As in 2023 and 2024, Dr. Anna Nolin met with Fig City News at the start of this school year for a lengthy discussion of academics, the district’s goals for the upcoming school year, and the current topics of interest to the community.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are some good things you’re looking forward to this year, either new initiatives, or things happening in NPS to a different extent than prior years?
We’re really excited about the launch of the Portrait of a Learner (‘POL’) formally to all parts of the school system. We’re working with teachers to see what that looks like in the day-to-day life of students.
For example, how to teach creation and use of materials was on the list of topics you sent. The strategic planning meetings last year included 150 community members across Newton, as well as students, who were a strong voice. Creativity, and having lots of venues for it, was one competency they felt wasn’t as strongly appreciated by adults as it was by them. So that made it into our mission statement, because the students said we want creative lives filled with curiosity and joy. The students really put the adults on notice about what they felt was important for their education and careers. We’re excited to launch that formally, and to be able to say to families, over the 5-year POL development, here are the ways that we actually teach adaptability and creativity, and here are the venues we give to exercise those skills.
We’re looking forward to the math curriculum’s next steps. Teachers will be piloting new curriculum this year so we can make formal selections for the subsequent years. [Note: Discussion of math curriculum continues later in this interview]
Also, I’m looking forward to the MTSS [Multi-Tiered System of Support] trainings that we are doing for every building. We kicked it off [on September 11], with 140 different leaders from every building. Each school now has an MTSS team that is assessing their environment and designing what MTSS looks like based on the district’s expectations for unity and alignment. We’re moving away from being a system of schools to a school system. Elementary schools feed into middle schools, and two middle schools feed into each high school. There needs to be stability and consistency, some vertical understanding of how we roll as a system. It’s emerging. We’re now directly training folks in every building on leadership in their school, on how to look at available data, have conversations about instructional design, and match student performance to curriculum and resources, for a more personalized experience. It’s starting to really pick up momentum.
We’re also exploring some grants under the state’s Career and Technical Education [CTE] area so that we can add additional shops at both North and South [high schools], and try to help kids gain certifications for the workplace right out of the gate. When they leave high school, they can do some work while they continue their studies, or they can jump right into work.
What areas are those additional shops in?
New shops in information systems and technology, medical assisting, and dental assisting. We’re very much in the planning phases right now. We may not get the grants immediately, but we’re really excited to try to offer it.
Going back to Portrait of a Learner, and teaching creativity, some people may hear the word “creativity” and think that means lack of hard skill instruction, like math formulas or grammar rules. How is a focus on creativity sharpened into students producing creative but structured, well-formed work?
The things you’re saying are bordering on other competencies, like having a learner’s mindset. How critical a thinker are you? What kind of research skills do you have? All of these play into creativity. The question is: Are we providing students with rigorous enough tasks where they have to take knowledge that they researched, or memorized, and turn that into something unique and creative? My assessment of many public schools is that there’s a lot of covering the standards, rather than measuring the mastery of what you do with knowing those standards. That’s the difference between different levels of rigor within a school system, and whether or not you’re really interested in student engagement and joy.
How do programs like art, music, theater, and others help the student creative process?
I was an English language arts and theater teacher, and I’m married to a retired music teacher. I was a clarinet player for 25 years. I believe that participation in the arts is a mandatory part of life, it’s super important. We have pretty robust programs here. You’re going to hear me start to talk about pathways in general in the district. For example, I just talked about some CTE pathways. There’s a new program of math that’s going to give people different pathways within the STEM traditions. We owe our arts staff and faculty the same definitions of arts pathways. Do we have enough robust coursework to allow for [musical] conservatory matriculation? Can we get folks into studio art programs? We do that here in Newton, but it’s my job to define those pathways here.
We actually have a lot of arts programming here compared to other districts. During recent budget struggles, there was a complete reluctance to cut those “not mandatory courses.” I’m a superintendent who feels those are part of the core student experience. This year we’re redesigning the middle school schedule for MTSS reasons. But the companion to that is, while some students receive advanced curriculum or intervention curriculum, others may choose arts pathways in those time periods. That’s literally what it means when you have a WIN [or extension] block.That’s when students are choosing to pursue creative, academic, and social-emotional interests. Our job is to provide a big range of experiences that students can take advantage of within the arts.
