Passing the Torch in Melrose Public Schools

By Grace Donahue

Written June 13th, 2020

Superintendent Taymore is known to many highschool students as the granter of snow days or the woman whose presence causes you to put your phone when she comes in to observe your history class. But Ms. Taymore’s impact on the Melrose Public Schools System over her 8 years serving as superintendent of schools has been much greater than most of the students have realized. Ms. Taymore announced in the early spring that she will be retiring at the end of this school year, and as her time in Melrose comes to a close she has reflected on the work that she has done for the district and unfinished projects she will be leaving behind.

Ms. Taymore’s overarching goal for the school system in her 8 years has been to improve the educational experience of both students and teachers, and to empower teachers so that they would be invested in always examining their practices and learning to grow. This goal manifested itself in her mission to implement a more personalized style of teaching and learning into Melrose classrooms. Ms. Taymore described this process as a slow-growing and far from finished multi-year journey that will be passed on to the next Superintendent. Melrose Public Schools employs roughly 450 educators, and Ms. Taymore hoped to get all of them on board to think differently about their teaching, and give them the right tools to support this change in style. The idea behind personalized learning is that no two children learn the same or have the same needs on the same day, and she hoped to encourage teachers to rethink and redesign what they provide for their students to learn and develop their understanding. She says that this includes thinking about where students are starting from, what they need to know, and what interests they want to pursue further. While she challenges in creating a standardized curriculum that allows for flexibility in the modes of learning employed by teachers and the tools they utilized, her ultimate goal was to engage students in their own learning. She found that while she received pushback from teachers in the beginning, that teachers’ support of personalized learning grew as they recognized the positive response from students.

The idea of personalized learning is a new concept, and has faced challenges in its implementation in other school districts, like in the state of Maine where its practice was ended altogether. But despite that, Ms. Taymore is confident in Melrose’s ability to adopt proficiency-based learning and personalized instruction to change how students are evaluated in classrooms. Changes in classrooms range from learning “menus” in elementary school classrooms where students choose which learning tool they use that day to the creation of senior capstone projects where students choose an area of interests and develop a project, as opposed to the traditional senior papers.

The new superintendent, Julie Kukenberger, was the interim superintendent at Hamilton-Wenham. She was voted for unanimously by the school committee, and will be assuming her new position in June. Ms. Taymore hopes Ms. Kukenberger will continue to adopt innovative teaching practices and finally resolve the issue with what to do with the Beebe school, which has recently been put on hold because of the school closures due to Covid-19. Ms. Taymore also discussed what she described as the “very unfinished” commitment of Melrose to better the “cultural awareness and proficiency” of the school system. This has been an ongoing project for 6 years that Ms. Taymore says is “never finished.” She hopes that in coming years, the new superintendent will continue the process of vetting materials and curriculum as they are chosen and to raise awareness around culture and equity, especially for BIPOC students, LGBTQ+ students, and students who are English language learners.

Reflecting on her time in Melrose, Ms. Taymore said without hesitation that what she will miss the most is the staff and students. While she loved her job as superintendent, she wishes that she was able to spend more time in classrooms and with the hands-on educational aspects of the job, rather than the legal, political, and fiscals parts that took up so much of her time. She says that although the current events taking place in America are a cause of worry, her interactions with students have given her confidence that “things will be okay.”