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

Residents ask for more financial, community use considerations in school project

By Alice Waugh

Heeding the School Building Committee’s call for more public input on what the school building project should look like, dozens attended a January 9 SBC workshop and asked for a building that considered the needs of the broader community and was closely connected to its surrounding natural environment.

The workshop’s goal was to reexamine the guiding principles and evaluation criteria that were used in developing the school project. Residents broke into groups and contributed ideas that were then written on poster paper hung on the walls of Reed Gym.

The SBC will decide on a final consolidated set of criteria at its January 22 meeting.

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School, LEAP beefing up security

The Lincoln After-school Extended-day Program (LEAP) has begun keepings its door locked at times, and this week the Lincoln Schools will announce measures to increase security in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school shootings.

When the children are indoors doing homework or other activities, LEAP visitors must now ring a doorbell and be admitted by a staff member. The door will not be locked when children are playing outside under staff supervision, said Susan Callum, program administrator at LEAP, adding that the locked-door policy was put in place after discussions with the Lincoln Police Department.

It’s a minor inconvenience to ring the bell and wait at the door rather than walk right in as before, “I think the parents understand,” Callum said, adding that eventually she hopes to replace the doorbell with a keypad system.

Many other Boston-area school districts have increased their security measures since the tragedy in Newton, Conn., when a gunman forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 20 children and six staff members on December 14, 2012.

Lincoln School District officials and staff have also been meeting with Lincoln police to review security procedures at the Lincoln and Hanscom schools, Superintendent Becky McFall said on Friday. At the Lincoln School, all teachers must wear a visible plastic badge. Visitors are required to sign in at the office and wear a paper name badge, though this policy is not always strictly enforced.

Each teacher has a quick-reference “flip book” crisis manual of procedures to follow in the event of a school evacuation, lockdown, bomb threat, suspicious package or other potential danger, McFall said. There will be an afternoon of additional training for teachers and staff as well as more frequent lockdown drills while school is in session, she added.

The School Committee discussed the issue in executive session at its January 19 meeting, McFall said. She plans to send a letter to parents this week outlining what security measures are already in place, as well as any new steps to tighten security, McFall said.

Déjà vu?

From the editor:

I had an oddly sad feeling when I picked up my Lincoln Journal yesterday and saw that the only “pure Lincoln” story was a piece about the transfer station swap table that I wrote back in July 2012. This was a “tryout” story the editor had assigned me to see if I could be a freelancer for the paper, though it was never published and I more or less forgot about it. Obviously they still had it, and they apparently ran it  at a time when this was their only available Lincoln story. (As an aside, I did end up writing several stories for the Lincoln Journal; they’re reposted chronologically here in the Lincoln Squirrel starting in October 2012.)

This is not a snarky attack on the Journal, which is in the same fix as thousands of other newspapers bedeviled by free Internet sites for news and advertising, as well as rising printing and distribution costs. Having worked for several small newspapers myself, I truly sympathize with what’s left of their staff in the wake of acquisitions and cutbacks. Sadly, this just shows that the product eventually suffers when you cut too much. The news business is still looking for a new business model that works for them and for readers, but trying to maintain the status quo isn’t working, though I have no knowledge about the situation at Lincoln Journal other than the fact that for some time now, they have not had a full-time editor or writer, but have had to share those resources with sister newspapers in the area.

I started the Lincoln Squirrel because I like doing local journalism and I thought Lincoln could use some additional coverage. I view myself as fortunate that I don’t depend on income from a newspaper or a website to pay my bills, and I feel downcast for the newspaper employees who are doing the best they can with insufficient resources and the readers who aren’t getting the coverage they need.

Any far-reaching suggestions on how to fix the news problem? Your comments are welcome. Meanwhile, here’s some more background and food for thought:

Crucial meetings on school project begin Wednesday

The School Building Committee this week kicks off a series of meetings to ratchet up communication between residents and the SBC about what the school project should look like—or whether it should go forward under the current scenario at all.

The SBC is trying to regroup after the project failed to garner a two-thirds majority at Town Meeting on November 3. Members are treading a fine line, trying to learn what changes in the project will garner enough resident support while also knowing that if the town comes back with a “different project” than what the Massachusetts School Building Authority previously approved, a promised $21 million MSBA grant is off the table and the town must start the process from the start. Still to be determined is the extent of resident-supported tweaks to the plan, if any, that the MSBA will accept without considering the project to be “different.”

The town has until February 28 to inform the MSBA of how it wants to proceed.

The SBC will host a “Guiding Principles and Evaluation Criteria Workshop” on Wednesday, January 9 from 7-10 p.m. in Reed Gym. “Two years ago, the SBC reached out to the community to develop a set of guiding principles and criteria that were used to develop the school building project. Are they still the right criteria? Are there others that should be added? We need as many people as possible to participate in the upcoming series of meetings. The workshop on January 9th is an opportunity to review the educational and other criteria that were used to develop the school building project,” the SBC said an email to Lincoln School parents and others.