[Note: WIN is the acronym for ‘What I Need’ and those blocks are time periods within the high school day without standard coursework classroom instruction. ‘Extension’ is the comparable time during the middle school day.]
Are WIN blocks’ activities the students’ choice?
It depends how they’re structured and when they are. Some times are mandated to certain WIN or extension experiences, and others students have their choice.
At the start of the school year, the Office of Student Services sent a district-wide email that said the district would continue the work of dismantling ableist systems. What’s being dismantled this year?
With regard to ableist systems, [the office] talks about mindset shifting, i.e. are we planning in advance for students who come to us from all levels of ability? For example, right now, the district is rife with field trips that are nice and promote social development. They’re called Community Building trips, but they’re not accessible to many of our students with disabilities. When we raise that with parent groups or staff, the reply is: “[The trip] is a tradition. We’ve done it here for many years, the kids have to have some fun,” that kind of thing. But if you’re performing field trips where some of your student body cannot participate, you have two choices. You can either cancel the trip, but then who gets blamed for that? The students and families who raised the issue to us. Or, we can design systems that allow us to community build, let kids have fun, and also be accessible by all students. That’s what’s meant by dismantling ableist systems.
In that example, one could say that if the only permissible field trips must be able to accommodate the most disabled student, that will limit the offerings available to the other students. How do you decide where that line of accessibility is drawn?
There has to be an interactive dialog between all the planners. It’s not very hard to meet this criteria, but people have to be engaged in the process. If the process is planned by folks who only have one worldview, then we’re not going to have the full range of creative activities that we should. What if we’re missing something that would enhance even better everyone’s experience? That’s what we’re after, that conversation, not set-it-and-forget-it, for example not revisiting what people did 25 years ago. We have to ask: “How’s it going? Is it appropriate?”
Also, I’ll say I can be that curmudgeonly superintendent. We have 180 days of school; we’re the sole academic provider. We’re not a summer camp. So my job is to say, is this [activity] truly connected to the curriculum? Is it an enhancement that we have to have? And if it is, then we need to make sure that every student can attend. We’re a public school, and we do have to make sure that every activity we do is accessible to students.
You mentioned earlier that teachers will be piloting a new math curriculum. Will that be all math teachers or some teachers?
Teachers from every grade, every section of the district, will be involved. Not every teacher will be piloting, but [there will be] enough penetration to assess the quality of the materials. For example, about 25 teachers at one school all want to participate. There’s different iterations at the middle and the elementary levels. My goal is for this year to be about the math curriculum, because it’s really important to the community that we get that right, and it sets the tone for all the other curriculum reviews in subsequent years. I’m glad we’re at that point where we can present the community with a plan [discussed at the September 24 School Committee meeting].
It’s a five-year, staggered plan for the implementation of new math curriculum and pathways, which will allow for more differentiation between students who are advanced, need more help, are at grade-level standards, as well as fluidity among the different pathways…all driven by data and assessments over time. No student is given a “life sentence” in a track of courses. When students demonstrate they can jump up to a new place, they’re given the opportunity to do that. But it also means that we fund summer coursework and meaningful, reliable interventions in middle and elementary school, through our MTSS program, so that when a student is struggling, they’re not struggling forever. And this math program will only work if it is adequately funded.
What is Algebra 1, and why do many in the community think it’s important?
A lot of research indicates that Algebra 1 is a gateway towards more advanced math courses, and towards giving more students a shot at STEM-based careers in the future. Not every district can promise that they will get every student through algebra in eighth grade. This connects to the current school year being our second year of math benchmark assessments. Last year was a baseline year for math. There’s never been any way, except for MCAS, for us to see how they’re doing, and MCAS is not an agile or fine enough assessment for us to really dig into how every single kid is doing.
