On Nov. 6, the Waltham School Committee met for its bi-weekly meeting, discussing a range of topics including district-wide successes and challenges in English Language Arts, the formation of an equity audit team and a decision to modify a key program at Waltham High School. 

During the student council and student input portion of the Nov. 6 meeting, Alexander Tapia, a student representative of Waltham High School, shared students’ disconnect with recent changes to Hawk Block, a period during the school day designated for students to focus on activities including academic support, study time and reassessment. 

“Some students are upset about the recent changes that have removed Hawk Block,” Tapia said, adding that “it is more difficult for students to make up missed work and quizzes.” Tapia recognizes that while “some students could have used Hawk Block correctly but they chose not to,” others would like to keep it as it was, citing that it has been “beneficial for the students who actually use it to get help with class content.” 

According to The Waltham Times, Waltham High School Principal Darrell Braggs first announced the pause of Hawk Block in a Nov. 6 email to the school community and instead implemented a “Wednesday Advisory” period starting Nov. 20, where students will pursue “ goal setting, academic counseling, exploring, and reflecting on themselves as learners,” with the school staff. Two days later, the school announced that Hawk Block was not being eliminated, rather “restructured” to ensure that “every student is thoughtfully scheduled into a space and connected to an educator who will work with them to create an academic plan for how to use this time.” The biggest concern expressed in the Nov. 8 email was the unaccounted for students who were “roaming hallways or entering classrooms they were not signed into,” classifying it as “not safe.”

Currently, there is a petition to reinstate Hawk Block back as it was, which has garnered 859 signatures as of press time. The petition, which has support from students and parents, depicts issues with being “confined to our homerooms, unable to seek educational aid from our curriculum teachers” and feeling “treated like prisoners in lockdown.” 

The petition calls for the reinstatement of Hawk Block, while the high school has said it will “work to rectify these concerns and establish a new procedure for the way in which students are assigned as well as identifying tiered support interventions for students who need it.” 

The school committee then discussed a $9,030 book donation made by Cambridge Public Schools, which included over 3,600 student work books and over 70 sets of teacher guides for elementary schools to use for math field tests. According to Waltham Public Schools Assistant Superintendent Sarah Kent, Cambridge originally reviewed the resources through a grant for field tests and decided they no longer needed it. The school committee approved the acceptance of the donation. 

During the committee meeting, Director of Elementary Humanities Anne Curry and Director of Grades 6-12 English Language Arts Daphne Fay both provided updates on their respective departments.

Curry reported on the work of the district’s eight reading specialists and seven literacy coaches across its six elementary schools. These specialists, according to Curry “provide small group interventions and are detected coaches, while also serving as interventionist, provide coaching and support to educators through collaborating coaching cycles and facilitation of monthly professional development and biweekly grade level team meetings.” Together, the team serves 2,600 elementary students.

Curry also highlighted the success of the district’s completion of the Growing, Literacy, Equity Across Massachusetts, a grant program which focuses on literacy instruction for Grades kindergarten through third. She points to the success of the grant program highlighting a decrease in kindergarten through second students in need of decoding support, with kindergarten dropping from 52% to 23%, first graders from 38 to 20% and second from 34% to 21%. She also highlighted the increased reading accuracy between third and fifth grade. For the last academic year, third graders saw an increase in accuracy from 32% to 82%, fourth grade from 16% to 74.8% and fifth grade up from 23% to 88%.

Despite success from last year, Curry recognized areas in need of improvement, including addressing concerns of “disjointed” days as a result of students receiving support from multiple providers in short windows of time.

“We want to make sure the students are getting what they need in all areas of their education and we are committed to working with the multilingual department and the special education department to make sure that we are aligned in the instruction we are providing,” Curry said. 

She concluded her presentation by addressing one other concern — remaining constant with implementing “Tier 1” literacy instruction. 

“To do so, we are working with educators to elevate curricular components, increase student discourse and allow them to express their learning through writing.” Students in grades kindergarten through second received their own sets of decodable readers with the aim to “empower our youngest readers and help them develop confidence as they practice and apply the skills they have been taught,” Curry notes. 

Fay shared that similar to Curry’s department, her goal is to apply science of reading reason to secondary English Language Arts instruction. For middle school students, the curriculum focuses on oral reading fluency and vocabulary development while students in high school focus on stamina and standards aligned questions on text sets. 

Success within the middle and high schools includes improvement of Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System scores for Kennedy Middle School, who exceeded targets in ELA for their lowest performing 25% of students. 

She also spoke about two new class offerings at Waltham High school — English Literacy Acceleration, a class for sophomore students who were identified as “at risk” of  not reaching grade level reading. Another new class offering is the ESL 2B-ELA Bridge, which offers students set to enter “a mainstream English course [that] they will be taking for the first time at the high school, with “extra push and acceleration in their literacy skills to better prepare them for success,” Fay explained.  

One challenge that Fay noticed, which she said “[wouldn’t] be surprising to hear,” is the district's “historically low performance on MCAS reading standards across all grade levels.” She adds that all of the work put in getting students to become better readers is “really driven by what we see from their performance on the MCAS over the years.”

Earlier in the meeting, the committee took a moment to recognize over 30 members of the National Honor Society at Waltham High School, who volunteered their time by giving tours of the new highschool that opened this August to the greater Waltham community. Superintendent Marisa Mendonsa shared that much of the positive feedback describes the students as “patient and kind and thoughtful,” and “ how amazing the students were … and knowledgeable already of all of the different spaces in such a short amount of time.” Mendonsa adds, before the rest of the school committee handed out certificates recognizing their efforts, “I want to really, on behalf of the school district and the School Committee, thank all of you for committing your time. It was invaluable for us as a greater city.”

Mendonsa also shared briefly that an equity audit team has been selected and an audit set to begin this month. More information about the timeline and implementation would be provided in the next committee meeting, Mendonsa said, following the team's first meeting. The idea of having an equity audit was first raised by Mendonsa during a July 10 school committee meeting, where she noted that there was an audit before the COVID-19 Pandemic that is now “outdated.”

“I believe that the Waltham Public Schools would benefit from having an audit for us to really understand where we are in terms of [Diversity Equity Inclusion] and a sense of belonging in our district,” Mendonsa suggested, adding that staff, students, community members and caregivers would be included in focus groups.

“It would look at curriculum instructions. It would look at teaching and learning. It would look at professional development, our staffing structures and really develop a foundation of where we currently are as a district in terms of our DEI work.” In the July meeting, Mendonsa said the audit could be conducted and completed “this year,” in time for the district to discuss it in relation to what the Fiscal Year 26 budget could bring. 

Concluding the Nov. 6 committee meeting, committee member Elizabeth Aljammal requested that Waltham High School Principal Braggs attend the next school committee meeting to discuss the Hawk Block change.

The school committee is set to reconvene Nov. 20 at 7 p.m.