In the wake of the pending retirement of Sudbury Superintendent of Schools Anne Wilson, Sudbury school officials are mulling the idea of a shared superintendent for Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School and the Sudbury Public Schools.
The Sudbury School Committee (SSC) must decide what sort of position they would begin a search for: a permanent Sudbury superintendent, an interim superintendent while other options are studied, or a shared superintendent. The Concord-Carlisle and Acton-Boxborough districts have this shared structure, with one superintendent for the high school plus one of the town’s K-8 schools, while the other town has its own K-8 superintendent. Lincoln’s K-8 students have three schools (two of which are at Hanscom Air Force Base), while Sudbury has five (four elementary schools and one middle school.
The SSC had a special meeting on September 15 meeting with Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, to learn more about leadership reorganization options in light of the opportunity created by Wilson’s departure, which is effective in June 2018. At her group’s October 6 meeting, SSC chair Christine Hogan made a motion to explore the idea of a shared superintendency.
However, some of her fellow committee members were wary of moving too quickly even in exploring the idea of a shared superintendency.
“It benefits our students, it may benefit the town as a whole, it benefits collaboration among staff and teachers—there’s a whole host of reasons we must explore uniting both districts,” SSC member Kouchakdjian said. “At the same time, Christine, I think we need to be careful. I think we need to move slowly, methodically, and respectfully of both districts, and be especially respectful of our friends and neighbors in Lincoln… we’ve waited a long time to do this and I want to make sure we do it well.”
Other members persuaded Hogan to amend her motion to explore not just a shared superintendency, but “all options with regard to district-level organization within the town of Sudbury, pending positive affirmation” from the Lincoln and Lincoln-Sudbury School Committees.
Meanwhile, Lincoln-Sudbury School Committee chair Kevin Matthews asked LSSC attorney Marc Terry in September for a memo outlining the various superintendency options under Massachusetts law. Under a “union superintendency,” where two elementary districts and a shared high school have a single superintendent, cost savings can be achieved by pooling some administrative, financial and special-education operations, but it’s unclear to what extent this could occur under a shared superintendency, Terry wrote in his September 25 memo. The ability of a town district and a regional district to share central office functions is also “an unsettled point of law,” he added.
At the request of SSC members Lucie St. George and Lisa Kouchakdjian, Hogan subsequently obtained Terry’s memo under a public records request and shared it with the rest of her committee.
At the LSSC’s September 26 meeting, Matthews sought to “form a consensus to explore [the idea of a shared superintendency], with no commitment as to whether we would do this or not.” The idea is worth pursuing, he said, because “it would make education stronger here and it would make the financial footing for L-S much stronger, and that can only be a benefit to our partners in Lincoln.”
But other LSSC members expressed concerns about the idea. They wondered what problem the proposed exploration was intended to solve, and whether officials even have the capacity to explore the issue right now, given everything else that’s going on in both towns.
The L-S school district has “a level of autonomy and independence we’ve fiercely guarded over 50-plus years of the school, and we need to be wary on behalf of both towns of giving up that control,” said member Gerald Quirk of Sudbury.”We should always be thinking about ways to build a better mousetrap, but we need to think about what’s in it for the kids.”
“We are elected by people in both towns,” said LSSC member Nancy Marshall of Lincoln. “As we examine this, what compels us to make it a priority for this year? I want to make sure Lincoln is heard and respected and that a process is duly served, and this is some that’s not taken lightly by anybody.”
The committee decided to defer a decision on the matter until its October 24 meeting.
In an October 10 interview with the Lincoln Squirrel, Matthews (who emphasized that he is expressing only his own opinion, not that of the LSSC as a whole) said “a singular approach is superior to a bifurcated approach” for the high school, which draws about 85 percent of its students from Sudbury.
“What I would like to see for 85 percent of our kids is that we have a singular vision and singular approach to managing educational benefits for kids from pre-K through age 22… if you increase the quality of the delivery of education for 85 percent of the kids in L-S, you have affected L-S in a positive way,” Matthews said. A shared superintendency is “only tricky if you consider Acton-Boxborough and Concord-Carlisle as failed models, and most people consider those to be our peers. The idea that this doesn’t work is disingenuous at best,” he added.
The three school committees will hold a previously scheduled tri-district public forum on the topic of diversity and inclusion on Monday, Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. in Lincoln’s Reed Gym. The agenda includes remarks by Dr. William Smith of the National Center for Race Amity and short presentations from Lincoln and Sudbury residents followed by about an hour of public discussion.