The Newton School Committee met Monday evening for its annual retreat—a meeting to discuss the committee’s ability to work together and to assess whether the district is thriving.

The retreat was held at the Newton Community Education Center in the same room where regular school committee meetings are held. The evening began with a discussion of how to shorten future meetings and stay within a 2-3 hour window.

One suggestion brought up was for presenters to be instructed not to read word-for-word from every slide and to keep their presentations between 10-15 minutes. In return, committee members agreed they can attempt to keep their questions and comments “pithy” and Chair Alicia Piedalue can be firmer about cutting short public comments or committee discussions when necessary.

Superintendent Anna Nolin said, in her experience, May and June meetings are always at least three hours due to the need to discuss the district’s strategic plan, budget and superintendent review. In May and June of this year, committee meetings regularly went longer than three hours.

“I have shepherded through seven or eight iterations of committees and it gets shorter over time,” Nolin said. “We just don’t have the same amount of questions.”

The committee decided to experiment with virtual executive session meetings that are not held back-to-back with regular meetings that are open to the public. Ben Schlesinger of Ward 5 said meetings tend to take up more time if they can, so he generally prefers having the hard deadline of needing to end executive sessions in time to begin public school committee meetings.

The committee also heard a presentation from Maria Kolbe, director of the Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) for Newton Public Schools. MTSS is the district’s framework for providing different tiers of additional academic support to students who demonstrate a need for it.

More than 90% of NPS students rated themselves as low-risk for academic, emotional and social issues impacting mental health, with academics being the most strongly associated with high risk for impact on student wellbeing.

Kolbe also reported strong performance in literacy and math skills across grade levels. District-wide reading proficiency grew from 71.6% last fall to 74.9% this past spring. Math proficiency rose from 67.6% in the fall of 2024 to 72.8% in the winter of 2026.

Notably, Kolbe shared that a dyslexia screening last year identified 615 students in Kindergarten through grade 3 to be at risk—a number that reduced to 177 by the end of the school year.

“This level of reduction shows that our just-in-time supports are really having tremendous, tremendous impact,” she said. “I actually went back in and checked this three times in our system because I didn’t believe it.”

“We have a really compelling case to say that general education intervention really makes a huge difference,” Nolin added. 

Nolin additionally raised that she would like to change the role of Christina Maryland, current Director of Communications and Family Engagement, to a “chief of engagement and access” for NPS, and hire a part-time communications person to handle some of Maryland’s current responsibilities in the district’s Office of Communications. 

“She has the skills, and I think we all understand that we want oversight of this work in our district,” she said. “What we need is access and engagement with a DEI lens.”

This past spring, the school committee voted to approve a Fiscal Year 2027 budget that reduced the district’s full-time DEI director position to part time in order to free up funding for an accelerated middle school math curriculum known as Math Pathways. Kathy Lopes, who served in the role full time since July 2020, announced her resignation last month, which went into effect on June 30.

Near the end of the meeting, Mayor Marc Laredo gave an update on NPS facilities, sharing that the city’s Chief Operating Officer Josh Morse has been working on a plan to install air conditioners in several older school buildings that are not due to be replaced soon. 

Laredo said he expects to get City Council approval next month for the $1.2 million it will cost to install the air conditioners, but wants to move ahead with buying and installing units now so that they are ready for the beginning of the school year.  

“I cannot imagine the City Council is not going to approve this, but if it doesn’t approve it the way we’re asking, I’m going to figure out a way to get the money back to the system,” he said. “So I want to be clear, I think this is virtually risk free.”

Laredo added that the city calculated the additional electricity costs of running the air conditioners to be $25,000—a minimal amount of the school’s total budget, in his view.

The committee voted unanimously in favor of authorizing the city to install air conditioners in the classrooms and offices of the Bigelow, Bowen, Brown, Burr, Mason-Rice, Memorial Spaulding, Peirce, Underwood and Ward school buildings.