The Lexington Public Schools (LPS) assignment policy for elementary grades (K-5) has been based on geography for decades: in short, K-5 students attend the closest school to their home.

This is nice for kids and parents, but costly for taxpayers because K-5 kids moving to Lexington don’t fill existing classrooms in a geographically balanced way and the LPS must open additional classrooms to accommodate students under the LPS’s “maximum” and “preferred” classroom sizes at each grade. The result is partially “empty” classrooms in certain schools.

The 1st and 2nd grade “preferred” size is 22 students and the “maximum” size is 24 students in 1st grade and 26 in 2nd grade.

But right now Fiske has three 2nd grade classrooms with only 12, 13, 13 students; Harrington has three 1st grade classrooms with only 15, 15, 17 students; and Bridge has three 2nd grade classrooms with 18, 18, 19 students (per the LPS).

Across our current 116 elementary classrooms, 12 have 15 or fewer students and 26, or almost a quarter of all elementary classrooms, have 18 or fewer students: this is extremely expensive, and unsustainable long term.

And there is inequity between schools: Fiske has 259 students but Hastings has 563, over twice Fiske’s enrollment.

The LPS can solve these problems by replacing its geography-based elementary districts with a new policy such as:

1. Each elementary student will finish 5th grade in the same school;

2. No family will have 2 elementary students in 2 different schools;

3. The LPS will seek to assign each student to the geographically closest elementary school to her/his home;

4. The LPS retains the right to determine any student’s school assignment, with an appeals process for parents.

A few years after this new assignment policy is in place, the LPS will operate with 10-15 fewer classrooms overall than this 2026-27 school year, last year or the year before, saving $1-2 million annually in teacher costs (after deduction of extra bussing costs, if any) and will have solved today’s inequities in class size at various grade levels and between different schools.

Only a very small percentage of our elementary students, all of them new to Lexington, would not attend the school closest to their home.

A new assignment policy is urgent now because new dwellings under construction or planned under the MBTA Communities Act — 882 just in the Hartwell Ave area — will make it impossible for certain schools to accommodate the resulting students under current assignment policies. Some redistricting will be unavoidable, so now is a good time for the LPS to adopt this new assignment policy to save money and provide class size equity.

Patrick Mehr

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