Five of the seven candidates in the contested School Committee and Planning Board races shared their views on issues including class size and the Housing Choice Act at a March 21 forum. A recording of the event is available here for viewing in advance of the election on Monday, March 27.
School Committee
Candidates for the two seats: Peter Buchthal, Adam Hogue (two-term incumbent), Matina Madrick, and Jake Lehrhoff, who was not present.
Buchthal has been posting pieces on LincolnTalk about student attrition at the Lincoln School, what he termed an “achievement gap,” and funding, saying that Lincoln “spends substantially more per student than peer towns.”
“We need a new set of eyes, not a rubber stamp,” he said.
While Hogue touted his record of helping negotiate past teacher contracts and fighting to keep the Lincoln Public School open during the pandemic, Madrick said that “educators and administrators have also gone through a big mental health crisis” during that time, and the School Committee “could look at aligning the budget to provide services for our educators.”
The candidates had different takes on the issue of diversity work in the schools. “The AIDE [access, inclusion, diversity, and equity] work I think has been terrific,” particularly the recent 21-day AIDE Challenge, said Madrick, who also lauded the schools’ Portrait of a Learner initiative.
“I really support the AIDE stuff but these are really difficult conversations, Hogue said. When the issue was first being discussed in depth on the School Committee, “everyone was kind of singing ‘Kumbaya’ but not talking. When we had to start debating issues, it was tough — we butted heads. We disagreed but it was actually a good thing [because] we went through the issues.” He said some committee members initially wanted to focus on issues surrounding Black and Indigenous students, “but I said I disagree with this” because he wanted to include LGBTQ students and “Asian hate” in the conversation. “I got some nasty emails about that,” he said.
Buchthal said “really didn’t know the details” about the AIDE and Portrait of a Learner work. “We need to focus on what they’re behind in, and that’s reading, writing, and arithmetic,” he said. He claimed that a recent assessment showed that 38% of Lincoln School students are one or more grades behind where they should be, “and we should start looking at what we should do in terms of an action plan.”
Regarding the METCO program, Madrick advocated having more activities involving Lincoln students and parents in Boston. Buchthal again brought up the achievement gap during the METCO discussion, saying that “the program has enormous potential but we haven’t achieved it yet… I’m all for the social aspects but [METCO kids] spend two hours a day coming and going from here, and we have to make sure they get the best education possible. With this kind of gap we’re not doing what we need to do.”
All three School Committee candidates welcomed the hire of Superintendent of Schools Parry Graham and vowed to support him as much as possible. “I’d give him super carte blanche to put everything on the table — this is his regime,” Buchthal said. Also on deck is a new middle school principal. “They handle disciplinary issues [and] and we need clearer, more defined disciplinary rules,” he added. If there’s instances of bullying or “a kid says he doesn’t want to do his homework, what happens to them? I don’t know.”
The candidates diverged on the issue of class sizes. Research showing the benefits of smaller classes has been “debunked” by the Department of Education, Buchthal said. Some middle school classes have been as small as 15 students (largely due to students leaving the district, he said)., adding that larger classes offer “social benefits as well as little bit of competition.”
But Madrick disagreed, noting that her daughter was in a 32-student class in kindergarten in another town “and it was chaos — she spent the year doing worksheets.” Although “I’m sure in some cases we could add students” to a class, “this is kind of more complicated for a small district. It’s a big privilege to have that problem and I’m happy to have it and happy to have discussions about it, but I’m not sure it’s such a high priority for our district right now.”
Planning Board
Candidates: Craig Nicholson and Mark Levinson (incumbent Lynn DeLisi was not present).
The two biggest planning issues facing Lincoln at the moment are the proposed expansions of Hanscom Field and The Commons in Lincoln, and the Housing Choice Act (HCA), which requires “MBTA communities” including Lincoln to allow more multifamily housing by right. “The initial proposal sprung on the [Commons] residents didn’t seem to protect their interests very much,” Levinson said. As for the Hanscom proposal, “it’s a really bad idea for all sorts of reasons,” including increased air and road traffic and noise,” he added.
The idea has attracted protests from hundreds of area residents, and developers must now submit a detailed environmental impact report. Nevertheless, “Massport has made it clear they want to do something there. It would be foolish to think that pressure is going to go away,” Nicholson said. “The town doesn’t have direct control, but we have to do as much as we can as a town to apply political pressure on our state and federal legislators.”
The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office recently ratcheted up the pressure on towns by making it clear that compliance with the HCA is not optional. Lincoln’s HCA Working Group is working to figure out how the rules apply specifically to Lincoln. A Town Meeting vote on zoning amendments is expected in March 2024.
“It has to start with a tremendous amount of outreach,” Nicholson said. As the working group looks at what areas of town could be subject to rezoning, “it may not necessarily all be negative impacts.”
The two candidates were also asked about how to make it easier for families and others (even if they are not technically low-income) to afford a home in Lincoln. Nicholson noted that this is a regional problem that is driven largely by supply and demand.
As Levinson noted, the town is again proposing to amend zoning rules in order to encourage more accessory apartments. If approved, Article 26 will allow accessory apartments by right within the principal dwelling unit and would streamline the permitting process for an unit in an accessory structure by deleting the requirement of a Planning Board recommendation to the Zoning Board of Appeals. This would hopefully create more housing that is “relatively affordable,” he said.