The Lincoln Squirrel – News, features and photos from Lincoln, Mass.

schools

Town still awaiting word on extension request for school project

By Alice Waugh

School officials are still waiting for a response to their request from the state for more time to achieve enough “yes” votes to allow the school building project to go forward.

At a meeting of three town panels on December 5, Superintendent of Schools Becky McFall said she had spoken by phone to representatives of the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) and gotten “verbal approval of additional time to work with the community” until at least the end of February.

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School hoping to buy time for building project

By Alice Waugh

The School Committee has asked for more time from the state and more money from the town in hopes of salvaging almost $21 million in state aid promised for the school building project, which earlier this month failed to garner enough voter support to move forward.

School Committee chairman Jennifer Glass and Superintendent of School Becky McFall sent a letter on November 15 to the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) to formally report on the failed town meeting vote on Nov. 3 and ask if the town could have more time to achieve resident buy-in before the state-funding window of opportunity closes. The MSBA had committed to providing $20.9 million of the $49 million that would be needed for major renovations and additions to the school if voters had approved the project by a two-thirds majority at town meeting and a simple majority at the polls on Election Day.

Glass and McFall asked the MSBA to give the town until the end of February 2013 to “determine whether we believe the project can garner sufficient support from he Town, and whether and to what extent revisions of the project will be necessary.”

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New faces at Lincoln School in 2012-13

Maurisa Davis

(This article originally appeared in the Lincoln Journal on September 27, 2012.)

By Alice Waugh

Among the new faces at the Lincoln School this fall are three teachers, a school psychologist, and several instructional assistants and tutors. The faculty features a pair of new fifth-grade teachers, Maurisa Davis and Lauren Sonalkar.

Davis taught fourth and fifth grade in Amherst for five years before coming to Lincoln. “I grew up in Amherst from the age of 13 and have only lived in western Massachusetts since, so this is a complete adventure for me,” she said. An English major who focused on creative writing, she described herself as a “voracious reader and writer,” an avid shopper, and “a bit of a coffee snob.”

In addition to learning new philosophies and approaches to education, Davis said she looks forward to “expanding my horizons and challenging myself. That’s something I’ve always tried to instill in my students.”

Lauren Sonalkar

The second new fifth-grade teacher is Lauren Sonalkar, who taught fifth grade in Whitney Point, N.Y. for the last two years and worked in kindergarten and second-grade classrooms in Virginia before that. A native of Lexington, she enjoys cooking, hiking and digging clams on the Cape.

“I know Lincoln is a great school district and cares about the whole child,” she said. “My goal is to tap into the knowledge base and really learn from my colleagues and improve my [teaching] practice.”

Alissa Nageotte is a new second-grade teacher this year, though she’s worked at the Lincoln School since 2008 as an assistant, long-term substitute teacher and reading tutor, as well as coaching the middle-school girls’ soccer and basketball teams. The Connecticut native enjoys watching UConn basketball, traveling and cooking.

“I’ve really enjoyed working in Lincoln. I like that the school is a tight-knit community and that I’ve been able to get to know many of the kids throughout the grades,” Nageotte said. “A highlight for me is watching a child that has been struggling with something have that ‘aha moment.’ It’s so fun to watch how excited they are when they achieve something they’ve been working so hard at. I hope that at the end of the year, [my students] can look back and tell me what they learned and that they had fun along the way.”

Anique Lebel

Another new hire is school psychologist Anique Lebel, who previously worked as a school psychologist and team chair at Kingston Elementary School. Lebel has also worked at the Ely Center in Auburndale, helping students with social skills, anxiety management and behavioral strategies.

“I’m thrilled to be working in Lincoln,” said Lebel, who graduated from Acton-Boxborough High School. “The collaborative, inclusive, and dynamic approach of teachers and administrators has been wonderful, and I look forward to a great year.”

In 2012-23, teachers and administrators will continue adjusting the curriculum to align with the Massachusetts “common core” in mathematics and English language arts, or ELA. The newer ELA standards call for a greater emphasis on “informational reading” (in addition to fiction and narrative) to improve students’ competence in learning and expressing information from multiple media and across the curriculum.

This is also the first year that grades 5, 7 and 8 will be using the new standards-based scoring, a system that was piloted in the sixth grade last year. Rather than a traditional letter-based report card, standards-based reports assign numbers (1-4) to indicate whether the child is below, near, at or above the grade level standard for several categories in each academic subject.

Alissa Nageotte

Although they had to learn a new assessment system in 2011-12, “by the end of the year, the sixth-grade teachers said they loved it because it really freed them to teach more creatively, which was my hope,” said Sharon Hobbs, principal of the middle school.

For at least this year, however, eighth-graders will also get letter grades in addition to the standards-based scoring. Most high schools use traditional “A-F” report cards, “and we decided it wasn’t fair to send kids to high school having never seen letter grades,” Hobbs said.