LPS -- Superintendent's bi-weekly message September 18, 2026

Dear Lincoln Public Schools Families,

I hope, like me, you have been enjoying the beautiful weather recently. It looks like we could get some rain on Sunday and cooler temperatures next week – I’m crossing my fingers that fall lasts as late as possible this year.

For this week’s message I have a link to the 2026-27 District Improvement Plan, a shout-out to our new electric buses, and a reminder about upcoming back-to-school nights.

District Improvement Plan

Each year the district develops a District Improvement Plan, which highlights some of our most important areas of focus for the year. At last week’s School Committee meeting, the Committee approved this year’s Plan.

Two big areas of focus are literacy and math. We implemented the new EL literacy curriculum last year, and we want to make sure we are continuing to support teachers with that implementation, while also codifying multi-year goals for student growth and achievement. We will also be working this year to select a new math curriculum, which would be implemented in the 2027-28 school year. 

Our final district goal is to make changes to our master schedule to allow us to better support student intervention, and to use faculty time as effectively and efficiently as possible. While this will certainly end up being a multi-year effort, we are targeting the 2027-28 school year for implementation of a new district-wide master schedule (and when I say master schedule, I don’t mean the calendar that lays out what days school happens, but rather how time is apportioned within the school day).

Electric buses

Our primary Lincoln School bus vendor, Doherty’s, has been working for several years to start electrifying their bus fleet. Shifting toward clean energy sources is a high priority for the town of Lincoln, and it was great to see that Doherty’s has now added multiple electric buses to its fleet for this year. We are also hoping to use electric buses for our Boston routes in future years, but those buses are managed by a different vendor and have longer ride times (which can make the logistics of charging more complicated), so we anticipate that the process will take longer to put in place.

Back-to-school nights

Building strong relationships and communication between schools and families is incredibly important. The new ParentSquare communication platform is one resource to help, but we want to make sure parents and caregivers have many opportunities to connect with their children’s teachers and schools: to that end, we have multiple back-to-school nights scheduled during September and early October, and parent-teacher conferences coming up in late October and early November.

The Lincoln 5-8 back-to-school night was last night, and the Lincoln K-4 and Hanscom K-8 nights are next week. Preschool nights will take place on both campuses in the coming weeks, and parent-teacher conferences are the last week of October and first week of November (for specific dates, please see the bottom right-hand-corner of the first page of the district’s calendar, and look for more detailed information in the future about signing up for conferences). 

Thank you, and have a wonderful weekend!

Parry Graham

Superintendent