Concepts on the High School

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Wendy R.

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Jul 22, 2018, 9:43:52 AM7/22/18
to Town Meeting Members
We now have a good, stimulating discussion on the tax burden issue which I am sure will be helpful to that committee.

In that light, l am going to suggest airing a different approach to the high school. The School Committee will be going through their usual process. They will be thinking about what would be the best high school we can build now from the educational point of view. Ultimately, at some future time, their proposal will come before Town Meeting and will also need a public override vote.

In my personal life as well as in my professional life, I have had to confront a problem with not only, "What would we like?" but from the start, "What can we afford?" I think most of all households in the world have to start with, "What can we afford?"

From a totally different point of view, it may be a disadvantage to build a completely new school all at once as we will be locked into one type of idea. Look at the current landscape in technology and work environments. The common phenomenon here is change and continuing change. In my work life, one went to an office and then one went home.  Today, telecommuting for some of the work week is normal, especially in bad weather.  Through Doxy.me, I use this telemedicine site regularly to consult with a health practitioner who moved to California.

With text messaging, e-mail, video conferencing, Skype, Google conferencing, etc., etc.for many, the work day never truly ends. When I worked, it was only in emergencies that one got a call at night or on the week-end. Now messages about work are sent 24/7 and one is expected to notice them to determine if they need an immediate response. Many companies are now global so  employees working on a common project must be able to communicate between various time zones.

The rate of change has been staggering and shows no sign of slowing down. Computers are shrinking, artificial intelligence will affect more and more of our lives. The purpose of high school is to prepare our youth for adulthood, work and college.  So another key question with regard to the high school is, "How do we prepare our students in an ever changing environment for an ever changing environment and how does the high school building have to change?"

Building one new big building freezes our thinking to one point in time and may make the project obsolete even before it is paid for.  My thought is not necessarily a "phased approach" as someone commented on. We need to address the need - increased enrollment. We want to maintain and improve our quality of education and we need to be flexible to stay modern.

My proposal is to build, either adjacent or connected to the current high school, a STEM building with a capacity for 1,000 students.  It would have the latest in 3-D printing, robotics, computer labs, science labs, etc. This would give us modernity and additional capacity now but would not disrupt everything.

Because of the American  With Disabilities Act, we need elevators in all buildings. We should take advantage of this to make our school buildings taller and use a smaller land footprint.

Lastly, with more powerful and ever smaller, laptops, and wireless becoming available all over, for many, work is where they are sitting, not necessarily in a specific work place. If we are preparing our students for life, maybe we should give our juniors and seniors  a chance to learn to be more independent in their school work. We should stop thinking of them being tethered to a building every day of the school day and allow for independence of place. Schoolwork could be done from our wonderful library, the Boston Public Library, their home or other places like the Museum of Fine Arts or the Harvard Museums.

Many colleges have some courses at night for "the day students" because to offer modern specialty topics, they sometimes need a teacher who works at his specialty during the normal school day. Maybe we need to consider that we can open up the boundaries of the school day for our juniors and seniors.  This way, they will have a chance to develop some good coping skills for real life after high school.

Let us open up our collective creativity to envision many alternatives and then, over time, the most cost effective solution will emerge. The most cost/effective solution will also have the most wide spread acceptance and the best chance of passage both at town meeting and in a public vote.

I look forward to your ideas.

Wendy Reasenberg
Precinct 8




Thomas, Ruth S

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Jul 22, 2018, 2:00:27 PM7/22/18
to Wendy R., Town Meeting Members
I agree!  

Missing from Wendy's post is online (distance) education.  Maybe it's because there already are O/DE courses offered at the high school.  This is where colleges and universities are now--both full programs and individual courses.  Students and faculty are not working in isolation but "conferencing" and streaming which allow online group/team work.  Online projects, such as digital humanities programs, are replacing traditional text reports.  Here's an example from a M.I.T. Boston architecture/urban planning course:



Ruth Thomas, 4





From: 'Wendy R.' via LexTMMA <lex...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 22, 2018 9:43:34 AM
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Subject: [LexTMMA] Concepts on the High School
 
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Thomas, Ruth S

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Jul 22, 2018, 2:05:32 PM7/22/18
to Wendy R., Town Meeting Members

Lest I mislead, the MIT class also meets in a classroom while the project is online.


