School Committee preview: March 4 & 7

The Finance, Operations and Governance Standing Committee on Monday, the full School Committee on Thursday

Hey hey! Bill here with a quick editor’s note. Aislinn’s work for Worcester Sucks is split between two sections: the monthly WPS In Brief posts (first one is up!) which go out to the entire mailing list, and these short meeting previews, which do not. We both agreed that the audience for these is a little too niche to blast out to everyone. So they’ll get posted online for all to read, but they’ll only appear in your inbox if you opt in.

You can sign up for the email version by going to your Worcester Sucks account page, where you’ll find this “Notifications” dashboard…

…and make that little grey button next to “School Committee previews” a green one. Voila!

As always, please consider a paid subscription or a one-time tip! This newsletter is supported entirely by reader subscriptions. I’m able to pay Aislinn to write these posts because you pay me to run this newsletter! The more paid subscribers we get, the more we’re able to do! And we just hit 700, which is very cool I think.

It’s just a few bucks a month, and unlike a Telegram subscription, it doesn’t go to some media conglomerate that makes money by laying people off. Rather, it goes directly to Worcester people writing about Worcester.

Ok, that’s enough begging for today. Now to Aislinn…

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March 4 Finance, Operations and Governance (FOG) Standing Committee Meeting

The next Finance, Operations and Governance meeting is scheduled for Monday, March 4 at 4:45pm at the Durkin Administration Building. There are three items on the agenda:

-An item about offering summer custodial jobs to students 16+.

-An item approving the school calendar for the next three years. The proposed calendar now includes Indigenous People’s Day alongside Columbus Day.

-And for a second time in FOG, an item to accept a donation from the Gene Haas Foundation. The administration is requesting it be filed. When this originally appeared on the agenda at the October general school committee meeting there was long debate around the ethics of accepting the donation due to the naming requirement.

The full agenda is here. You can watch it via zoom or Facebook live.

March 7 School Committee Meeting 

The next school committee meeting is scheduled for Thursday, March 7. Executive session starts at 5pm and the general meeting is scheduled to start at 5:30pm. Actual start time depends on how long the executive session lasts. See the agenda here. You can watch it via zoom or Facebook live. panish translation is available on zoom.

(Editor’s note: Better yet, you can watch it with us on the Worcestery Council Theatre 3000 Twitch stream. We recently started streaming School Committee meetings on top of our regular City Council program. It’s fun!) 

Here’s my selective preview:

Burncoat Middle Renovation: Administration is asking the school committee to authorize them to submit to City Council a statement of interest to include Burncoat Middle School in the MSBA rebuild process of Burncoat High School. The rationale is that the two schools share some mechanical infrastructure and instructional programs. Administration wrote in the back up that “The determination by the city whether to combine the high school and middle school into a shared facility (but remain as two separate schools) would be determined during the feasibility study of the project. That project timeline is expected to take place between 2025-2028.”

Report of the Superintendent is an update on the Alternative Education Program. No preview of the presentation yet.  There’s also a related item that was previously held to “consider renaming St. Casimir's to The Dr. Michael O’Neil Program at the Alternative School.”

Culture and Climate Specialists: Member Maureen Binienda (at-large) asked for a report on the cost of hiring the culture and climate specialists, the number in each school, and the training provided. The culture and climate specialist positions are part of the instructional assistant collective bargaining agreement and are in the middle and high schools.

Approval of courses. There are a bunch of proposed courses for the school committee to consider, including astronomy, elementary world culture and language (this was initially approved last year so not sure what’s different here), light and sound design, introduction to medical translation, as well as some new Chapter 74 vocational programs.

Menard Naming. Member Molly McCullough (district A) is requesting that administration and the community work together to consider naming a space in the new Doherty High School building after fallen firefighter Jason Menard, who is a Doherty alum.

That’s it, have a lovely week!  If you have feedback you can always get in touch: aislinn.doyle@me.com