The School Committee and the Board of Selectmen jointly voted last week to appoint Peter Borden as the interim School Committee member. Borden will serve as an appointed member until town elections in late March.
Borden replaces Tom Sander, who stepped down in September. Other candidates for the interim position were Vin Cannistraro, Lisa Freedman, Philip Greenspun, Randy Harrison, Caitlin Hogu and Aldis Russell.
By Alice Waugh
Programmatic flexibility, opportunities for collaboration, and a connection to the community and the outdoor environment are among the key educational values that support the need for a Lincoln School building project, Superintendent of Schools Becky McFall told officials at a multiboard meeting on September 30.
Also at the meeting, architects from Dore & Whittier presented an analysis of the results of a charrette held at a September 16 meeting where about 70 residents broke into teams and identified key issues and priorities for a project, as well as what they thought would define a successful project.
[Read more…] about McFall outlines educational needs for school
To the editor:
For the first time in many years, Lincoln has an opportunity to complete a long-held dream of many citizens by the addition of a multigenerational community center on a Lincoln community campus.
Lincoln first expressed the dream in 1932 and began its long tradition of celebrating diversity and inclusion with one small step—it built a ballfield. An anonymous donor, believing the town needed a place for the townsfolk of all ages and from all walks of life to come together and celebrate community, gifted a sum of money to allow the town to purchase the land that now forms the center field of the school campus. The field was deeded to the town, to be overseen by the Board of Selectman. The field became home of Lincoln’s semipro baseball team, the Mohawks.
[Read more…] about Letter to the editor: Celebrate inclusion with community center
The School Committee is seeking an appointee to serve for a renewable three-year term on the the Lincoln Scholarship Committee (LSC), a town committee consisting of three residents (two appointed by the town moderator and one by the School Committee).
The LSC’s responsibilities focus on funding needs-based scholarships and administering five awards that are funded through endowments administered by the town, two of which are thanks to the Ogden Codman Trust. Some specific tasks of the committee include:
Meetings are clustered in the late winter and spring and require approximately 30 hours of dedicated work per year. One member serves as liaison to the Codman Trust, one member is responsible for liaising with the town treasurer, and one member is responsible for composing and distributing the annual appeal letter. For fall 2014, the committee will also be liaising with the L-S Scholarship Committee and attending both the financial aid and college fair events at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School to provide more information to Lincoln-resident families about the scholarship opportunities. For more information about the position, please contact Carolyn Dwyer or Nancy Marshall, trustees for the Lincoln Scholarship Committee.
If interested in serving on the committee, please submit a letter of interest to Jennifer Glass, chair of the Lincoln School Committee, at schoolcomm@lincnet.org. Submissions are due by October 17. Interviews with the School Committee will be held on October 23.
To the editor:
The School Building Advisory Committee and the School Committee would like to thank all the community members who attended the first SBAC public forum this past Tuesday, Sept. 16 [editor’s note: see the Lincoln Squirrel, Sept. 17, 2014]. Over 90 residents attended and engaged in conversation about educational and facilities priorities for the Lincoln School, cost estimates of several renovation components, and what those in attendance hoped the study would achieve.
This was the first of four iterative forums. The next one will be held on October 16 at 7 p.m. in Reed Gym, when consultants from Dore & Whittier will present some preliminary renovation alternatives.
Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters must be about a Lincoln-specific topic, will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published.
Dear Lincoln community,
I write reluctantly to announce that I am stepping down from the Lincoln School Committee. I have been asked to take a leadership position with the Cambridge Quaker Meeting in which I grew up and am still active, and I feel called to fully engage my responsibilities there. Were I to try to do both, I would probably risk being excommunicated by my family, who have always been extremely tolerant about the extensive time I’ve already been spending in community meetings.
[Read more…] about Letter to the editor: Sander resigns from School Committee
By Alice Waugh
Residents got their first glimpse of some cost options for repairing and renovating the Lincoln School at a School Building Advisory Committee forum on September 16.
Alice Waugh, editor of the Lincoln Squirrel, gets ready to spread the word at the September 10 PTO picnic about how the Squirrel keeps residents abreast of Lincoln news. (9/13/14)
Readers may submit photos for consideration for Lincoln Through the Lens by emailing them to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. If your photo is published, you’ll receive credit in the Squirrel. Photos must be taken in Lincoln and include the date, location, and names of any people who are identifiable in the photo. Previously published photos can be viewed on the Lincoln Through the Lens page of the Lincoln Squirrel.
The School Building Advisory Committee (SBAC) will have a public forum on Tuesday, Sept. 16 to share preliminary cost estimates for the renovation options for the Lincoln School. The meeting will take place from 7-9 p.m. in the Smith gym.
The current SBAC began meeting in May and hired Dore & Whittier Architects in July to to develop repair and renovation options for the school. The moves were made in the wake of the Massachusetts School Building Authority’s refusal in December 2013 to consider a new application from the town to help fund a comprehensive project.
The SBAC’s schedule of upcoming meetings through January 2015 includes several other public forums:
The SBAC also plans joint meetings with other town boards and commissions on September 30 and November 5.
The Lincoln School Committee has sent a letter to the state legislature’s Ways and Means Committee in support of a bill that would create a task force to examine the ever-increasing array of statewide educational mandates that Massachusetts school districts are required to follow.
“The issue is not with a specific mandate—it’s that there have been so many coming down at once,” said committee chair Jennifer Glass. “Many have very good aims, but having to do them all at once means it’s difficult to do everything well and with the energy each initiative deserves. Also, over the years mandates get added, but none get taken away. This bill is designed to take a look at them all and analyze what’s redundant or meaningless or even contradictory.”
The letter from the School Committee is reprinted below.
An open letter to the members of the Massachusetts House Committee on Ways and Means:
On July 23, 2014, the Lincoln School Committee voted to join MASS [the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents], MASC [the Massachusetts Association of School Committees] and MASBO [the Massachusetts Association of School Business Officials] in voicing its strong support for Bill H.3722. H.3722 is a bill establishing an education mandate task force designed to examine and make sense of the extraordinary number of mandates school districts are required to adhere to each year. In addition to passing the bill, the School Committee urges the appointment of active school employees (district and building administrators and classroom teachers) to such a task force.
As a committee, we fully appreciate the excellent intentions of many of the mandates, and support those that focus on ensuring all students are in high-quality learning environments. However, there are well over 100 mandated regulations and administrative reporting requirements that currently overwhelm school staff, divert necessary resources, and distract attention from our schools’ primary mission: preparing students to succeed in a rapidly changing, highly competitive global economy. This work is difficult to manage for all districts, and even more onerous for small districts, such as ours, that operate with a small team of administrators and support personnel.
On top of the current requirements, right now there are more than 20 education-related bills before the House Ways and Means Committee. All but one of them, H.3722, advocate imposing additional regulations. Unless there is a task force to holistically examine education regulations, districts will be placed in the unfortunate position of treating these regulations as mere compliance exercises, negating any positive impact they were intended to have.
As outlined in the bill, H.3722 proposes establishing an eleven-member task force that, over the course of a year, would inventory all existing regulations and then recommend measures to streamline, consolidate, or eliminate specific mandates and/or reporting requirements that are outdated, duplicative, or inconsistent with current laws, regulations and practices.
We would deeply appreciate your efforts to champion H.3722 and bring it to a vote. Thank you for your continued support of all the students and educators of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Sincerely,
The Lincoln School Committee:
Jennifer Glass, chair
Tom Sander, vice chair
Preditta Cedeno, METCO representative
Tim Christenfeld, member
Al Schmertzler, member
Jena Salon, member