Ruth

From: lex...@googlegroups.com <lex...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Thomas, Ruth S <rth...@bu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, July 22, 2018 2:00:23 PM
To: Wendy R.; Town Meeting Members
Subject: Re: [LexTMMA] Concepts on the High School
 

Meg Muckenhoupt

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Jul 23, 2018, 8:17:24 AM7/23/18
to Thomas, Ruth S, Wendy R., Town Meeting Members
I think this is a wonderful idea if you want to reduce Lexington's property values. 

From all evidence, online/remote education works really well for extremely self-motivated people.... and everyone else does worse. Take for example this article, which shows that for the bottom two-thirds of the 200,000 students in the study, distance learning reduced achievement by almost an entire grade.  

Is the average high school student mature enough to thrive in a virtual educational world where they don't see their teachers or peers? I'm a parent of three LHS students. Do you have any idea how many kids sometimes forget their homework when they see their teachers every day? 

What kind of education do you think our town's children deserve? 

  

Meg Muckenhoupt  

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andrei radulescu-banu

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Jul 23, 2018, 8:25:44 AM7/23/18
to meg muckenhoupt, Thomas, Ruth S, Wendy R., Town Meeting Members
Remote education also does not comply with the state curricular standards.

Andrei Radulescu-Banu, Pct 8


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Thomas, Ruth S

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Jul 23, 2018, 8:55:20 AM7/23/18
to andrei radulescu-banu, meg muckenhoupt, Wendy R., Town Meeting Members

Guess they need updating!


Ruth

From: andrei radulescu-banu <bitdr...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, July 23, 2018 8:25:30 AM
To: meg muckenhoupt
Cc: Thomas, Ruth S; Wendy R.; Town Meeting Members
Subject: Re: [LexTMMA] Concepts on the High School
 

Thomas, Ruth S

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Jul 23, 2018, 9:10:35 AM7/23/18
to me...@post.harvard.edu, Wendy R., Town Meeting Members

If Lex is preparing its 88% of students for going on to higher ed, then DE course options is where higher ed is.  DE is all about how well it is done and supported. It can be personal and group interactive.  As with all teaching online and in class, online ed's success depends on the individual teacher's ability to develop interesting content, personal connection, and exciting presentation. 


The students are online anyway both in and outside of school.  


I think our children deserve a 21st century education with flexible and creative teachers.


Ruth 4


 

From: lex...@googlegroups.com <lex...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Meg Muckenhoupt <meg...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, July 23, 2018 8:16:43 AM
To: Thomas, Ruth S
Cc: Wendy R.; Town Meeting Members
Subject: Re: [LexTMMA] Concepts on the High School
 
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Wendy R.

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Jul 23, 2018, 10:22:22 AM7/23/18
to Thomas, Ruth S, Town Meeting Members
Yes, Ruth, I did intend to include on-line educational opportunities as one of the tools in the modern educational tool kit integrated with school attendance.

I also would like to clarify that in suggesting a STEM building, I did not intend to suggest that we favor science and technology over the humanities. The reason is simply the need in STEM subjects for the specialized equipment and related physical aspects. In a pinch, one can have an English class in a chemistry building but not vice versa.

Also, since we could make the building taller, some of the floors could incorporate  some of the new learning spaces that were demonstrated in the High School Vision Meetings of last December. Furthermore, at those meetings, some of the educators expressed that it would be helpful to have some spaces dedicated to the ninth graders to help in their transition to high school from middle school. All of this could be incorporated in the STEM building.

Lastly, we must create something that makes sense to everyone. If the final high school project proposed is so big and so expensive that the community as a whole is not behind it, but it manages to pass anyway, there could be a sudden senior exodus from homeownership. It is desirable for the senior homes to go on the market over years in the natural course of events. A sudden exodus will resulting in a new wave of school age children.

