LYNNFIELD — The only contested race in this year’s town election consists of three candidates vying for two open seats on the Lynnfield School Committee.
Incumbent Phil McQueen and challengers Brian Charville and Kate DePrizio are vying for a spot on the school board. Unlike McQueen, committee veteran Timothy Doyle opted not to seek re-election this year.
For McQueen, the choice the town faces comes down to a proven record of accomplishments.
“We, meaning we as a school committee, have had a lot of accomplishments since I started on the committee in 2018,” said McQueen, who works as the English Department head at Lynn Classical High School. “This committee listens to each other and the community. We have met every week to address new issues and we shared that with the community. I feel I am in the best position to continue doing that the next three years.”
McQueen said his accomplishments include the $17 million elementary school expansion project, as well as enhanced social-emotional learning initiatives.
“School expansion has been a full-time multi-level effort, which the School Committee has worked on for years,” said McQueen, adding that he is proud of the way the board worked together to add school adjustment counselors.
“Both elementary school principals said they were spending half their time on social-emotional issues,” McQueen said. “Principals should be focused on students’ learning. It was absolutely essential to get those adjustment counselors. Imagine if we hadn’t and we were getting these kids back into a post-COVID world.”
McQueen said several AP courses have been added at the high school over the past two years, including art, European history, and computer science. A full-time high school computer science teacher was also hired. In addition, the district has expanded its online options for courses that are not currently offered.
“We expanded STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and world language, which was progressing well and then COVID came along, but we are now ready to move forward,” McQueen said.
Another priority for McQueen is the expansion of equity and diversity in the district’s curriculum.
“I am passionate about that equity piece,” he said. “We are becoming a more diverse community and our curricula needs to better reflect that reality.”
McQueen feels that “teachers are the greatest asset any school district can have and we need to invest in them.
“We have a great school system, however, that just doesn’t happen. We need to focus on educated growth and build leadership capacity in teachers. Strange as it seems, all sorts of new learning and teaching opportunities have opened up this year. We need to continue that fluid learning model.”
McQueen said the biggest challenge facing Lynnfield schools is to “make sure we are producing graduates who are ready to be successful in the 21st-century global world.
“We are addressing these challenges through our district strategic plans and superintendent’s goals plan,” he said.
In terms of the district’s response to the pandemic, McQueen said “there are so many moving parts to this back-to-school plan. It is progressing very well.
“We will be able to give an update at the next meeting (on Tuesday). People need to be aware that there is so much more to this than they know.”
McQueen is a 1993 graduate of Aberdeen University in Scotland, where he majored in English. He earned international ESL certification at International House in London in 1995. He obtained a Master’s degree from Salem State in English in 2006 and a Master’s in English as a Second Language four years later.
He began teaching in April 1996 at Nova Group, the largest English conversion school in Japan.
McQueen taught English at Thurgood Marshall Middle School in Lynn from December 1998 to June 2004, serving as cluster leader during his final year. He moved onto the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in Lynn and Washington, D.C. from April 2010 to March 2015, serving as a national and local trainer for AFT.
McQueen came to Classical in September 2004, and was promoted to lead its English Department in March 2005.
McQueen has lived in Lynnfield for 12 years. His wife, Deanne, has taught bilingual kindergarten in Chelsea for 23 years. The couple has three sons: Shane, 17, a junior at Lynnfield High; Luke, 15, a freshman at the high school, and Nate, 12, a sixth grader at the town’s middle school.
“As a parent and committee member, I want to make the schools even better than they are,” said McQueen. “We want our students to leave the Lynnfield schools ready to engage and succeed in the global world because we are going to get global again.
McQueen plans to build on the successful campaign he ran in 2018, when he was first elected to the School Committee.
“I ran a positive campaign and topped the ticket, so I plan to run this campaign the same way so I can focus on my suitability,” he said.