The SBC email also included these details about the meetings:

Wednesday, January 9
7:30-10:30 p.m., Reed Gym
GUIDING PRINCIPLES AND EVALUATION CRITERIA WORKSHOP

Wednesday, January 16
7:30-10:30 p.m., Reed Gym
CONSIDERING SITE AND DESIGN CONCERNS AND IDEAS
The SBC is soliciting site and design ideas from the public. If members of the community have ideas that require presentation time, please contact the School Committee at schoolcomm@lincnet.org by January 11 (date extended). There will also be an opportunity for the public to generate ideas and to discuss ideas that have been raised.

Tuesday, January 22
7:30-10:30 p.m., Reed Gym
PLAN FOR COMMUNITY CHARRETTES
Using the guiding principles and evaluation criteria from the January 9 meeting, evaluate several scenarios. To reach as many citizens as possible, the same event will be offered at two different times.

Community charrettes—two identical sessions to evaluate several scenarios:

  • Sunday, January 27
    1-4 p.m., Reed Gym
  • Thursday, January 31
    7-10 p.m., Reed Gym

Information from the two events will be compiled by the SBC in order to determine its response to the MSBA.

Wednesday, February 6
7:30-10:30 p.m., Reed Gym
PLANNING THE RESPONSE TO THE MSBA

Lincoln welcomes the new year at First Day

Lincolnites had a great time socializing and enjoying the music of Weston’s Ancient Mariners at the annual First Day celebration hosted by the Pierce House Committee on the afternoon of January 1, 2013. Harold McAleer took photos and created this slide show on YouTube — see how many people you can recognize…

Here’s a video of the band doing “Flat Foot“…

Harold also stepped up to the mike to sing “Million-Dollar Baby” and “It Had to Be You.” Go to his YouTube channel to browse his full collection.

Happy new year!

Happy 2013 from the Lincoln Squirrel! I hope everyone behaved themselves on New Year’s Eve, unlike my friend here…

 

Do you have some random squirrelly video, picture or text you’d like to submit? I’ll post stuff like this from time to time, and you can find them in the “just for fun” category. Shoot me an email at lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. And don’t forget to “like” the Squirrel on Facebook to get updates in your Facebook news stream:

https://www.facebook.com/LincolnSquirrel

State gives town two months on school building project

By Alice Waugh

State officials have given Lincoln another two months to decide how to proceed with the school building project, but they appeared to offer little wiggle room as far as allowing changes to their approved plan.

The town has until February 28, 2013 to “assess community support and examine how best to proceed,” said the December 14 letter to Superintendent of Schools Becky McFall from Mary Pichetti, director of capital planning for the Massachusetts School Building Authority. McFall and School Committee Chair Jennifer Glass wrote on November 15 to ask for an extension to try to keep the project alive after it failed to get a two-thirds majority at the November 3 Town Meeting.

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Selectmen won’t support town vote on ‘same’ school project

By Alice Waugh

The Board of Selectmen will not support the idea of bringing the “same exact” project to another Town Meeting, even if that was the only way to retain the state funding.

“It would be disrespectful of the Town Meeting process,” Selectman Renel Fredriksen said at the board’s December 17 meeting.

“I think it was very clear,” said Selectman Noah Eckhouse, referring to the November 3 Town Meeting vote at which the $49 million project failed to garner a two-thirds majority. “It may have been a majority [in favor], but it was a down vote. We don’t want to run the same project up the flagpole.”

Eckhouse added that he “might” support having a vote on a project that was “meaningfully different,” even though he knew there was “never a question” that the town would drop out of the pipeline for a promised state grant of $21 million for the project.

“There are many, many reasons people voted against it,” Braun said. “To just revisit it would be counterproductive for town culture and goodwill.”

When you consider the votes that would be necessary, “the numbers are daunting,” Braun said. The Town Meeting tally was 370 in favor of the project and 321 against (54 percent to 45 percent). If the same number of “no” votes were cast in a second Town Meeting, “another 270 people would have to show up and all vote yes” to achieve a two-third majority, he said.

Put another way, if the same group of 691 voters came to a second Town Meeting, 93 of them would have to switch their votes from “no” to “yes” for the measure to pass.

CoA speaker explains what hospice is—and isn’t

erinBy Alice Waugh

The vast majority of people with a terminal medical condition want to die peacefully at home rather than in a hospital, but many seniors don’t know that Medicare will cover hospice care with no out-of-pocket expenses, a hospice representative said at a Council on Aging talk.

Erin Sanford, a patient transition representative from AseraCare Hospice, explained what hospice offers and how Medicare covers it while also dispelling some misconceptions at the November 16 session in Bemis Hall.

The word hospice is related to hospitality, or “providing a place of shelter for weary travelers,” Sanford said. The first hospice was founded in 1967 in London by Dame Cicely Saunders, who felt that end-of life care should provide pain relief, preserve the patient’s dignity, and help the patent and family with the psychological and spiritual pain of death. Medicare added a hospice benefit in 1983. Medicaid, MassHealth and most private insurance plans also have a hospice benefit.

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