Wendy Reasenberg
Precinct 8




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Meg Muckenhoupt

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Jul 23, 2018, 10:29:46 AM7/23/18
to Thomas, Ruth S, Wendy R., Town Meeting Members
I agree that our children deserve a 21st century education with flexible and creative teachers. But most of the evidence out there shows that students who enroll in distance education/online courses get worse grades and learn less than students who actually see teachers and other students. Ruth, you talk about how distance education can be done well; I haven't seen any evidence that it works as well as in-person education in public school districts. Could you provide some? 


Here's a fun paragraph from a study by the Brookings Institution of distance-learning college students.
"..we find that taking a course online reduces student grades by 0.44 points on the traditional four-point grading scale, approximately a 0.33 standard deviation decline relative to taking a course in-person (See Figure 1). To be more concrete, students taking the course in-person earned roughly a B- grade (2.8) on average while if they had taken it online, they would have earned a C (2.4). Additionally, taking a course online reduces a student’s GPA the following term by 0.15 points; and, if we look only at the next term GPA for courses in the same subject area or courses for which the course in question is a pre-requisite, we find larger drops of 0.42 points and 0.32 points respectively, providing evidence that students learned less in the online setting."

Why would we opt for educational alternatives that are worse? Are we that desperate to save money? Why not just double class sizes and eliminate all the electives? 

And let's remember that A) We already have a couple hundred students in trailers ("modulars") on campus, B) LHS's physical plant is nearing the end of its useful life, and C) as a school system, we've been gaining 100-150 students a year for several years now. We're in a crisis *now.*


Meg Muckenhoupt




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Tom Shiple

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Jul 23, 2018, 10:45:57 AM7/23/18
to me...@post.harvard.edu, Thomas, Ruth S, Wendy R., Town Meeting Members

Wendy, thanks for laying out your concept of a 1000-student STEM building.  We can have a discussion about the merits of distance learning, but I don’t think it’s fundamental to the concept you put forward.  

I have also been thinking that we need an intermediate solution that addresses our short-term capacity and science needs, and I like your concept.  Also, by not committing us to a comprehensive long-term solution, it provides us the flexibility to respond to a changing enrollment and educational landscape in the longer-term.  In addition, I support the idea of building up to overcome the space issue of adding a building to the campus.  Finally, if we commit to using some of the buildings for another couple of decades, then we will need to invest in upgrading their systems, but I think this will still be cheaper than a complete rebuild.

Tom Shiple, Precinct 9



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Meg Muckenhoupt

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Jul 23, 2018, 2:21:40 PM7/23/18
to Tom Shiple, Thomas, Ruth S, Wendy R., Town Meeting Members

 a comprehensive long-term solution, it provides us the flexibility to respond to a changing enrollment and educational landscape in the longer-term.  In addition, I support the idea of building up to overcome the space issue of adding a building to the campus.  Finally, if we commit to using some of the buildings for another couple of decades, then we will need to invest in upgrading their systems, but I think this will still be cheaper than a complete rebuild.


Whether or not any of these suggestions would be cheaper depends a lot on what the state will pay for, and whether retrofitting an old building to upgrade the HVAC systems and meet modern ADA, fire, and earthquake safety requirements is more expensive than rebuilding, and what the expected lifetime of a rebuilt school would actually be. In the past, the state reimbursement in other communities has favored building new schools over rebuilding old schools. 

We may also find that once we open up the walls, rebuilding LHS is more expensive than we thought. I don't *think* there are contaminants at LHS, or foundation cracks, or termite invsaions, but who knows? Estabrook and the Pelham property surprised us. LHS may too.

I'd like to withhold judgement on what should be built until we've gone through a community process to get feedback about what everyone needs -- the LABB students, the future French and Italian majors, the English language learners, the Metco students, the swim team, the robotics team, the guidance counselors dealing with opiate-addicted kids, the orchestra teachers  -- everyone. 


Meg Muckenhoupt







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