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
Folks may review a response from the school committee chair: https://tmmalex.groups.io/g/TMMAList/message/3041
“benjaminlees” (Apologies but your real name doesn’t appear when you post here, so I don’t know who you are; can you by the way let us know?):
Here is my email exchange with Julie and Larry, following what you called “a response from the school committee chair” on the TMMA email list (I would call it a defensive, unproductive and inaccurate piece of prose). I have not yet received the information I asked for in my Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 3:53 PM email below.
You can conclude whatever you want from it, but I saw in this confirmation that our School Committee and Superintendent
(1) don’t really care to receive considered input from residents (since they posted this less than 24 hours after Tom courtesy-posted an analysis that took me far longer — trust me… — to develop), and
(2) are financially incompetent, since, as Julie recognized, their message showed that they don’t even know how many elementary classrooms they are running this 2026-27 school year (116) when 80% of their expenses is salaries which in turn are a direct result of number of FTEs (here teachers) employed.
Sad but both (1) and (2) only confirm what I have seen many times over the past years in our LPS (which represent 80% of the Town’s total budget).
———- Forwarded message ———
From: Patrick Mehr
Date: Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 3:53 PM
Subject: Re: Request for information
To: Superintendent , Records Requests, LPS
Cc: Freeman, Larry , Carter, Sarah , Tom Diaz , Scott Burson , Glenn Parker , Meg Muckenhoupt , Steven Kaufman , , Courtney Apgar ,
Julie:
Thank you for your email. I look forward to seeing the analyses you referred to in https://tmmalex.groups.io/g/TMMAList/message/3041 (apologies as I incorrectly used an amazon.com url instead), especially those (and the raw data) that led you to write:
1. “Realistic savings would be about $400,000 a year”; I want to see the math, including your analysis of additional transportation costs that filling classrooms to SC-policy sizes would entail leading to $400,000. Clearly, if such analyses (which I here ask to see) don’t exist, you are pulling the $400,000 figure out of thin air.
2. “At roughly $100,000 per teacher in salary and benefits”; I had in mind (an old) $150,000, so please send me the raw data yielding $100,000 instead.
3. “the cost of busing reassigned students across town could put a sizable dent in those savings”; as I requested under #1 above, how “sizable” is that dent, and what is the analysis showing that “dent” size?
4. “The proposal reassigns only students new to Lexington, so it depends on a steady flow of new arrivals to be placed where there’s room. As we know that flow has slowed”; as I asked Maureen in a separate email, do you track how many new students come into Lexington each year grade by grade? If not, your statement is invalid because pulled out of thin air; if yes, please email me those data going back since the LPS have tracked them.
5. “The proposal also keeps siblings together, so a family arriving with a third and a fifth grader, or with twins, needs one school with room in each of those grades, which limits our options further.” Good point, which I have not spent time looking into. There will be a solution, at worst to do what we do today: we open an additional section in a given school just because we have 1 additional student that doesn’t fit in the pre-existing sections.
Please let me know when I should expect to receive the data and analyses requested above in #1 through #4.
As for meetings, sorry, I don’t do meetings, I analyze data, and then I offer my best conclusions and welcome numbers-based comments so I can modify and/or improve my recommendations where appropriate. That’s what I did in TM in 2004 when AvalonBay came for approval of 387 rental units at Campus Dr and asserted that their development would generate 60 kids. Some of the people who commented (negatively, most of them without even having studied the data and analyses I linked to) on my proposal were at the time among the 200 minus 5 or so TMMs who accepted the 60 figure; I and 4 or so other TMMs said that 60 was crazy because obviously too low, and we were right (the actual number is 3.5 times the 60 figure the overwhelming majority of Town Meeting though correct). I have learned from this to (i) not waste my time in meetings, including TM, and (ii) be patient until the facts prove me right (as will happen with Bloom being too small the day it opens or with any geography-based elementary assignment policy to be suboptimal in cost and equity and/or outright inapplicable).
