Despite challenges, Lowell rises above
IN ONE week, Lowell played host to a LGBTQ+ roundtable organized by U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan, cheered the graduation of thousands of area high school students, and celebrated Greek and gay pride among many other community events.
Trahan’s discussion focused on the work of nonprofits and advocacy groups to provide resources and create safe spaces for members of the community in the 3rd Congressional District.
The engaging conversation, which highlighted the lifesaving work of Lowell organizations like Center for Hope and Healing, was tempered by the discussion around white supremacist groups operating in the region and actively threatening LGBTQ+ lives.
Acceptance by government institutions is a powerful demonstration of support for marginalized communities, and the city picked up on the Pride theme by hosting its annual flag-raising ceremony with a performance by the New England Pride Colorguard Ensemble in front of City Hall on Saturday. That ceremony was followed by a parade to Kerouac Park for an afternoon festival.
The administration, led by City Manager Tom Golden, launched its Open Lowell initiative this spring, which seeks to make Lowell a more welcoming city.
At the roundtable, he told the LGBTQ+ leaders that the “city is going to stand for acceptance.”
This outreach builds on its diversity, equity and inclusion training for City Hall leadership, finally interviewing to fill the longvacant DEI position and increasing participation by expanding both communications and access to municipal operations through translation services as well as improving the city’s workforce diversity footprint and outreach.
Not far from City Hall, an army of dedicated volunteers with the Transfiguration Greek Orthodox Church threw their annual Grecian Festival this weekend. Sunday, from noon to 6 p.m., is the last chance to grab a wedge of spanakopita (spinach pie), a helping of pastitsio (Greek lasagna) and pastries like baklava and koulourakia. Beer and wine will also be for sale. The celebration includes live Greek music and dancing.
And much-needed rain showers are watering the extensive Lord Overpass plantings, which are coming in fast, providing a bit of color, softness, shade and dimension to that stretch of concrete and asphalt.
The Cummings Foundation announced the grant winners for its $30 million funding program, and Lowell was well represented by the Lowell Alliance for $90,000, Lowell Association for the Blind for $75,000, Lowell
Community Charter Public School for $105,000, Merrimack Valley Food Bank for $225,000 and THRIVE Communities for $300,000. Those grants will help the nonprofits reach the most at-risk citizens to be their best selves in the community, thereby serving the greater good in Greater Lowell.
The week has been time for high school graduations across the Merrimack Valley. The Collegiate Charter School of Lowell held its first graduation ceremony on Thursday, while the very next night, the Greater Lowell Technical High School celebrated its 49th commencement to a packed house at the Tsongas Center.
Those are the big events, but below the ra
dar, little acts of kindness and entrepreneurial spirit are constantly taking place across the city, which don’t always get highlighted to the paper.
It’s sloppy to cherry-pick either the good or the bad aspects of big-city life. The rose-colored glasses cheerleading is as unproductive as the sky-is-falling drumbeat of negativity. Finding the balance between the two poles — to separate the sensational from sensationalism — is a daily challenge for a big-city paper with tight resources whose reach arcs across many platforms and constituencies.
Resource and participation challenges confront the city on many levels, too: a rising number of homeless people, the ongoing fallout from the cybersecurity breach, the end of critical COVID-ERA funding, the allocation of American Rescue Plan Act funding, the search for a new superintendent of the Lowell Public Schools, the need to find a way to revitalize the Downtown Lowell business district and also support neighborhood growth, how to quickly increase the city’s housing stock and more.
But this first week in June showed the promise of Lowell to come together, rise above and to celebrate, embrace and encourage all its citizens who will help build the Lowell of tomorrow.
Open-door policy
THE PUSH for government transparency in Lowell seems to be at an all-time high. A surprise visit from so-called “First Amendment auditors” at City Hall this past week sparked wide-ranging reactions around their interactions with City Manager Tom Golden, Chief Financial Officer Conor Baldwin and others across departments.
