schools

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:

• Mailing a town-wide appeal each spring to seek donations;
• Announcing the awards and scholarship opportunities through local press outlets and to all Lincoln-resident students enrolled at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School and Minuteman Regional Technical High School;
• Interviewing students who apply for scholarships;
• Ensuring all funds are disbursed to students before the fall.

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.

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

By Alice Waugh

In early May 2013, the Lincoln After-school Activities Program’s 33-year tenure in Lincoln suddenly seemed in jeopardy when another company outbid LEAP when its lease came up for renewal. But as of July 1, LEAP has an exclusive annual license with the School Committee to use Pod C.

LEAP’s five-year lease for use of Hartwell Pod C was due to expire on June 30, 2013, so as required by state law, the School Committee sought bids from LEAP and others who might be interested in leasing the space for an after-school program.

To the shock and dismay of many residents, the proposal from Springboard Education in America outscored LEAP’s on a number of criteria, and a three-member selection committee recommended that the School Committee award the contract to Springboard—a possibility that brought dozens of parents, current and former LEAP teachers, and a even a few children to an emotionally charged School Committee meeting last spring to plead LEAP’s case (see the Lincoln Squirrel, May 7, 2013).

Faced with this sentiment, the School Committee voted at that meeting to extend LEAP’s lease for a year based on a technicality, because its request for proposals did not state that the Lincoln Recreation Department would occupy Pod C during the summer to run the Lincoln Summer Day Camp.

LEAP has since made leadership changes, replacing longtime director Sue Callum with LEAP faculty members Kathryn Hawkins as program director and Chris Burns as operations director. The program also made several programmatic improvements and successfully renewed its state license with Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care.

Among the improvements that LEAP listed in its license application to the School Committee in February 2014: balancing its budget, installing 15 new computers, a new collaboration with Einstein’s Workshop, closer relationships with METCO and the nearby Magic Garden preschool, Spanish tutoring for kindergarteners and first-graders, and a revamped website. Enrollment in 2014-15 is up by 15 percent over the previous year, LEAP officials said.

In its application, LEAP also included a letter from middle school principal Sharon Hobbs. “In the past year, the board and staff of LEAP have worked together to tighten up programs and procedures that needed attention and to implement interesting new programs,” she wrote. “As LEAP has adjusted to a new organizational structure, the level of program has also been changing. The staff is experimenting in good ways with finding ideal configurations for students to work and play.”

Under terms of the license, LEAP will pay the school district an annual fee of $28,800 (slightly more than the $28,000 it offered last year but less than the $31,000 a year offered by Springboard) for a license that will run from July 1, 2014 to June 30, 2015. The license confers non-exclusive use of Pod C and may be extended or revoked at any time by the district.

For the school, the change to granting an annual license rather than a multiyear lease for LEAP means “maintaining our ability to use our facilities and knowing we have a shared facility in the summer,” Superintendent of Schools Becky McFall. The previous arrangement with LEAP was atypical for a lease arrangement, which generally confers exclusive use of the property for the lessee during the term of the lease, even though Pod C was also used by the Recreation Department for summer camp.

Also, the change was made “with a little bit of an eye toward a school building project and the need to use the pods for swing space [during construction] and having a little more flexibility in terms of our needs,” McFall said. The School Building Advisory Committee is in the process of obtaining cost estimates for various school construction/renovation options (see the Lincoln Squirrel, June 19, 2014).

“The licensing agreement with the Lincoln Public Schools is a net positive for LEAP because it provides a new level of stability and predictability for the town’s after-school program,” said LEAP board member Laura Kempke. “In essence, if LEAP continues to uphold the quality standards set by the School Committee, then we no longer need to periodically engage in a fairly resource-intensive review process. This is a win for LEAP staff and families because our full attention is on continuing to improve the program, not on filling out paperwork.”

Full disclosure: Alice Waugh, editor of the Lincoln Squirrel, had children in LEAP until earlier this year and was compensated by LEAP for rebuilding its website.