August 20 & Sept. 3 meetings – At the School Committee’s August 20 business meeting, Director of Finance and Operations Sheri Matthews reported a preliminary end-of-year budget surplus for the fiscal year 2025-26 of $3,674,251. According to Matthews, $1.1M of the surplus is from return on investments, with the remaining $2.5M coming from savings mostly due to vacancies in support staff positions last year.
The surplus will help build the District’s excess and deficiency fund, a reserve account maintained by regional school districts and used for one-time expenses. “This puts us in a healthy position with a balance just below the statutory maximum allowable,” Matthews said.
Matthews also reported good news regarding the District’s capital stabilization fund, which got a boost last year from a $2.96M refund check from the Internal Revenue Service for construction of the geothermal well system at the new Boardwalk Campus. These funds will likely support what Superintendent Peter Light described as a “massive, one-time capital project to replace the High School’s HVAC rooftop units,” a long-overdue project estimated to cost about $4M. Light told the Committee, “This is something we have been planning for, and we’ve been trying to get to a place where we could do it without going to the taxpayers. A few years ago, we would’ve had to have asked Acton and Boxborough Town Meetings to pay for the project through a debt exclusion. I think at this point we potentially have the funds in reserve accounts to complete this project.”
District and superintendent goals define roadmap to 2031
At their September 3 business meeting, the School Committee voted unanimously to approve the District goals for 2026-27 and 2027-28. The three goals, which were presented in detail at the Committee’s August 20 meeting by Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning Gabby Abrams, provide a roadmap to a more cohesive, coherent preK-12 educational experience for students, families, and educators, and derive from the following four strategic priority areas in the District’s 2026-2031 long range strategic plan (AB Forward):
- Welcoming and inclusive school communities
- Student academic outcomes and social emotional learning
- Responsive support for staff
- Sustainable District systems and operations
A priority area of critical importance for the next several years includes laying the groundwork for welcoming and inclusive school communities (goal one) at the newly configured Acton elementary schools which underwent a large-scale reorganization from five K-6 schools to four schools: two serving students in grades K-3 and two serving students in grades 4-6. Blanchard Elementary in Boxborough remains a K-6 school. All families were assigned to a school under a new geography-based enrollment model. Educators were also redistributed. Superintendent of Schools Peter Light, told the Committee on August 20 that school staff worked hard through the summer to get classrooms ready for the first day of school.
The directive and focus of goal one is for each elementary school to begin the process this fall of surveying stakeholders in order to identify which shared community norms and values will serve as the foundational elements for building school climate and culture. The goal calls for visioning teams at each school to draft a two-year action plan with the end goal of establishing intentional school communities that foster a sense of belonging for students, families and educators.
Elementary principals collaborated over the summer to develop a shared resource to inform the work, called the “Anchor Guide: Building Our New School Cultures.”
The junior and senior high schools will also be looking to develop action steps to increase the sense of belonging for students, families, and staff over the next two years. This work will be informed by survey data and the forthcoming results of a new Youth Risk Behavior Study scheduled for publication in the fall of 2027.
Abrams noted that the High School is also focusing on school climate and culture within their professional staff.
Goal two calls for greater coherence in instructional practices across all schools by 2027-28 with the goal of effectively supporting students in building the core competencies defined in the district’s Vision of a Graduate and maximizing learning by responding to each student’s unique learning needs.
Learning outcomes for goal two include increased student proficiency and growth on qualitative assessments within the curriculum and on benchmark assessments and state-mandated measures of growth such as the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS).
Since 2017 the district has gradually but consistently adopted common curricula in core content areas, the latest being the roll out in October 2025 of an open-source, social studies curriculum spanning grades three through seven. Governor Healey also signed new literacy legislation this June requiring school districts to teach phonics and use research-backed curriculum and high-quality instructional materials to improve reading, vocabulary, oral language, and comprehension in K-3 classrooms statewide.
Goal three provides sustained, District-wide professional development responsive to the needs of Acton-Boxborough educators and specific to the AB Forward Strategic Plan with outcomes geared toward supporting educators’ ability to effectively respond to a broad diversity of learning needs of students that evolve as students move through the school system.
Superintendent Light also presented his goals for 2026-27 on August 20 which focus on completing the District’s 2026-2031 strategic plan with an eye toward supporting the onboarding process for the to-be-selected, incoming, new superintendent of schools.
Light announced in February 2026 that he is relocating to Abu Dhabi starting July 2027 where he will serve as superintendent of the American Community School.
