Parent text chains are buzzing, school emails are filling inboxes, and the hum of back-to-school signals summer’s close. But it isn’t only children and teachers returning to routine.
PTOs across Lexington’s five elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school are also back at work, ready to strengthen our communities and deliver value far beyond what is often recognized.
Despite their impact, PTOs are rarely seen as our community’s competitive advantage. Yet that is exactly what they are. They harness human capital in its purest form: parents with diverse skills, passions, and perspectives who give freely of their time for collective gain.
Consider a lesser-told story from Bill Gates’s eighth grade year. His first access to a computer came from his school’s Mother’s Club (the forerunner of today’s PTO). With proceeds from a rummage sale, a group of parents purchased a Teletype terminal at a teacher’s request, connecting students to a GE time-sharing computer. That small act of collective effort unlocked a possibility that changed the world.
PTOs create differentiation—the “extras” that make our schools stronger, more cohesive, and more attractive. But every advantage is perishable if not renewed. Without a steady influx of new volunteers, momentum stalls.
Across town, other PTO leaders echo this concern: The most pressing challenge is sustaining the steady commitment of parent volunteers—the one resource no community can thrive without. From personal experience, I’ve seen how often it is the same families carrying the load year after year, with only small increases in new contributors. Their commitment is extraordinary, but the concentration of effort in too few hands creates a strategic bottleneck and leaves the system vulnerable.
So as the school year begins, let’s not just applaud PTOs from the sidelines. Let’s widen the circle. PTOs must make opportunities clear, and lower barriers to entry. And parents—every one of us—can step in, even briefly. One hour, one event, one contribution of expertise compounds into lasting benefit.
Let’s invest in PTOs as the strategic engines of our schools. The cost is not simply deferred initiatives—it is diminished community strength. Our town’s greatest advantage lies not only in its schools, but in the parents who choose to make them thrive.
Hafsah:
To be complete, your letter should have also mentioned that PTOs can support ballot questions — and they do.
Each PTO gave $2,000 in 2024 — specifically in June and November 2024, i.e. before knowing what Bloom would really cost — to the YES campaign for the December 2025 debt exclusion for Bloom, per https://records.lexingtonma.gov/WebLink/DocView.aspx?id=3056049&dbid=0&repo=TownOfLexington.
Parents who pay dues to their PTO should realize that a portion of their dues supports a project that I, as a parent of 2 former LPS students who moved my family here from Cambridge “for the schools”, consider dangerous for the future of our schools because Bloom is
– too small at 2,395 students capacity,
– too expensive,
– would take too long to relieve overcrowding at LHS,
– may never get the land it needs in the fields to be built on,
while the SBC has refused to consider the true 2-phase design recommended by the Schools’ own 2015 facilities planning document which would also be MSBA-eligible.
And the SBC has used misinformation, as demonstrated in https://lexobserver.org/2025/08/18/letters-to-the-editor-some-facts-about-bloom, to ignore this design, which is better than Bloom along all of Bloom’s weaknesses listed above.
It’s pretty funny to call the future LHS plans “too small” when the current central LHS was built to educate 1800 students, and has been at least 100 students over capacity consistently since 2005. Apparently, Mr. Mehr is perfectly happy to have a high school that’s 33% over capacity.
By contrast the LHS “Bloom” plan is designed to accommodate up to 3,238 students – not just 2,395 as Mehr asserts. See “Can Bloom accommodate enrollment swells?” in the January 31, 2025 Lexington Observer – where Mehr made the same false statement about Bloom’s capacity.
The 2-phase plan that Mehr refers to was overwhelmingly voted down at Fall Town Meeting in 2024 for many reasons, including the fact that it would cost the Town more money than the current plan. There is *no* evidence that the MSBA would fund that scheme – sacrificing ca. $110 million in construction funds from the MSBA – and it would kick Lexington out of the current MSBA process (which started in 2022). That means years of delay in repairing an overcrowded school with and HVAC that’s on its last legs.
In its report to 2024 Special Town Meeting, the Capital Expenditures Committee estimated that this “2-phase design” would cost at least $150 MILLION more than the Bloom design. You can read their report on the Town website.
https://lexingtonma.gov/DocumentCenter/View/13074/USE-2024-CEC-report-to-STM-1?bidId=
As Brielle Meade wrote in the second link Mehr provided,
“Actually, that could cost $860+ million—over $300 million more for the taxpayers than Bloom, as it would not be eligible for the estimated $111 million MSBA reimbursement. The team looked at multiple phased options (including “Thrive” community submissions and the design from the 2015 Master Plan that replace the foreign language building) and they were all projected to cost more than Bloom, so we would pay more out of pocket if we chose that path.”
