Dear Lincoln Public Schools Families,

My goodness this has been a cold week! The forecast is calling for continued frigid (and potentially dangerously low) temperatures throughout the weekend, but slightly more reasonable weather in the 30s beginning next Monday. There were also projections of a potential snowstorm on Sunday, but the latest forecasts are calling for that storm to stay off the coast and bring limited snowfall. If things change and it looks as though the weather could worsen and impact school on Monday, I will be sure to provide updated information; for now, however, it looks as though we should be okay.

For this week’s message I wanted to highlight information about next year’s school calendar, and provide an update about the district budget passed by the School Committee last week.

At the January 22nd School Committee meeting, the Committee officially approved the calendar for the next school year. Labor Day next year will be on September 7th – the latest it can be – so the School Committee approved a calendar that has students starting the Monday before the Labor Day weekend to ensure that the school year doesn’t go too late. Here are the calendar highlights:

While I’m talking about the calendar, I wanted to point out one quirk of Massachusetts public school calendars. You may have noticed (and potentially been confused by!) the mention of a last day of school with five snow days. This is not an LPS thing, it’s actually a statutory requirement that Massachusetts school districts create a calendar that includes the possibility of five snow days.

Applying that logic to this year's 2025-26 calendar, June 23rd, 2026 would be the last school day with five snow days for this year, but the school year should (knock on wood) end earlier than that. With our one snow day from earlier this week, the current last day of school is Tuesday, June 16th. It’s possible we could have additional snow days this winter, so we won’t update this year’s calendar on the website quite yet. Once we get to the spring, however, we will officially change the 2025-26 calendar online to reflect any snow days that occurred.

Also at the January 22nd School Committee meeting, the Committee passed a budget for the FY27 (i.e., 2026-27) school year. My initial budget presentation from December, along with the original budget book that goes into significant detail about the budget, are available online. The presentation of the budget that was approved by the School Committee last week is also available online (that presentation focused on the final numbers and leaves out much of the detail from the December presentation).

From a big-picture standpoint, we saw declined student enrollment this year, which means we are projecting smaller enrollment for next year. As a result, the budget approved by the School Committee is a conservative one, with a 2.5% increase for the Lincoln School (which stays within Finance Committee guidance) and a 1.7% increase for the Hanscom School. There are a number of places where we are making modest reductions to staffing to reflect the reduced number of students, but the budget still provides us with the generous staffing and resources that will allow us to continue to provide a high-quality education.

A big Thank You to the School Committee and the administrative team for preparing and finalizing a successful budget, and an even bigger Thank You to the community for its financial support – it is the Lincoln taxpayers and the contract with DoDEA that are the primary funding sources for our budget, and we are incredibly grateful for that support.

 

Have a wonderful weekend, and stay warm!

Parry Graham

Superintendent