NTA EBulletin: September 7 2025

Click on the image above to link to the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation. You have to love all that royal blue!

Updates

1. The When Waltham Strikes exhibit is now open to the public, and includes a section on our own strike last year.

2. We want to make sure that our communication with membership is both robust and easily accessible. If you have not already, would you please complete this (very short!) communications survey that our summer organizers created. 

3. We have posted explanations for both on the job injuries and sick leave benefits on the Know Your Contract section of the NTA website.

A Pattern of Violating Our Trust

Last year, you completed a survey providing feedback around an email that Dr. Nolin sent out announcing and explaining district-wide reorganizations. Here are the main ideas we gleaned from what you said:

• ... respondents’ views of Superintendent Nolin were largely skeptical, distrustful, and frustrated, with a small minority holding more hopeful or supportive views.

• Respondents view the superintendent as a leader who is not fully transparent, insufficiently communicative, and more reactive to budget pressures than proactive for student needs.

• While there is acknowledgment of her difficult position, the prevailing tone is one of distrust, frustration, and diminished confidence in her leadership.....

You can read the full report on the survey here.

Over the last year, and continuing into this one, the superintendent’s office has continued to strain our trust.

The district regularly fails to provide reliable and timely information upon request. Often, we receive nothing until it is too late. The district continues to violate individual member’s contractual rights, particularly when members are in a very vulnerable position due to injury or illness.

On opening day, I remarked on one of the most immediate examples of this: the new attendance reporting system, which uses the language of ‘requesting’ absences as opposed to ‘reporting’ absences.

This difference is important, because the impact of reading that you are “requesting” a day is to slowly erode your memory that the right to take these days off paid are benefits we have won at the negotiating table. 

In an email to all of you, Anna claimed that the system cannot be changed, that NTA leadership already knew this, and that we were kept abreast of progress on implementing the system all along. This is a partial truth: Dr. Nolin did report in to us about the system last year, but very selectively, and very cursorily. 

We were told, as were you in Anna’s email clarification, that the company that produces the software cannot customize its wording, yet clearly some customization is possible: the categories of absences are categories found in our collective bargaining agreements. 

Last March, I sought access to individuals who could independently verify the claim that the word ‘request’ could not be replaced with ‘report’: The city employee in charge did not return my call. Instead, I received this email from the Director of Human Resources: 

“XXXX received your voicemail. He does not discuss Munis with external parties and asked me to handle this. Perhaps the earlier response below answers your question, but if it does not, please let me know.”

As a result of being told to take her word for it and refused access to independently verify what she says, I simply don’t believe her.

Here is but a sampling of other reasons why it is challenging to trust the superintendent and her office:

• In light of Dr. Nolin's unsubstantiated claims of an absenteeism crisis among staff, I have been asking for attendance data for over a year. I still have not received the requested data.

• Despite repeated expressions of serious reservations about the work and direction of the district’s math curriculum review committee, the district rushes forward, mandating that teachers pilot new curriculum. Teachers learned about this on August 26, and are expected to begin piloting in three weeks.

• The Teaching and Learning Office is requiring elementary educators to move faster than ever in a rush to cover four modules of the new literacy curriculum and has already scheduled standardized tests at the end of each module.

• The district is adding eight new canned assessments to middle school, and six new canned assessments to the ninth grade. This is eating into teachers’ already tight time to cover content, and it is decreasing the amount of time that students spend learning. 

• Despite claims that the decision was made in February, the district announced last week that they’ve decided to reduce by half or more the number of family conferences at the middle schools, asserting that these conferences are not effective, and get in the way of the district’s ability to require teachers to evaluate the data from all their new assessments. Were middle school teachers consulted about this? Several have reached out to tell us they didn’t even know this was happening.

Personally, I have done my best to give Dr. Nolin the benefit of the doubt. I have found her to be easily accessible and willing to hear educator concerns. But the results we all need are still not there. 

And certainly responsibility for the degradation of trust between educators and the central office does not fall squarely on Dr. Nolin’s shoulders - the School Committee and Mayor Fuller have done enormous damage to our school system, turning every budget season into a major fiasco, and every contract negotiation into a major battle, both of which distract from the business of teaching and learning.

That said, the pace of underfunded initiatives, the lack of educator voice, the theft of our autonomy in the classroom, and the refusal to honor our contractual rights continue to drain Newton’s educators and to make it impossible to build trust in the central office.

I will end with this quote from an elementary colleague:

"I have to reconcile myself to the fact that Newton is no longer a place where we teach students, but rather, one where we teach curriculum."

The Newton Public Schools are, and always have been, great. That is often despite the district leadership’s best efforts, and because of the incredible work that all of you do. The superintendent and her team must do better to partner with the heart of the school system, the lifeblood that keeps it serving our students - us.

If they continue to try to control us, rather than authentically work with us, they will be stripping away everything that makes Newton so special.

In solidarity, 

Mike Zilles, President

Newton Teachers Association