At their final meeting before winter break, the Acton-Boxborough School Committee, which is tasked with making the final decision on which elementary school reorganization scenario to implement next year, voted six to one to eliminate two of four options forwarded for consideration by the AB Forward Steering Committee earlier this month.
Options 3.2 and 6 eliminated
Off the table is option 6, which proposed a large scale consolidation that would have created three large K-6 schools (two in Acton and one in Boxborough), and option 3.2 which proposed reducing the number of K-6 schools from six to five by closing the Merriam School, dispersing its 395 students across the remaining schools, and relocating the Conant school community intact into the building.
The two scenarios that remain include option 5.2 which converts both the Parker-Damon and Boardwalk Campus school buildings in Acton into grade-banded K-3 “lower schools” and grade 4-6 “upper schools”, and option 4, which retains the K-6 structure of the elementary schools but formally dissolves the Merriam and McCarthy Towne school programs and then recombines part of their student populations into a single, smaller school community, redistributing the rest across the remaining schools.
With a final vote scheduled for January 22 fast approaching, the School Committee is facing one of the most consequential educational decisions it has faced in decades: how to reorganize its elementary schools in response to declining enrollment, rising costs, and long-term financial constraints. A District-issued report made public on December 15, lays out in painstaking detail what that choice entails — not just in dollars, but in disruption to students, families, and school communities.
Every option on the table assumes the closure of the Conant building and the Merriam School and eliminates eleven K-6 classroom teachers, seven classroom assistants, four unified arts staff, and one instructional coach, pushing class sizes to the upper end, and in some grade levels, one student beyond the School Committee’s published class size guidelines.
The annual savings in year one for all options under consideration is projected to be roughly $1.9M.
Superintendent of Schools Peter Light told the Committee on December 18 that while “the intent of option 4 is to preserve stability for the majority of the District’s elementary schools by concentrating the highest intensity of disruption in one or two specific school communities, the intent of option 5.2 is [large-scale], systemic reorganization which embraces broader disruption as an opportunity to reset.”
Light iterated the many educational benefits noted by the District’s leadership team under option 5.2, noting that this option has the highest alignment with the District’s strategic priorities. “Six or seven classroom sections per grade level in a school [under option 5.2] as opposed to two or three [under option 4], opens up more opportunities for larger groups of educators to collaborate, provides more flexibility in grouping students who need reading and math support, increases the number of students specialists can see, offers more creative ways to deliver services to multilanguage learners and students with disabilities, allows more flexibility to expand or contract depending on enrollment trends over time, and affords staff the ability to be more thoughtful about what inclusion looks like across classrooms,” Light said.
Parents, educators and School Committee members have voiced concerns that only option 4 would allow the District to preserve the innovative educational practices unique to individual schools such as grade-level looping, student led conferences, and project-based learning.
A Hidden Second Decision: Enrollment
A focus of discussion at the December 18 meeting was on how students would be reassigned to schools under option 5.2, a decision which falls squarely under the purview of the School Committee. Deputy Superintendent of Schools Andrew Shen reviewed three different enrollment models delineated in section five of the report in the School Committee’s packet that would “directly shape how systemic change is experienced under option 5.2 by Acton-Boxborough families.”
The least disruptive reassignment path under option 5.2 would keep school populations in their current building and re-assign only Conant students by lottery. A second approach would require all K-5 (or K-4) students to re-enroll by participating in a one-time, district-wide re-lottery. A third model would align the District with the common practice of assigning “neighborhood schools” based on geographical proximity, an option overwhelmingly endorsed by Conant and Merriam parents who spoke to the Committee on December 18 during the public comment period. “We should not be designing a system where there are winners and losers through lottery-based enrollment,” said one Conant parent. “We need collaboration and compromise, not coalitions protecting individual schools.”
Moving to “neighborhood schools” under option 5.2 would overturn a longstanding, lottery-based, open enrollment practice in Acton-Boxborough that has become embedded in School Committee policy.
School Committee members remain divided on whether to endorse options that minimize or maximize disruption to school communities. Member Glen Cote told his School Committee colleagues, “It’s really important we do everything we can do to not exacerbate conditions that cultivate resentment. I think emphasizing the need for a community-wide lift and creating a more systemic distribution of the change we’re all going to have to collectively absorb is the best way to cultivate the conditions where we can build the community that helps us navigate forward.”
Superintendent of Schools Peter Light noted that though reorganization will help to close what has been a persistent budget deficit, “…we have to be super clear with our community that taking on this work to operate more efficiently may not solve the long-term problem should costs continue to escalate. There’s a real tension between wanting strong schools and being at the limit of what our communities can afford. I don’t want to promise and underdeliver; reorganization does not mean we’ve fixed the revenue problem. Revenue is not keeping up with expenses. That is the reality for schools everywhere right now. We are doing everything we can to control what we can in the moment, which is to choose how we organize ourselves and operate within the resources we have knowing we can’t control the revenue.”
The Committee has scheduled a public hearing on January 8 and invites the public to submit comments on the two remaining options by emailing the School Committee at abrsc@abschools.org or using the AB Forward comment form. A final vote is scheduled for January 22.
Diane Baum is the Acton Exchange’s School Committee beat reporter. ChatGPT was used to summarize information from the AB Forward supplemental information document.
