Month: June 2020

We wanted to send our heartfelt thanks to everyone who tuned in to last night’s conversation. As with the rest of our community, we have been personally devastated to learn that so many Brookline educators have been pink-slipped since last week.

Our apologies to those who could not view last night’s conversation—we exceeded our zoom limit of 1,000 people and though many more were able to view the live stream, we know that some of you could not. We have just put the video of the event on youtube, you can find it here:

https://youtu.be/xOoVnscoVEM

We wanted to thank School Committee Members Suzanne Federspiel and David Pearlman and State Representative Tommy Vitolo for answering questions, as well as Brookline parent Meghna Chakrabarti for moderating the conversation. And thank you to everyone who submitted questions. With limited time we were unable to get to all of the questions, so if yours remains unanswered please, please write to the school committee.

And thanks also to everyone for their feedback about last night’s online conversation. If we don’t get back to you, our apologies in advance! We are already discussing plans for future conversations, so stay tuned for more information.

Finally, solving the issues discussed last night is of utmost and urgent importance. Although we are deeply upset that so many educators received pink-slips, many of us are very hopeful and cautiously optimistic that the town can rehire most, if not all of our educators who received notices. Please know that there are many Town Meeting Members, Lauren among them, as well as other members of local government  and the community at large who are thinking creatively and working diligently on how to resolve this budget crisis in a way that quickly saves jobs at the school building level. Clearly, time is of the essence and we, Brookline parents, absolutely do NOT want to lose our talented and beloved educators.

 

Respectfully,

Lauren Bernard & Ben Kelley

Co-Presidents, Brookline Parents Organization