fact, Dennis Canario first proposed it when he was a Councilor in 2006, and he deserves some credit." (Canario got a round of applause.)

So Canario appropriately provided the wrap-up. Referring to the differing perspectives about education spending in town he said, "People will disagree on the color of the sky." In his experience, he said, "When you have two different sides, you bring in an outside person to mediate." He indicated that the report served this function, and now that the results were in, we could finally say "You know what? We're doing a good job. Portsmouth is a high-performing town."