Best regards,
Patrick Mehr, Publisher
Plunkett Lake Press
781-367-2229
https://plunkettlakepress.com
See our titles at https://goo.gl/xfujEM
On Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 1:59 PM Superintendent wrote:
Patrick,
Thank you for your note and for flagging the elementary section concern. The figures in our letter did not reflect our latest October 1 updates. You are correct: as of October 1, we have 116 elementary sections, 30 below the FY18 baseline of 146. Sarah Carter, who is the Vice Chair of the School Committee, will likely be the person to update our recent TMMA communication to reflect this information.
The Master Planning Advisory Committee will be meeting in November. Feel free to make suggestions to that body if you have new information to share. The data and documents behind the letter are the ones linked in it. If you are seeking additional records, please submit a request to recordsrequests@lexingtonma.org.
Thank you for your continued interest in our schools. I also want to take a moment to say that I really appreciate the thoughtful comments raised by Courtney, Josh, Meg, Scott, Steve, Tom, and others in response to your question. They captured the tradeoffs that are inherent in decisions about class size, balance across schools, and the needs of our students, staff, and school community. It is a real asset to the community to have Town Meeting Members engaging this thoughtfully in matters affecting our schools and our students. I hope they will continue to share their perspectives, as we plan for the years ahead.
Julie
[photo of Julie and signature block, which my pasting here lost]
On Tue, Oct 20, 2026 at 8:58 PM Patrick Mehr wrote:
Larry, Julie (and Sarah):
Please email me all analyses, in full details, conducted by the SC and/or the LPS staff on the basis of which the assertions you published (with, unlike my own analyses, no background explanations, therefore this request) in https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140165282 (posted under Sarah’s name for reasons I do not understand) are made.
A detail — I very much care about (numerical) details. You wrote “We begin serious consideration of a closure once sections fall 30 below the FY18 baseline, and we expect to reach that point this April.” Unless I am missing something, this is wrong: as of Oct 1, 2026 (3 weeks ago) we are already down to 116 elementary classrooms systemwide per https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fjvbWBvmTJxR2jtjjRCfeeSmZwgvC–evDhYDgiYOLs/edit?usp=sharing. Am I missing something?
An editorial comment: your comments do not address the inequity for students if a 2nd grader is in a 12- to 13-student 2nd grade classroom at Fiske vs. a 2nd grader in a 21-student 2nd grade classroom at Hastings. Is that of no importance to the SC and/or to Julie?
Another editorial comment: I believe I have spent more time than most residents, including TMMs, looking into this issue, and Julie and the SC keep saying that they welcome public input, so would it not help improve our collective wisdom and the quality of the analyses done by the SC and/or LPS staff on this topic if I was invited to at the very least review those analyses, and better yet to contribute to them? We all make mistakes — including the LPS and Patrick who both believed that new condos create 0 new kids in our schools. I discovered that that is wrong when I moved to a new (MBTA) condo (at 93 Bedford St), and as a result am renting my old hose to a family that is increasing Bridge’s enrollment by 1 since Oct 1. Had this new condo not existed, I would still happily live in my (albeit too large for empty nesters) house, so effectively, my new MBTA condo did generate 1 additional kid, NOT 0, in our schools. Again, I was as wrong on “condos create 0 kids” as Julie, the SC, the AC and everyone else who accepted that as “fact” was — which is fine: we all make mistakes; what is not fine is to not learn from our mistakes. In a spirit of learning and possibly correcting any mistakes in my analyses, I asked Joshua to call me so I can learn a few things from him — he seems to have spent far more time than all other commenters so far on this issue of partly “empty” elementary classrooms. Might Julie and her staff learn a few things from Patrick and Joshua as well? I think so.
I copy here the people who commented on the TMMA email list on my post.
Thank you.
Best regards,
Patrick Mehr, Publisher
Plunkett Lake Press
781-367-2229
https://plunkettlakepress.com
See our titles at https://goo.gl/xfujEM