To the editor:
Like many others in this town, I voted for the school expansion project in 2020. While no one likes to pay more taxes, this community voted to fund a $17 million initiative which promised to “keep class sizes small.”
Unfortunately, since the completion of this project, class sizes have been increasing each year in kindergarten and first grade, where students need the most attention, and where small classes are the most important. After trending up these last two years, the K-1 classes at Summer Street and Huckleberry both average more than 22 kids per class this year. This is in excess of the district policy, which has guided this town for more than 20 years, and calls for 18-22 kids per class in K-1 with 18 being “optimal”. If you are alarmed by this, you are not alone. Myself and many other parents have raised these concerns with both Superintendent Vogel and the School Committee, beginning as early as May of 2023. It was at this time that it was revealed that the administration was removing the funding for a fourth kindergarten classroom at Summer Street School, despite it being in the original budget, and despite the fact that this would cause class size to exceed the high end of the town policy. Many in the community reached out to the School Committee and the superintendent to raise our concerns about this fact, both in emails and in public comment at School Committee meetings. The response from the School Committee and Superintendent Vogel has consistently made it clear that they do not believe small classes are a priority.
In a phone call reply to my email in May, Superintendent Vogel informed me that “Class size has no bearing on academic success.” Meanwhile, to quell concerns from parents that classes exceeded the town’s own policy, the School Committee promised to “review the policy this school year,” leading the more optimistic among us to believe that a lower cap on K-1 class sizes was at least under consideration. However, when Vice Chair Stacy Dahlstedt presented an updated policy proposal at the School Committee meeting on Nov. 1, it became clear this would not be the case. Rather than updating the current policy in the spirit of aiming for lower class sizes in K-1, the committee is proposing to do away with class-size ranges and caps altogether, replacing what is currently a very detailed table with only a vague commitment to “maintain reasonable class sizes, to the extent possible” for preK-12.
In what can only be described as an audacious move, when the School Committee and the superintendent were called out by members of the community for being over their own policy, they simply decided to change the policy to include no numbers of any kind – no ranges, no caps, and no accountability whatsoever. To put it plainly, it’s hard to see how this can be viewed as anything other than an affront to a community which has so recently voted to expand the schools at great expense to “maintain small class sizes,” a direct quote from the marketing campaign for the project.
So why, when the town made it clear they prioritized small class sizes, is this even an issue? The word that comes up over and over again is budget. To put it simply, we voted to pay for the extra classrooms, but staffing those classrooms with teachers is expensive. But budget is not the real constraint here – a budget simply forces us to prioritize where we should spend our money. For example, the School Committee made it a priority to give raises to the entire superintendent’s office this year, a year in which none of their contracts were up. This is not to say they were not deserving, or that we chose one thing over the other, but it is worth highlighting if we’re going to point to budget as the reason that we have 23 kids in multiple kindergarten and first-grade classes this year. Budget is fluid and dollars are fungible – so if this town prioritizes small class sizes, why doesn’t the administration? If the proposed policy draft is allowed to go into effect as is, it would remove all accountability for school administrators to maintain the small class sizes that have served this community well for the last two decades. Considering the recent string of increasing class sizes and the superintendent’s public stance of nonchalance toward class size – is this really a leap of faith we want to take? If you are like me and want to keep class sizes small in Lynnfield, I encourage you to express your viewpoint to the superintendent via email (vogelk@lynnfield.k12.ma.us), or to the School Committee via public comment at their next meeting on Nov. 14 at 6 p.m.
Sincerely,
Jenny Sheehan
Lynnfield
