LPS -- Superintendent's bi-weekly message - November 13, 2026

Dear Lincoln Public Schools Families,

Happy Friday as we head into a chillier weekend. For this week’s message, I wanted to highlight one of our most joyful School Committee agenda items – the Student Learning Spotlights – and preview a couple of important topics that will be discussed at upcoming School Committee meetings: our annual student learning presentation and upcoming budget discussions.

Student Learning Spotlight

A highlight at many of our School Committee meetings during the year is the Student Learning Spotlight. These are opportunities for the School Committee and the larger community to learn about great things happening in our schools from the kids doing the great things. For the Spotlights, a small group of students come to the beginning of a School Committee meeting and share information about what they are learning and doing in their classes.

For the last several years the Spotlights have focused on core academic work being done at each grade level, but we shifted the focus for this year and next year: this year we will be highlighting work happening in Art, Music, Drama, and Wellness, and next year will highlight Library, STEM/Tech-Engineering, World Languages, and Digital Literacy. We had presentations on Wellness at the Hanscom School at the October 22nd School Committee meeting, and on Art at the Lincoln School at the November 5th meeting. The students did a wonderful job at each meeting, and I am so appreciative of all the support from faculty members in those subjects for helping to support the students’ presentations. I am looking forward to more Student Learning Spotlights over the course of the year!

Annual student learning presentation

Each year we share information with the School Committee about the patterns we saw from the previous year in terms of student growth and achievement. We use a variety of data sources to do this: MCAS is certainly one of the measures we look at, but we also include data from other standardized district assessments that we give multiple times over the course of each year.

We will be doing this year’s presentation at the School Committee meeting next Thursday, November 19th. I will certainly share the link to that information in a future message, but I would encourage you to watch the School Committee meeting if you have the opportunity to do so.

FY28 budget

In early December I will be presenting to the School Committee my proposed budget for the 2027-28 school year (or “FY28” in budget-speak). The budget is the result of a lengthy process that includes input from all of the different budget managers across the district (i.e., principals and central office administrators).

I will share my full budget proposal with the School Committee on December 3rd and then, after discussing and deliberating over multiple meetings in December and January, the School Committee will vote a final budget by the end of January. I will be sure to share a link to my budget presentation after it has happened, but the meeting that first week in December is an opportunity to hear a lengthy description of the budget, if you are interested in attending.

Thank you and have a wonderful weekend!

Parry Graham

Superintendent