Dear Lincoln Residents, My name is Peter Buchthal and I am running for one of the two open Lincoln School Committee Seats. I believe in the value of a great public education. I feel lucky that I grew up in Scarsdale, New York, which has one of the strongest Public School systems in the country. After Scarsdale, I went to Carnegie-Mellon University and graduated at the top of my class. I then worked at IBM and Oracle Corporation for a couple of years. I left Oracle to serially start two successful Oracle related businesses that I grew from nothing, hired employees, raised capital, built a product, gained customers around the world and eventually sold the businesses to public companies. I know how to see and understand the needs of customers and solve problems.
Even though Lincoln is only K-8, I believe Lincoln could be one of the best school districts in the Boston area. However, I am troubled by the high attrition of current students when compared against many other school systems in our area. I have been told by many that some Lincoln families pull their children out of the school and send their children to Private School. Some of these neighboring districts (i.e. Weston, Lexington) are also very affluent like Lincoln, but their students do not leave their school systems in similar numbers. As a School Committee member, I would prioritize learning the reasons families are voting with their feet and try to improve our school to meet more of our school family needs. I promise to be open and transparent with our findings. The data below comes from here https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/statereport/attrition.aspx and reflects % of attrition by grade (students not returning following year). Given how low the turnover of housing is in Lincoln, the root cause is not people moving out of town. In case anyone hypothesizes that our high attrition is due to our higher METCO percentages, the conclusions don’t change even when we isolate METCO out. I believe it is very important for School Committee members to not only look at Lincoln data (as normally provided by the School administration), *but also the data from neighboring towns.* *District Name* *2* *3* *4* *5* *6* *7* *Average* Lincoln - Lincoln School 5.4 6.8 11.3 6.7 11.5 9.4 8.5 Concord 2.8 7.8 7.4 6.7 8.2 6.5 6.6 Newton 5.5 6.4 5.3 8.9 6.3 5.1 6.3 Wellesley 4.5 5.5 6.1 13.4 2.3 3.4 5.9 Dover-Sherborn 7.5 3.8 5.7 Belmont 4.2 5.8 4.6 7.1 7.1 4.6 5.6 Weston 2.8 7.0 6.7 5.6 6.0 2.0 5.0 Needham 2.7 3.9 4.7 3.9 6.0 5.7 4.5 Lexington 5.9 3.2 3.6 5.5 4.0 2.8 4.2 Sudbury 3.6 4.2 4.4 4.7 4.1 3.1 4.0 Carlisle 1.8 5.6 8.7 1.4 1.7 1.6 3.5 Winchester 1.7 2.2 3.8 4.3 4.3 3.2 3.3 Wayland 3.4 4.1 2.4 4.5 1.5 1.0 2.8 Dover 2.2 1.2 4.1 2.5 Sherborn 0.0 3.2 1.7 1.6 ReplyForward
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