Students’ Town Meeting article seeks funds for field work

Six Lincoln School eighth-graders are hoping voters at Saturday’s Town Meeting approve a citizens’ petition for funding to clear the edges of one of the school playing fields.

Elena Christenfeld, Colin Christian, Allie Dwyer, Greer Harden, Amalia Munn and Irene Terpstra have been meeting every Monday since September withTown Moderator Sarah Cannon Holden and Town Clerk Susan Brooks to experience the process for getting an issue before Lincoln’s Annual Town Meeting.

After conversations with the Parks and Recreation Department, the students first came up with the idea to clear the edges of the playing fields next to Codman Pool, the Smith school building and the Town Office Building where brush is growing into the playing area. They eventually settled for just the Smith field as well as an adjacent student emergency evacuation area.

Clearing the area involves pulling invasive plants, poison ivy, small shrubs and some small trees.

“In my opinion, this project is a great idea,” Munn said in an email. “There are only so many fields in Lincoln (only five I’m aware of, not including L-S fields) and all of them are heavily overused. The main idea of this project is not to simply clear the evacuation site, but to raise awareness about the overgrowth and the delayed maintenance that the fields in Lincoln desperately need.”

The students asked for and received support from the Capital Planning Committee and then collected almost 100 signatures from registered Lincoln voters (almost 10 times the minimum needed for a citizens’ petition) to get on the agenda (warrant article 11) on Saturday.

The students now have the support of the School Committee, the Board of Selectmen, the Parks & Recreation Committee, the Finance Committee and the Conservation Commission. They also spoke at one of their meetings with Detective Ian Spencer from the Lincoln Police Department, who is very much in favor of their proposal. During the process, the kids learned that people can ask some very difficult questions and they had to find the answers, and they also learned that they had to be polite even if some people were not polite to them, Holden noted.

This is the second year in a row that Lincoln School eighth-graders have worked on a citizens’ petition for Town Meeting. In 2014, another group won voter approval for new bike racks on the school campus.