The Wayland School Committee unanimously approved the use of $45,000 in state funds to purchase a van for the district’s transition programming for high school special education students at its meeting on July 16.
The grant comes from surplus funds from the state Fair Share Act, a tax on incomes of $1 million or more (the revenue is allocated toward public education and transportation).
School Committee member Kate Sambuco asked whether the van could be used for other special education transportation needs outside of the transition programming. Betsy Cullen, another member, asked about the van’s capacity, particularly as the program is anticipated to expand in the future. Committee Chair Erin Gibbons said she would direct their questions to Wayland Director of Student Services Ronnie Kessler. Still, she maintained that the purpose of the buses is to support the needs of special education services within the town, thereby preventing students from having to leave the district to access these services. Next fiscal year, Wayland is projected to enroll 34 special education students outside of the district.
“At the heart of this program is getting them in their community,” Gibbons said. “Right now, we’re having to go out so much, I would think that we would try to keep it growing here.”
“I’m glad to see these funds coming back to Wayland,” School Committee Member Christina Rodrigo said.
The committee also received an update from its policy subcommittee, Christina Rodrigo and Kate Sambuco. Rodrigo said that in her research about policy changes, she discovered that certain towns adopt the entire state policy guide from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees (MASC) while specifying a few exceptions for that town. This strategy is an alternative to a city or town creating an entire guidebook itself. Sambuco added that this approach could work well for Wayland, as it’s clear which committee policies can be general and which need to be unique to the community.
“MASC sometimes tends to be shorter, obviously, a little bit more general,” Sambuco said. “I think we’ll know the policies that we want to keep Wayland-specific.” The committee agreed that if they adopted that approach, they would retain the district-specific cell phone policy that had been developed over the course of the last year.
Gibbons also suggested filing Wayland’s School Committee policy on the state association’s website, asking the subcommittee to investigate whether that would be an improvement over the district’s site. She said she’s experienced difficulties with the current policy platform.
Keeping policy information on the MASC site would make it easier for people to compare specific policy points across districts, Rodrigo added.
The policy subcommittee will have until mid-October to determine Wayland’s committee policies and where they should be stored for public access.
