Priorities

The impacts of the pandemic on NPS and our students will be felt for years.  Previously existing gaps in student learning have been exacerbated by the pandemic, and many of these gaps fall along racial and socioeconomic lines and include special needs and ELL students.  We must start addressing these issues immediately and have an aggressive plan in place for the coming school year and following years to mitigate the pandemic’s impacts.

Students across our district have had completely different academic and social experiences over the last year. NPS should be implementing programs for all students in need, and we should immediately start the process of assessing our student populations to determine where resources and efforts are best targeted.  In doing so, we must have a particular emphasis on the mental health of our students and staff.

As with all of our challenges we have to (i) define the scope of the issue, (ii) set aggressive and tangible goals, (iii) develop a plan to achieve those goals, (iv) consistently assess and evaluate whether our plan is effective, and (v) make adjustments wherever appropriate. 

Confidence and trust in NPS have eroded over the course of the pandemic, and transparency with the community will be key to restoring trust in NPS with both educators and NPS families.  NPS administration and every School Committee member must be transparent in communicating how they are arriving at their decisions.  We must remember our mission while weighing these decisions and educating our students must be the priority.  Specifically:

• NPS and School Committee leadership should ensure that any major policy discussions are clearly communicated well in advance, and we need transparent processes to investigate and consider them;

• System-wide goals must be transparent, observable, measurable and achievable;

• District working group members should be identified, and discussion materials of critical issues for all working group meetings should be made public in a timely fashion;

• School Committee meeting transcripts should be made available on the School Committee website, translated for the entire NPS community;

• NPS should have a transparent annual scorecard, shared with the Newton community, that measures how well we are performing, and provide comparisons over time.  This should include observable, measurable and objective benchmarks of both Equity and Excellence as well as parent, administration and educator input regarding that performance. 

Our public schools exist to educate our children.  We should seek excellence both in the achievement of our highest performing students and in improved outcomes for our struggling students.  We want all NPS students to be adequately prepared for the next stages of their lives, regardless of where that next stage takes place, and we have to recognize that we live in a competitive world that extends far beyond Newton’s borders.  

• We require fair assessments that accurately reflect student learning, and should analyze performance across student cohorts, comparing grades with standardized tests, and track how well students perform at the next level of their education and beyond;

• Data should inform our decisions on allocating our resources to improve student learning;

• We need to ensure that all students are provided similarly safe places of learning, with equal access to credentialed staff, classroom resources and technology;

• Our policies should place all students on an upward trajectory while narrowing the gap in performance between our highest performing students and our struggling students by improving the outcomes for those struggling students;

• Our policies should focus more on what we CAN do for our students, and less on what we CAN’T do 

The NPS budget represents a majority of the budget for the City of Newton – public education is one of the primary services that our City provides to its residents.  The School Committee, responsible for approving the NPS budget, needs to ensure that there is a direct relationship between our budget allocations and our goals as a system.  This will become increasingly important as Newton may be more resourced challenged in the coming years.  

Given that approximately 88% of the budget is salaries and benefits, there are tradeoffs involved in every program or initiative.  But there are always priorities that must be addressed and NPS has some important decisions to make over the coming years including the allocation of pandemic-related federal dollars that will support its budget.  Our first priority should be to apply these one-time funds to address the direct impact of the pandemic on student learning.

Fees:

Athletic, extracurricular and bus fees have been a point of contention for some time.  NPS should not be impeding students from participating in these activities or from riding the bus.  That said, the money has to come from somewhere – these programs all have expenses that have to be met.  FY22 budgeted bus fee revenue is $470,000 (0.19% of NPS budget) and extracurricular/athletic fee revenue is $1,200,000 (.47% of NPS budget).  Approximately 75% of NPS families pay these amounts in full, while 25% are waived, capped or not paid.  While we do not want to just dismiss 0.5% or 0.2% of the budget as immaterial, this should be a solvable problem.

I propose that NPS keeps these fees in place given budget constraints, but provides automatic, no-questions-asked waivers for any family seeking them, as opposed to the current system of granting waiver approvals on a case-by-case basis.  The policy would have to be stated clearly so families are aware that financial stress should never impede their child from participating in any NPS activity or riding the bus to school.

My priorities:

• Preserve our neighborhood schools while providing every NPS student a safe and supportive environment for learning;

• Publicly prioritize our goals and spending;

• Maintain our pandemic-necessitated leap forward in technology, and appropriately deploy it at each grade level;

• Investigate all available sources of funding for capital improvements;

• Encourage sustainable buildings and transportation, cognizant of the return on these investments

Newton is a welcoming community and our schools should reflect that. NPS needs to ensure that every student feels that NPS is a school for them and that the culture in our school buildings is reflective of, and a source of comfort for, all our students.

NPS has a strong special education program that we must continue to vigorously support.   Many special education students have been extraordinarily impacted by the events of the past year and our recovery must include resources to address the needs of those students.  We may need to offer robust year-round programming to support our most vulnerable students in greater numbers than we ever have before.