CPS Superintendent's Update

Dear CPS Community,

As the third week of October concludes, we have had another fantastic week of weather and Halloween celebrations abound. I hope you have a few minutes to view some of the pictures below of art projects created in our elementary schools. A link is also provided to a new free, on-demand tutoring service the district purchased for our Grade 5 – 12 students. All middle and high school students now have 24/7 access to an online tutor to assist them outside of school when needed. Please review the information below on PAPER to see how this valuable service may help your child with their academic needs.

Please continue to follow our COVID-19 dashboard updated to the CPS website weekly. The COVID-19 positivity rates in our schools remain incredibly low and we are not experiencing COVID spread from our confirmed positive cases – this is great news! We also had our first week of COVID-19 pool testing that yielded zero (0) positive results – again, great news! Please keep up the good work of practicing social distancing when possible, wearing masks, and washing/sanitizing your hands frequently throughout the day.

One of the most significant operational issues we have been dealing with since the start of the school year is a shortage of school bus drivers. The Chelmsford Public Schools typically contracts for 29 big yellow busses to transport over 3,200 students to and from school each day. Each year, the first few weeks of school experience adjustments with bus stops and arrival times. Bus drivers and students establish their new routines and transportation flows smoothly by October. This year has not been as predictable as prior years, primarily due to the nationwide shortage of CDL drivers. While our hope is the CDL driver shortage is temporary, we are taking steps now to improve consistency with pick-up (in the morning) and drop-off (in the afternoon) times for our students and families.

We are working with our transportation vendor to manage our routes with fewer drivers. The outcome will be combining some bus routes – going from 29 busses to 27 busses each day. We are not eliminating bus drivers; our vendor simply cannot hire enough drivers to service our 29 routes. Our hope is that by consolidating a few runs, now that ridership has been fully established, we will require fewer busses to transport our students, resulting in fewer double runs when a driver vacancy exists because of hiring inability or sickness. This change will affect approximately 120 student bus riders. Families impacted will receive a separate communication with their new bus number and new pick-up and drop-off time. The location of the bus stops originally assigned to each student will not change. Our goal is to minimize the change to the pick-up and drop-off times (within 10 minutes of the current times), while maintaining safe and efficient bus routes, with more reliability and consistency. Updates will be posted in the Aspen X2 family portal bussing tab. Implementation of new routes for the 120 affected students will be towards the end of next week (week of October 25) once notice is provided.

I hope you have a nice weekend, it looks like the true fall weather is finally upon us.

Yours truly,

Jay Lang, Ed.D.

Superintendent of Schools

Next week:

• View complete athletics schedules here

• School Committee Workshop DEI - 10/26, 5:00 p.m.

• Center Elementary Trunk-A-Treat, 10/30, 11:00 a.m.

Ms. Spaulding has been the custodian at the CHIPS/Community Education building on Dalton Road for six years. While she keeps the building in pristine condition, she is perhaps better known for her many visual displays that brighten not just the building, but the days of the CHIPS and Community Education students and staff. To read more about Ms. Spaulding please visit our website.

Trunk or Treat will be on Saturday, October 30 from 11-1. Dress up your gang and come have a spooky-good time trick-or-treating around the Center School parking lot. There will be fun and games for all to enjoy. Volunteer to decorate your trunk and win a prize for the "Best Dressed" car! Volunteer: https://signup.com/go/dagBguW

The Chelmsford High School Theatre Guild is finally back on stage with its annual musical! After a brief hiatus due to the pandemic, the theatre students are once more singing, dancing, and acting. Over 60 students are eagerly readying their annual major musical. This year’s treat is the musical comedy PIPPIN written by award-winning composer Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Godspell, Prince of Egypt). Pippin has had two major turns on Broadway, most recently its Tony Award-winning revival in 2013 that was premiered at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge. To read more about Pippin, please review this press release.

Chelmsford Public Schools has partnered with Paper, an online academic support platform, to provide its grades 5-12 students with easily accessible, after-hours tutoring and educational support. Partnered with more than 270 school districts in North America, Paper takes the burden off educators by offering scalable, 24-7 academic support to students, particularly when teachers are not accessible after school hours. Paper has more than 1,000 certified tutors and offers its support in four languages: English, Spanish, French, and Mandarin. To read more about this opportunity please visit our website.

Socktober is still going on! Please send new socks (any size and color) to school with your student. We will be donating them to The Wish Project. Thank you to everyone that has donated so far!

Over the next two months, fifteen colleges and universities are scheduled to visit with students at CHS. View our schedule of visiting colleges.

The Chelmsford Public Schools utilizes School Spring to advertise job postings and the online application process. To apply for any of our positions, please visit our website.

The mission of the Chelmsford Public Schools is to educate, engage, prepare, and empower well-rounded and knowledgeable learners who PERSEVERE through challenges, demonstrate RESPECT and INTEGRITY in their words and actions, are DEDICATED to their community, and display EMPATHY as global citizens while discovering and pursuing their full potential.

Email: information@chelmsford.k12.ma.us
Website: https://chelmsfordschools.org
Location: 230 North Road, Chelmsford, MA, USA
Phone: (978) 251-5100
Facebook: facebook.com/chelmsfordpublicschools
Twitter: @ChelmsfordPS