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After months of data collection, meetings with local faith leaders, and in-depth deliberations, a Tri-District Calendar Review School Subcommittee decided not make any recommendations on school calendars.
The subcommittee, which was composed of members of the Sudbury Public Schools School Committee, the Lincoln Public Schools School Committee and the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School School Committee, was tasked with evaluating school calendars, finding areas to align the calendars of the three districts, and to make recommendations on calendar or policy changes where appropriate.
During the October 29 meeting of the subcommittee, members opted not to make any recommendations at all. Instead, they decided to send the data they had collected off to their respective school committees with four broad considerations about calendars, and let each individual committee do what they want with the information. (1:27:30 in the video below)
Ravi Simon, chair of the LSRHS School Committee, told the subcommittee:
“When we started this process, the way personally I envisioned it, is that through information gathering we would collect all of the relevant data and information and we would take a look at it, and the right, objectively correct option would hit all of us and we would recommend it to our full committees. But I don’t think that is really how things have played out. There’s a lot of different factors. People are going to subjectively weight them differently. I think, at least my sense of what the L-S school committee is expecting from us, is sort of for us to present our information and findings, which we have started to do, and I don’t know that there’s any usefulness in trying to narrow down the options at this point. I think that’s just something, at least for L-S, that we’re going to have to do in the full school committee.”
Representatives from Lincoln quickly agreed. Ken Lepage from the Lincoln Public Schools School Committee voiced his agreement, while Lucy Maulsby from the LSRHS School Committee added “I concur.” Following Lepage’s comments, Jake Lehrhoff of the Lincoln Public Schools School Committee added “Yeah, I concur.”
Nicole Burnard, from the SPS School Committee, chaired the subcommittee, and added in agreement:
“I know, to Ravi’s point at the beginning we were trying to narrow it down, but I think it really depends on the committee and what they feel their focus is. Is it equity and inclusion? Is it education and continuity? So I think it could be different for each committee.”
The decision not to make any formal recommendations back to the full committees effectively concludes the work of the subcommittee with a resounding thud. Their meetings garnered significant amounts of interest from the public, including multiple public comments at each of their meetings and robust public comments at a recent listening session.
While the subcommittee was formed in an attempt to better align calendars across the three districts, the subcommittee decided to keep any specific calendar change conversations siloed in each of the three school committees.
The charge of the subcommittee from the three districts generally indicated a desire for recommendations and an attempt to find areas to bring district calendars into the alignment. The Sudbury Public Schools charge for the subcommittee, which was voted and approved by the full committee in August, was provided to Sudbury Weekly and is embedded below.