The benchmark assessments help us, but this is the first year we [can act on] those results. Our fourth and fifth grade students in Newton look significantly higher than other fourth and fifth graders in MetroWest and even in the nation. I’ve been looking at Renaissance Learning data for 20 years now. I realize there’ll be people in the community that will say that’s because we tutor our kids on our own. Maybe that’s the case, because we have wonderful parents. I asked a parent: “Are you doing math problems at dinner every night?” And they said yes!
However, we’re not there in our literacy. In fact, we look much lower in our literacy than I would expect us to look, given our demographics and the comparables in math. So we have some interesting problems to solve, but only about 17% of students are not demonstrating at, or significantly above grade level, in their math Star assessments in those two grades in the first year we took this snapshot.
We’re in a transitional time period, because we have students across a continuum in mathematics skill right now, since we have not adopted a formal, vertically articulated, coordinated K-12 curriculum. Students have had some uneven experiences across four elementary schools, feeding into one middle school, and then two middle schools feeding into one high school. The problem is not the high school multi-level classes, it’s all the uneven instruction that has happened underneath. That’s not to say that our teachers aren’t doing good work and aren’t working really hard, but are we working in a way that students are systematically acquiring skills? Are they backtracking because a given teacher doesn’t know what was covered by the previous grade? That’s happening right now, and so we’re wasting time, and we’re not taking students right where they left off and moving them ahead.
This year, our first meetings with all the teachers included showing exit data from June 2025, instructionally grouped. We know what students showed mastery on, and what they didn’t, and that’s the first time we’ve been able to do that. From there, we continue to assess students, and we’re closer to where we need to be. Now we need the tools to align interventions with what is found in those assessments. It’s going to be a multi-year process to get students through algebra by eighth grade, and we’re going to create some compacted curriculum in 6-8th grades currently.
You mentioned different curriculum experiences across different schools. The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), in public statements, has made academic freedom one of its statewide issues. How do you think about managing that balance of having a common curriculum, versus teachers having some range in the classroom to manage the kids in front of them?
I’ve taught in some systems that it seems the MTA, and even some of our NTA partners, are guarding against. Those places where you’re told: “It’s Thursday, you should be on page seven.” We are nowhere in that stratosphere. Coordinated curriculum and materials means we give base materials, end assessment expectations, and standards by which we know a student has mastered the content in this unit. We say to the teacher: “take your students in front of you and what their needs are, the resources that [the district] provides, and use your secret sauce as an instructor to design the best ways for students to achieve these outcome standards.” There’s all the freedom in the world. We’ll define what’s loose and what’s tight, and teachers have all the room for the creativity and adaptation that they need to be professional educators. It’s not robo-teach. We still have a lot of latitude within base curriculum materials, but the assessments are agreed upon, and they drive expectations.
The statewide commission on antisemitism recently released its preliminary recommendations for school districts. While many of those recommendations are aimed at the state Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and not individual districts, in a place like Newton with a large Jewish population, how is NPS thinking about those recommendations?
I’m one of the eight Massachusetts Association of Superintendents roundtable presidents in the state, in my case for Norfolk and western Middlesex counties. We’re working with our roundtables to digest the recommendations, and work with DESE and the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, which is our professional board, to understand how the state will move with these recommendations. They’re still new recommendations, and we’re in discussion now.
How do you think about balancing the fact that kids from all different demographics probably have better experiences than they would in most other districts in Massachusetts, with also educating about things like discrimination and racism in the world?
I’m everybody’s superintendent. This is everybody’s public school, and we do have mandates through the federal government to do better, anti-discrimination, anti-hate, all of those pieces. We will follow those, and we want all our families and students to feel heard and to feel like this is their school system. So that’s the art of administering and teaching – to make folks feel comfortable.
I think one of the hard parts for Newton parents is they haven’t felt like they had a window into what NPS had been doing. In the absence of us being super-transparent about our curriculum, some things get made up and may seem worse than they are. Now you’ll see us constantly putting out as much transparent information as possible. We launched our parent curriculum site, which has everything that has been nailed down as curriculum and text. We want parents to know what’s happening in the schools, so they can then have conversations with principals and teachers about how their family values hit the classroom. My opening-day remarks to teachers were about that: “Let’s stop the division between parents and staff. Let’s just stay talking,with the kids at the center, about how what we’re doing hits with your family. You tell us what’s happening on your side.” That’s what good, strong schools are.
