LYNN — With this week’s two-day wind-driven nor’easter causing significant damage on the North Shore, Superintendent of Schools Dr. Patrick Tutwiler said the district has turned its attention toward planning for snow days.
While Tutwiler said the Lynn Public Schools has the capability to transition to remote learning in lieu of offering a traditional snow day for students, he said the problem is that the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) is not allowing districts to count remote learning hours toward the annual requirement for instructional hours.
For the elementary level, the state requires schools to complete 900 hours of instruction; at the secondary level, schools are required to complete 990 hours, Tutwiler said.
“Therefore, at present, should a district or school pivot to remote learning for whatever reason, those instructional hours would not count toward the requirement,” said Tutwiler.
However, this current requirement has not caused the district to take remote school days “off the table,” as School Committee member Lorraine Gately was wondering at Thursday night’s meeting, according to Tutwiler who responded that DESE has not released its official stance on allowing for remote learning during snow days this school year.
“Nonetheless, we will be prepared,” said Tutwiler, explaining that the district will work to ensure each student has access to a computer and internet connection at home, which was an issue for the district when learning was conducted remotely earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tutwiler said the district is also weighing the need to maintain continuity of instruction and the mental health of students, when considering whether instruction should continue remotely on snow, or other inclement weather days.
On Thursday, Tutwiler also briefed the School Committee on the district’s efforts to build a new Pickering Middle School. He said the city is making “significant strides” in the eligibility period of the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) process. The MSBA is a quasi-independent government authority that helps to fund capital projects in the state’s public schools.
The first phase of this project began on May 3 and the district must complete eight requirements before it ends in late January. Tutwiler said the district is ahead of schedule in terms of completing these actions, and intends to complete the two remaining requirements ahead of an MSBA board meeting on Dec. 15. Tutwiler hopes this will allow Lynn to move to the next phase of the project.
During Thursday’s meeting, Tutwiler and several committee members took the superintendent’s update as an opportunity to emphasize the need for new schools. In Lynn, 10 of the 25 public schools are more than 100 years old. The current Pickering is 105 years old, according to data on the MSBA website.
“Over the past three years, there have been several efforts involving significant stakeholder input,” said Tutwiler. “In all of them, families and the broader community point to the need for new schools. Moving carefully, yet expeditiously through the process is the purest form of respect for that input.”
Committee member Michael Satterwhite, who has been visiting schools this week to test the quality of the food served to students in the district — which two parents spoke about earlier in the meeting — said it breaks his heart to see the poor condition of the buildings he has gone to.
“We need a new Pickering; it’s vital,” said Satterwhite. “It’s crazy. We need this Pickering and we need multiple other schools after that.”
This eligibility period marks the district’s third attempt to replace Pickering. A two-school proposal to replace the middle school was overwhelmingly rejected by a city-wide vote in the spring of 2017, and the district’s last statement of interest was rejected by the MSBA in December of 2018 due to the city’s unstable finances.
