LYNN — Superintendent of Schools Dr. Patrick Tutwiler updated the School Committee Thursday night on three areas in which the city’s public schools are expanding their curriculum and programming for the upcoming school year.
“Typically, with the onset of a new calendar year, we ramp up plans and activities related to preparing for the following school year,” Tutwiler said. “Plans and activities can also involve updates to curriculum and program expansion.”
The first of the three areas briefed upon in Tutwiler’s report is the formation of a Curriculum Council Adoption Committee. The committee will be tasked with the process of evaluating and selecting a new core curriculum for Lynn Public Schools (LPS) designed around Tier 1 English Language Arts (ELA) instruction at the elementary-school level. Tutwiler said key stakeholders will include members from each elementary school in the city — including grade-level teachers, English-as-a-second-language specialists and special education teachers.
This comes as LPS received a $208,000 grant to support culturally-responsive literacy in the district under the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (DESE) Growing Literacy Equity Across Massachusetts (GLEAM) initiative last spring. Tutwiler also said LPS is working with DESE and consultants from HILL for Literacy.
“GLEAM grants will support districts in implementing deep and lasting improvements in programming ELA/literacy through a multi-tiered system of support,” Tutwiler said. “In tandem with these consultancies, our charge is to adopt a new core curriculum for our Tier 1 ELA instruction at the elementary level.”
The second of the three areas in Tutwiler’s report is the establishment of a leadership team led by the math curriculum team. This leadership team will analyze elementary math curriculum materials by using a standards-based and culturally-responsive teaching lens in a researched-based rubric.
Unlike the ELA curriculum plan, the leadership team is not facilitated through a formal partnership with DESE.
Tutwiler said those on the leadership team will be representatives from the curriculum, English Learner Education, special education and elementary teachers from across the school district.
“As part of the selection process, we intend to pilot some of the materials,” Tutwiler explained. “As we have done historically, we will follow the established adoption procedures approved by the School Committee.”
The third and final update from the superintendent was the submission of a grant-application partnership with North Shore Community College on Jan. 18.
The idea is to create a full-scale, high-impact immersion program to simulate an early college experience for Lynn high school students. Students are expected to graduate from high school with a completed minimum of 34 credits in four years.
“For now, we see this as an exciting chance to provide a robust, immersive, early college experience for LPS students and deepen our partnership with North Shore Community College,” Tutwiler said, adding that there was “much more to come.”
