I am a teacher (32-year veteran) with 15 years in the Hopkinton schools. I am dismayed by the recent events and the school budget.
Our school board, facing a potential $500,000 cut, has effectively laid off our entire office and lunch staff, as well as all instructional assistants. The intention is to restore some of these positions, but not all will survive.
We have so many high-quality, talented, caring, trained people doing this critical work. But now, staff who know our kids, our teachers, and our schools are, of course, looking for jobs. What do we lose if those support staff are not rehired? What do we lose if they find a job in a nearby district? We lose adults who have institutional memory of our buildings. These people know our kids. They know the families in town. They know how certain teachers do certain things. They know who needs what, and who doesn’t need something else. They are the “boots on the ground” in the front line of education.
We lose the training that went into helping those people become the very best they can be. The Hopkinton schools have, over many years, trained our support staff in teaching methods, trauma-informed practices, behavior modification – name an initiative the HSD has taken on and these women and men have been trained to do it.
Our kids would lose. Our town will lose. We will lose
TRISH WALTON
Henniker