The auditors have asserted it’s their mission — and right — to shed light on municipal employees, but city and town officials themselves are making efforts to open their doors to residents and their concerns.
In neighboring Chelmsford, which was also recently featured in a filmed audit, various boards are holding a municipal open house, partly to fill committee vacancies and spark interest from residents in the community, according to an item on the Select Board’s June 5 meeting agenda. But it’s also an opportunity for board members to hear constituents’ concerns and do something about them.
Eleven seats are available on a number of different boards, including the Community Action Program Committee, Permanent Building Committee, Clean Energy and Sustainability Committee and Board of Appeals.
The open house takes place at the Chelmsford Public Library June 12 from 6-8 p.m.
Littleton is adopting similar motions to increase accessibility to town leaders, after Select Board member Matthew Nordhaus shared the success of his office hours at their May 8 meeting.
“I started doing it on a whim, and it turned out to be really incredibly effective and engaging,” Nordhaus said.
Other board members seemed to express a desire to host their own hours, Nordhaus said, and he suggested they schedule them together, with alternating members each week. He called it an “excellent outreach opportunity,” and according to his Facebook page, he was stationed at the Reuben Hoar Public Library on Friday from 1-3 p.m.
Like Chelmsford, Littleton was also recently hit by the same “auditors,” and Nordhaus remarked at the following meeting May 22 that they felt the town was well represented.
Keeping the Youtube movement in mind, other communities may respond likewise, welcoming residents in for a time-sensitive conversation as opposed to allowing the unexpected, camera-wielding stranger to pop in unannounced and cause a stir.
School reconfiguration gets good grades
BILLERICA MEMORIAL High School’s building was first opened in 2019. At that time, the school district took the opportunity to reconfigure the locations of each grade level, bringing eighth-graders into the new high school building, and bringing fifth-graders into the middle schools while the elementary schools serve kindergarten through fourth grade.
Nearly four years later, Superintendent of Schools Tim Piwowar said that preliminary data indicates a possible positive correlation between the reconfiguration, student grades and graduation rates.
Piwowar told the Billerica School Committee May 30 that the goal of changing grade configurations was to help students better transition from middle school into their freshman year of high school. He preceded everything with the caveat that the new high school and grade configuration hadn’t even been in place for a full school year when the COVID-19 pandemic shut the world down and brought its own host of problems to education that we are still parsing through as a society.
“We know the challenges and all the research around when grade 9 students don’t see success. It leads to increased dropout rates and leads to decreased graduation rates,” said Piwowar.
Between fall 2018 and fall 2020, the percentage of students who needed to repeat their freshman year fell, and stayed relatively low seemingly across the board.
For high-needs students, that percentage fell from 16.9% in 2018 to 7.4% in 2023. For students with disabilities, the percentage fell from 22.2% to 9.4% in the same time frame. For all students the drop was more subtle, falling from 5.5% in 2018 to 3.7% in 2023.
In the same vein, the percentage of students passing all of their classes rose sharply. For all students it rose 80.4% to
86%, for high-needs students it rose significantly from 44.1% to 73.3%, and for students with disabilities it rose from 36.8% to 66.7%.
Again, this data was gathered from school years that took place in the height of the pandemic, and Piwowar remarked that these figures peaked in 2020, when the school year abruptly ended for in-person learning and a higher degree of leniency was given to students statewide.
“But those rates have been able to stay up in the last couple of years as well, which I think speaks for the grade 9 transition,” said Piwowar.
Graduation rates, similarly, rose for all categories as well. Between 2016 and 2023, the graduation rate rose from 92.3% to 97.3% for all students, 77.8% to 91.9% for high needs students and 67.6% to 89.3% for students with disabilities.
This week’s Column was prepared by reporters Melanie Gilbert in Lowell; Cameron Morsberger in Lowell, Chelmsford and Littleton; and Peter Currier in Billerica.