Light emphasized that his goal this year is to “bring the strategic plan to a point where it can be passed off to the next superintendent with proposed initiatives that have a flexible timeline.” He told the Committee, “As I think about what it would be like to inherit a strategic plan, the piece I’d like to have solid agreement on is coming up with three or four metrics for each priority area that can be tracked over time as a way of measuring meaningful progress.” Light plans to finalize metrics by January and bring the plan to the Committee for a final vote.
“The most important thing I can do this year,” Light said, ”is to engage in a good transition process for the next individual coming in and make sure they have access to documents and carry the institutional history to move things forward.”
The School Committee has hired the Edward J. Collins Jr. Center for Public Management to oversee the search and is currently seeking community members interested in serving on the Superintendent Search Screening Committee. A timeline for the search can be found on the District’s website.
School Committee takes urgent action to onboard policies
On August 20, the Committee voted to approve an update to a policy governing the physical restraint and seclusion of students. The action aligns the policy with federal civil rights law and new state regulations that went into effect August 17 and clarify the definition of physical restraint, seclusion, and “time-out”, delineate circumstances under which they may be enforced and by whom, lay out standards for their use, and encode safeguards pertaining to the rights of parents and guardians.
The School Committee vote was taken after a first read, an unusual move that circumvents a process requiring two opportunities for feedback and a thorough vetting by the Committee’s Policy Subcommittee unless immediate action is necessary.
Superintendent of Schools, Peter Light, citing the need for immediate action to demonstrate compliance and protect the district from liability, explained that the policy language was vetted by legal counsel and appropriately reflects language in the regulations. Light told the Committee that an immediate vote has been requested “so as to not put our educators in a position where we have a policy that says one thing and a state law that says we have to do something different.”
Citing procedural anomaly, Acton member Andrew Schwartz abstained from the vote, and Boxborough member Adam Klein voted “no”.
Amanda Bailey, co-president of the Acton-Boxborough Special Education Parent Advisory Council (SEPAC), who spoke to the School Committee during the August 20 public comment period, advocated for stronger language in the policy and procedures around timely parent notification when their child is placed in time-out, seclusion, or restraint, and requested that parents with children of disabilities be provided with a copy of any behavior plans referenced in their child’s individualized education plan.
“We know the law and regulation were updated with a lot of advocacy and input from outside agencies and organizations,” Bailey said. “We appreciate Natalia Kierul, Acton-Boxborough’s director of special education, for reaching out to SEPAC for input about the policy, but have concerns that, due to summer break, SEPAC has not had a chance to bounce the policy and procedures off of our broader community for conversation.”
On September 3, the School Committee voted to approve another policy, Policy ACL*: Interacting with Law Enforcement Officers Engaged in Civil Law Enforcement (PROTECT Act), without a first read, again due to the timeline for implementation required by the Commonwealth. The policy implements the requirements of the PROTECT Act, signed into law by Governor Maura Healey on August 5, 2026. The Act designates schools as protected locations and establishes standards for how district staff interact with federal civil immigration enforcement.
Specifically, the law generally prohibits civil arrests for civil law enforcement, including federal immigration enforcement, from being carried out on school grounds during school hours, student drop off and pick up windows, before- and after-school programming, and school-sponsored events without a Judicial Warrant or Judicial Order.
The Act’s implications for schools are as follows:
- Designates schools as protected “sensitive locations,” generally requiring a judicial warrant before civil immigration arrests can occur on school property
- Restricts how much information school officials can share with federal immigration authorities without a legal requirement or judicial warrant
- Prohibits inquiries about a student’s or family member’s immigration status except in narrow, specific circumstances
- Creates a new state civil rights claim allowing individuals, including students and families, to sue government officials, including ICE agents, for violations of their federal constitutional rights
- Requires multilingual guidance be made available to institutions, including schools, and to the public regarding these protections
School committees are legally required to adopt the policy by September 1, a point that Light said the school district’s attorney had confirmed with the Commonwealth.
“The requirement around this came from the state,” said Light. “Very well intended to protect students across the Commonwealth but it proved to be difficult in terms of the timeline for implementation in terms of local school committees.”
Light noted that the school district already has procedures in place, but they are not published since they are protected as safety procedures. He explained that there is “relatively little that is new in terms of how the district will proceed with the new policy in place.”
The policy was adopted unanimously, with Adam Klein abstaining due to the tight timeline the Commonwealth is requiring. “I don’t disagree with this policy at all,” Klein said. “But I will abstain from this vote as a matter of protest because the state should not be forcing policies down our throats without the time for us to be able to deliberate and actually vote on it.”
Diane Baum and Jodi Bromberg are the Acton Exchange’s School Committee beat reporters.
