We need to come together as a community to benefit the children of Marblehead

With the start of another school year about a month away, we believe that the recent change in leadership will not have an immediate impact on our students.

The 2023/2024 school year planning is already underway with the teachers and the Office of Teaching and Learning working together to plan professional development. Towards the end of August, there will be a Leadership Institute for all Lead Teachers to help drive our professional learning communities for the year. The Math and Literacy Coaches will continue to provide support to the staff in delivering instruction and analyzing student data. New teachers will be assigned a peer mentor and meet monthly. Our building administrators are strong, and we have amazing PTOs and families. When we return to school, our teachers will continue to do what they do best: teach.

Now, we need to come together as a community to benefit the children of Marblehead. While there may be differences of opinion at times, we believe that we all share the same goal of providing an exemplary education to the children of Marblehead.

We need to work together to build a budget that will attract and retain the best educators possible. This can be done by establishing a payscale that competes with top school systems, reducing class sizes, increasing salaries for our ESPs to provide a livable wage, focusing on the social-emotional health of students by increasing guidance and therapeutic support in each school, and providing more opportunities for professional development and planning time for teachers to collaborate, review and discuss student work, review curriculum, and communicate with families.

There is still much work to be done, but we are hopeful that as teachers, administrators, the school committee, families, and a community, we can work together to make Marblehead Public Schools an exemplary district for our children.

Respectfully,

Jonathan Heller and Sally Shevory

MEA Co-Presidents