“Muckenhoupt” (I am Patrick, not “Mehr”):
How much in addition to $660 million (the cost of Bloom accommodating 2,395 students) will a 3,238-student Bloom-expanded cost?
Nobody knows, because the SBC never priced such an expansion, which if ever done, would turn Bloom-expanded into an even tighter sardine design than Bloom already is when accommodating fewer than the 2,425 LHS students had this past school year.
The “costs” mentioned by Brielle and the CEC are pulled out of the air because contrary to the SBC’s assertion #3 on https://lexobserver.org/2025/08/18/letters-to-the-editor-some-facts-about-bloom, the SBC never cost-estimated a true 2-phase design as recommended in the Schools’ 2015 facilities planning document.
No, I am not at all “perfectly happy to have a high school that’s 33% over capacity”. And I am appalled that the SBC can recommend spending $660 million on a design, Bloom, that is evidently too small to last us 70 years since new MBTA dwellings could increase Lexington’s population by one third within just 10 years. The SBC is simply not thinking straight.
And Meg, please call me Patrick; we are all neighbors in this small town called Lexington. Thank you.
Hi Patrick,
Thank you for taking the time to read my letter. My intent was simple: to celebrate the parents who add so much value to our schools.
But let me ask you this—why must every conversation rise and set with the high school project? Why must so much of what we do for children become politicized?
For clarity: no PTO leader makes monetary or policy decisions in isolation. These were collective board votes, made transparently. And the amount was not $2,000, as you noted.
Patrick, every major project carries risks and costs. Leadership is about weighing tradeoffs. I applaud your civic engagement, but where we differ is in what it means to support our schools. Your points on size, cost, timing, and land are rooted in fear, rhetoric, opinion, and risk—but they overlook what Bloom actually delivers. This project meets urgent needs: modernization, safety, equity, and program space. Our current high school cannot support 21st-century learning without transformation.
It’s the very transformation this town was offering when you chose Lexington over Cambridge. How about taking that same calculated risk again—this time for others.
Best,
Hafsah
P.S. We could go back and forth in writing, but I’d rather sit down over coffee and talk it through. My treat.
Hafsah:
I also make excellent cappuccino, so email me on patrick.mehr@gmail.com and we can talk in person.
There is no question that we need a new high school. I never do “politics” because I am a numbers nerd and a public policy wonk, not a politician. All I am doing re Bloom is pointing out that the SBC has been spreading misinformation (see https://lexobserver.org/2025/08/18/letters-to-the-editor-some-facts-about-bloom) apparently to push Bloom which is too small at 2,395 students (we had 2,425 high schoolers this past school year) when Lexington’s population may increase by 30% in 8-10 years from new MBTA dwellings yet a new high school must last us 70 years, too expensive, too slow to be built vs. phase 1 of a true 2-phase project, and now impossible to build if https://drive.google.com/file/d/10beqNx4jZpoLeHauSFSwnYLR2Nmjd1Bp/view is correct.
In short, it’s clear to me that the SBC lacks diversity of points of view, did no long-range thinking, and has been pushing one design, Bloom, which is the wrong one as I just explained, without any Plan B. I consider all of this to be irresponsible governance for Lexington if we are to maintain the quality of our schools.
Patrick, you have been told time and again that your calculations for upcoming student populations are incorrect, because the upcoming classes are significantly smaller than those currently attending the school, and yet you continue to repeat your misinformation.
You also are wrong about the timing and cost of a two phase project; every year these building projects get more expensive, just look at Lowell high school.
Hafsah, thanks so much for this lovely call to join in volunteerism. So beautifully written and very much appreciated!
Nicola:
Classes are now smaller because parents sent their kids to private schools during Covid. That effect will no longer be the case when those cohorts of kids graduate from their private high schools.
More significantly https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17OpIfyFsvGyrz8u_fQ5nhWYk7rnEDml4/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116971253884586510151&rtpof=true&sd=true shows that we may very well have 4,000 new households in Town in a decade, in addition to the 12,000 we have now — a 30% increase in our population. Spending $660 million on a new High School that is evidently too small to last the 70 years it is supposed to last makes no sense to me.
Especially since the SBC never studied a true 2-phase design. If it had, and had demonstrated that what you wrote based on no fact — I am “wrong about the timing and cost of a two phase project” — is in fact true, I would join the YES campaign for Bloom. So why did the SBC NOT study such a true 2-phase design (recommended in the Schools 2015 facilities planning document)? That the SBC did not is sufficiently unkosher to me that I can only oppose Bloom.