School Committee Meeting Focuses on End-of-Year Activities

By Adam Swift

Much of Monday night’s regular meeting of the school committee focused on end-of-year activities in the Winthrop schools, as well as a brief update on ongoing negotiations with the local unions.

“Negotiations are continuing with teachers, secretaries, and nurses,” said Superintendent of Schools Lisa Howard. “We plan to continue throughout the summer as well, so we’ll try not to break for the summer recess. We’re looking forward to getting some additional dates for those meetings.”

Howard noted that the school year was rapidly coming to an end, with the last day for students and teachers on Thursday, June 12, with a half day for students and a full day for teachers.

“We are excited to announce that we are going to have a summer meal program at the Winthrop Public Schools again, which is really good,” said Howard. “It will start July 7 and it will run through August 15. We’re going to use the middle school site as the one that is an open public site for folks who have school-age children at any level to come.”

Breakfast and lunch will be offered, with breakfast starting at 8:30 a.m. and lunch starting at noon, according to Howard. She said more information about the summer meals program will be going home to families.

Howard also had praise for the 148 graduates of the Class of ‘25 from Winthrop High School, which recently held its graduation ceremony.

“That is a large number for us, that is one of the bigger numbers that we have had,” said Howard. “We gave out close to, if not more than, $400,000 in scholarships that evening to our students, which is the second set of scholarships we handed out. We do scholarships a couple of days prior (to graduation) where we do a whole evening of smaller scholarships then the ones that are given out at graduation.”

Howard said she and WHS Principal Matthew Crombie both felt that this year’s graduating class was a little different from past years.

“Every single student that crossed that stage received an equal amount of applause,” Howard said. “There are times when you see students who might be new to the school and don’t have a ton of family in the school might get some claps, but not the level of applause from their peers that we witnessed that night. So that was something that was pretty special for us.”