Amy Bisson watched last evening’s Lowell School Committee meeting so you didn’t have to. She wrote a full report on her own blog. Much of the meeting involved the report on the racial incident at Lowell High School. Amy supplements her report with her own observations as a recently-retired Lowell public school teacher.

One (relatively minor) point caught my attention. I think the schools will be closed on Tuesday, March 1, 2016 due to that day’s Presidential Primary election. In the recent past, the schools have been closed on election day in November. The reason for this is that several schools are used as polling places. Throughout the year, schools try very hard to keep unknown people out for security and safety reasons, but on election day, everyone is allowed in. It’s a policy that makes a lot of sense to me. One thing that didn’t make sense was that the schools were only closed for the general election, but were open for primaries and preliminaries. The policy implied that dangerous individuals, like many voters, didn’t bother with preliminaries or primaries and only came out in November. If this new policy does, in fact, close the schools for every election, it would seem more consistent and prudent. Unfortunately, it will also make the school year longer since students have to get through their full 180 days.