Belmont Superintendent's Blog

Hello Belmont Community!

During my update at a recent School Committee meeting, I spoke about the work students in the Global Leadership class are doing at BHS. In this class, students study issues such as health care, fair trade, and social entrepreneurship to gain an understanding of what it means to be a global citizen. There is a wide array of classes, like this one, that provide students opportunities to learn disciplines in new and unique ways. For example, Social Justice by the Numbers is an interdisciplinary course which combines Math with Social Studies to help students use math concepts to examine social justice issues, and the World Experience course brings English and Social Studies together enabling students to create interdisciplinary projects within thematic units.

These unique learning experiences allow our students to develop complex thinking and problem solving skills and the ability to work in multidisciplinary and multi-perspective settings. Starting this summer, we will begin developing our Vision of a Graduate, which will help us to articulate, as a community, those competencies, knowledge, and skills we want for our students. This work started with the launch of the BMHS Building Project and we are now poised and ready to bring it to fruition in the coming year.

Related to the Vision of a Graduate work, we have begun our strategic planning process, with the formation of a Steering Committee to lead the work of developing our mission, vision, and core values. An important part of that process is gathering community input into mission, vision, and core values statements. Over the next few weeks, there are forums scheduled for community members to provide this input at in-person and virtual meetings. I hope you are able to join these important conversations.

Strategic Planning Community Forums

As we look ahead, envisioning our students' paths into their futures, we are also looking at how we as educators are supporting the learning paths of all of our students throughout their K-12 journey. Every student has their own learning profiles and needs, they learn in different ways, and they have unique perspectives that they bring to their learning. This is the diversity of our student body that brings richness and depth to our schools.

To ensure that we are providing a supportive and enriching environment for all of our students, we worked closely with a consultant to conduct an audit of our Special Education programming, the findings of which were presented at the February 27 School Committee meeting. This audit provided insightful information about what we need to do to strengthen how we serve our students with disabilities specifically, as well as our students in general education. Indeed, all students are essentially general education, with those on an Individualized Education Program (IEP) having specialized instruction to further support their learning.

We will be outlining steps the district will take to operationalize the recommendations in the audit later this spring. As outlined in our FY25 Override Budget, we are looking to add special education positions with the goal of building in-district sub-separate programming. This audit has provided very useful information about developing this internal programming.

All of the Important FY25 budget information can be found on the websites for the School Department and the Town. On the Town page, you can find the Town Budget Documents, which includes an Override Impact Calculator. On the school page you can find the School Budget Documents as well as a 5-minute BPS FY25 Budget Video. which provides accurate information about the proposed investments in an override scenario and the significant reductions in a non-override scenario.

Finally, I share with you another Voices of Leadership Video Series which began last summer. This new installment in the series brings the voices of Russ Kupperstein, BMS Principal, Heidi Paisner-Roffman, Wellington Principal, and Jonathan Libby, Assistant Director of Student Services to our community.

Voices of Leadership Video Link

We are at the start of a busy and exciting spring season with many activities and events that showcase our students' talents and hard work. Please be sure to check out the calendar to know when things are happening.