Things seem hot and cold with the NTA. Last spring, there were positive public meetings around the joint planning groups and other collaborations. This school year started with the NTA President’s blog being critical of the staff absence-tracking system. How should the public view all this? Are these normal give-and-takes, or are there real differences?
I’m very positive about the collaborations with the NTA. We don’t always agree, the administration and the head of the Union are set up inherently to have tensions, but I’ve always had a co-leadership relationship with my district’s teacher’s union presidents. It is different here. There’s been a longstanding…I would say it’s not unlike what I just said about parents. I don’t know that there was a collaborative vibe that was expected as the default setting with our union leaders.
We generally want to solve the same problems. Take the absentee tracking for example. No policies have changed, though we changed vendors for how we’re tracking this. Everyone is talking about attendance for kids and adults in many venues. I can’t speak for the NTA president, but perhaps he didn’t feel we were as clear as we needed to be on how we were rolling that out. I can take that feedback. We sent out a set of clarifications to staff. We can hear feedback, and they can hear feedback. People should understand we’re trying really hard to solve problems and support kids, and I think we share that value system. That’s where I live every day; I try not to live in the world of the blog.
Now the question that our readers are most interested in: Is the first day of school next year really going to be September 8th, which is the traditional Tuesday after Labor Day?
I’m working with the School Committee’s policy subcommittee on a Labor Day policy, including looking at what other districts do. When the Labor Day holiday is so late, we’d like the option to start school at the end of August. We’re going to need to make a decision about [next year] very soon.
You said earlier that implementation of the math curriculum would require funding support. Can you elaborate?
Right now, you can visit our website and see our five-year strategic plan, the Thrive 2030 plan, with deliverables out by each year. We’re working on the cost for those things. That’s not a perfect science. Forecasting something five years out right now is a little difficult, but there are certain things that I know we need. For example, we’re forecasting the cost of getting the support staff in place to allow us to achieve algebra for everyone. Change practices are more expensive than just driving the status quo. I have to say in any venue that I can that if these programs are not funded adequately, they will not succeed – and then we’ll have dissatisfaction over another set of math programming decisions. We’ll put this plan in place, but if there are significant cuts to our intervention staff, we’re not going to be able to do it. The community needs to understand that if we really want this, we have to put money behind it.
How much does that drive an override that some officials have publicly speculated about?
That’s not my lane. I believe there are a lot of solutions to sort through before we start saying override. It’s hard for me to say, as we sit with a sizable Education Stabilization Fund, let’s start mounting an override. Having worked on some overrides in the past – in Natick Public Schools, where I served for 20 years prior to being here – we worked for 10 years on the override that passed this past spring. You have to lay some serious groundwork, and you also have to put out the items that community members can really buy into.
I look forward to joining hands with whoever our new Mayor is, and our new City Council and School Committee, to paint that picture for the community. You don’t pass an override saying funding the status quo. You say this is the vision of the future that we want for our community. My belief is there’s passion about what we’re doing with our academic programs, and if we really want to solve them, we have to show the community right now that we are serious.
Is there anything else you’d like to convey to the community?
We had the opening kickoff of our Family Engagement Center to start the year. The office serves as a hub so that school staff and family staff can continue to be stronger together. We’ll be offering Parent Academy workshops – where parents, like teachers, can get PDPs – “parent development points.” Parenting is a hard job. Much is made of the connections that happen between families in their neighborhood elementary schools, but what about after that? How are we bonding parents, helping them get together, and talking about the issues they’re facing as parents?
The cell-phone forums last year are perfect examples. That was as much parent therapy as it was planning for how kids are going to use cell phones. It’s that type of programming for parents: learning how my kid is doing at a school’s literacy night, or how do I support my student with math at home? Although it seems like that’s going pretty well with a lot of parents, those are the types of educational programs that the Family Engagement Center will work on in concert with parents and groups like SEPAC, ELPAC, our PTOs, and other outside agencies and schools, to enhance the parent experience, and to make sure that parents feel like they have the information they need.
