Report: Woburn Memorial High Downgraded, School Committee Demands Action

WOBURN, MA—The Massachusetts Department of Education has downgraded Woburn Memorial High School from a level 2 to a level 3 facility, and the School Committee is not happy.

The Daily Times Chronicle reported that the School Committee criticized members of the district’s administration for the downgrade during a recent school board meeting. According to the report, school administrators such as Superintendent Mark Donovan, Assistant Superintendent Dr. Matthew Crowley and Woburn High Principal Joseph Finigan said that the downgrade was not a result of catastrophic declining achievement.

Patrick Blais, who broke the story on the Daily Times Chronicle reports:

Though outlining a series of steps planned to address the situation, the administrators insisted the downgraded status from a Level 2 to a Level 3 school is not the result of a catastrophic decline in student achievement, but rather the outcome of a small drop in some performance indicators.

“I’ve always been extraordinarily frustrated with an accountability system that reduces everything to a number,” said Donovan. “There’s a million great things going on at the high school. There’s nothing going on that’s extraordinarily worse.”

“There is not one singular factor that moved us from Level 2 to Level 3. It was a combination of subtle factors,” Crowley subsequently remarked.

In response to those statements, various School Committee members, most of whom learned about the Level 3 designation during Mayor Scott Galvin’s inaugural address in the beginning of this month, refused to accept any excuses.

According to School Committee members Dr. John Wells and Patricia Chisholm, they were most frustrated about being left in the dark about the state ranking, as they believed they could have at least tried to address some of the underlying issues had someone notified them.

Referring to last spring’s round of budget deliberations, in which a number of new positions were vetted by the school board, Chisholm challenged the district’s leadership team to explain why the need for additional resources at the high school wasn’t a top priority.

“Had we been forewarned, maybe we could have done something,” said Wells.

According to the report, Principal Finigan and Assistant Superintendent Crowley outlined a new approach for the school’s future, including the following plans:

• Improving the district’s writing curriculum to improve students’ ability to respond to open-response questions on the MCAS, which Crowley has labelled as an area where pupils are generally underperforming;

• Studying the possibility of shifting to MCAS biology, rather than having freshmen and sophomores take the physical sciences exam that Finigan characterized as “the harder test”;

• Revamping Woburn’s English Language Learner’s program;

• Increasing the availability of MCAS prep and tutoring offerings for struggling student populations;

• and establishing a WMHS steering committee, comprised largely of teachers, who will be compensated to push for other needed curriculum and instructional interventions upon examining MCAS and other testing results.

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