Last Thursday’s 4-3 vote against requiring English as a Second Language (ESL) licensure for public school kindergarten teachers is proof the Lynn School Committee is not serving the needs of local children.
The School Committee chiefly exists to fill the state-sanctioned responsibility of hiring a school superintendent and reviewing the superintendent’s job performance. But the seven members, with the mayor serving as chair, also have the implied responsibility of ensuring Lynn students receive the best possible education.
The committee failed in that mission on March 25 when members Brian Castellanos, Donna Coppola, John Ford and Lorraine Gately voted against Superintendent Dr. Patrick Tutwiler’s ESL licensure proposal.
Dr. Tutwiler urged the committee to require new kindergarten teachers to hold an ESL license. He also proposed giving kindergarten teachers now working in the public schools two years to obtain a license.
English Language Learner Education Director Rania Caldwell underscored Dr. Tutwiler’s recommendation with statistics hammering home the need for strong ESL education at the kindergarten level.
Kindergarteners are receiving 15-30 minutes of daily ESL instruction when the state says they should be getting 45-90 minutes. Since 2017, the number of kindergarteners identified as English language learners has increased from 19.8 percent to 31.8 percent.
Caldwell stressed the importance of ESL education during arguably the most important year a student spends in school by placing ESL on the same learning top priority tier as mathematics.
Castellanos suggested during last week’s committee meeting that the committee and school administrators need to get on the same page with ESL instruction. So why didn’t he become the swing vote endorsing Dr. Tutwiler’s plan?
Again, the committee’s main job is to hire a superintendent. But how are Lynn students being served if the committee won’t support the superintendent in meeting a need as crucial as kindergarten ESL instruction?
The Lynn School Committee was not elected to serve the needs of Lynn teachers. It was elected to serve the needs of Lynn students.
If teachers don’t like proposals clearly intended to better educate students, then they should go teach somewhere else or choose another profession.
Mayor Thomas M. McGee was on the right side of the ESL vote along with committee members and mayoral candidates Jared Nicholson and Michael Satterwhite. But McGee, probably because of his status as a lame-duck mayor, was unable to muster enough votes to get the Tutwiler proposal approved by the committee.
Lynn’s students deserve accountability and the School Committee is failing them in that regard.
