SAUGUS — On the wall of Superintendent Erin McMahon’s office hangs a plaque bearing the words, “To the moon,” a physical reminder of her lofty goals for the town’s schools.
McMahon, who is halfway through her second year as superintendent, set a goal for Saugus schools to reach the top 10 percent of MCAS scores statewide by 2027. When McMahon took over as superintendent in July 2021, the town sat in the bottom 10 percent.
She said the first hurdle to achieving that goal, in her view, is simply setting it. Next, she explained, Saugus has to not just recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, but accelerate out of it.
“On the accelerate side, it’s been bringing in more than $500,000 worth of high-quality instructional materials. It’s training our teachers to be able to meet the demands of the curriculum they’re now teaching. We’ve seen specific investments in early literacy, middle school science, high school math, high school literacy. We have a solid curriculum for elementary math. And so that is the first foundation is having a high-quality curriculum,” she said. “On top of that you then train the teachers to teach at that level, on grade level or above. And then our third piece has really been the data.”
School officials, McMahon explained, meet to look over student data each week. That means meeting with a data team leader and a data team specialist for every grade level — pre-K through 12th grade — and every subject. Those meetings serve as a way to track students’ progress on a granular level, she said.
“When I think about accelerate, it starts with and ends with data,” McMahon said. “It means looking at student work, and really understanding where kids are based on standards. And then it’s really teaching to the kids in front of us. And the great thing is all the planning and data meetings we’re doing is for the purpose of meeting kids where they are and accelerating them to either get on grade level or past grade level.”
“That’s our plan,” she continued.
Progress, McMahon said, can be seen across different a number of areas.
As examples, she cited the implementation and growth of an early college program in conjunction with North Shore Community College, implementation of a new early literacy curriculum, and growth of the Kids Come First program, which now provides care to students before and after school at both the Veterans Early Learning Center (VELC) and the Belmonte.
“My highlights are really trying to build out the after school with Kids Come First … working hard to creatively address transportation and traffic because it matters to families, early college program. I’m really thinking about how kids do at the end [making sure] they graduate with college and career options. And then our structure, planning,” she said. “Small but big is our new website. We worked really hard on it. … Families have told us, ‘Thank you. It’s just so much easier to navigate.’”
McMahon successfully pushed for the hiring of deans in each of the town’s three school buildings, a move she said has bolstered the social and emotional learning side of students’ educational experience.
During her tenure, McMahon and district officials have applied for — and received — a number of grants from the state and federal governments to help bolster programs within the schools that aren’t accounted for in the annual budget. At an October meeting of the Finance Subcommittee of the School Committee, the town’s existing and anticipated grants totaled more than $4 million.
During previous stops in Denver and New York City, McMahon explained, she came to understand that “innovation comes through in a few different ways,” citing community support and donor and grant investments. Next, she said, “it’s really just finding the third way to get there.”
Grants, McMahon said, are driven by priorities and are a way to support existing efforts that the school district has taken on.
“What we care about is we care about kids going to college, so that’s why we went after the early college [program]. We really care about making the middle school high school incredibly strong, and allowing kids to graduate with at least a year’s worth of college credit,” she said. “We just secured a social-emotional learning grant that will invite … counselors from our surrounding communities into serve in our Saugus Public Schools to support mental health.”
“We are not driven by grants, but grants support the work we’re driving towards. And that’s really the key piece. Your budget determines your values and what we value is putting kids first through making sure that they have every option for college and career and that’s what we’re working backward from,” she continued.
Heading into 2023, McMahon is set to propose a fiscal year 2024 budget to the School Committee. That will likely happen as soon as next month, and McMahon said one of her key budgetary goals is to ensure that Saugus has the staff it needs and that those staff members receive a wage they deserve.
“What’s incredibly important this year is making sure that we have the right staff in all of our buildings,” she said. “I care most about making sure that our teachers and our paraprofessionals really get paid for the work that they do. I really care about paying … our entire Saugus staff but specifically, I want to make sure teachers and paras really get the pay that they deserve. So number one is thinking about teacher and para pay. The second is making sure we have the right staff in our buildings.”
Those staffing needs, she said, include a librarian at the VELC, where students currently have a “library without a librarian”; more teachers who speak English as a second language, to support the 43 percent of kindergartners who speak English as a second language; and bolstering elementary school math.
Math is a particular priority at the elementary school level, she said, because it supports literacy development. She described both as “learned languages.”
The final budget priority McMahon cited is the need for a new school bus, because the district has struggled to meet demand for seats since the beginning of the school year.
Transportation has become a larger issue in the wake of the consolidation of the town’s schools, McMahon said. But, she said, the merger has had its benefits, explaining that Saugus now has a “a clear line of sight of where kids start from and where they’re going.”
“The greatest impact has been that all kids are now together and that we have consistently high instructional expectations across every grade pre-K to 12,” she said. “A second impact is, because the schools are larger, we have found ways to make smaller communities within them and make sure that we’re building community and a sense of belonging. That’s been really important.”
Going forward into 2023 and beyond, McMahon said, she will work with Town Manager Scott Crabtree to develop and deliver a vision of Saugus schools that puts students on a path to success.
A key part of that, she said, will be tackling chronic absenteeism.
“If a child’s not in school, but specifically child’s not in class, he or she doesn’t have access to learning, and that’s what I care about most,” she said. “You want every child to have access to learning every single day, all school year, and then have opportunities beyond that.”
