School Committee Notes

By Jay Lancaster

School Committee Considers Girls Lacrosse Program

The School Committee’s athletic subcommittee recently heard from local coaches on the feasibility of starting a girl’s lacrosse program. The coaches conducted a survey on how many girls in Lynn schools would be interested in playing lacrosse and the results were somewhat encouraging.

Although there were a decent number of underclassmen girls who expressed interest in playing lacrosse, the school district has tried starting a lacrosse program before and the program quickly ran out steam as students lost interest over time. There are also concerns that a new lacrosse program would only serve to pull girls from other existing sports programs instead of getting students involved who otherwise wouldn’t have participated in sports at all.

Girls lacrosse is a much less physical version of the sport than boys lacrosse which the committee also considered. Committee member Jared Nicholson touched on the difference in cost for boys and girls lacrosse when he said “we do have a city wide boys lacrosse team and obviously girls lacrosse is also a growing sport and I think that there is a little bit less of an equipment cost than for the boys because the girls don’t have the same level of padding as in boy’s lacrosse.”

The subcommittee decided that a camp should be held next summer to gauge student interest and determine whether or not to have a girls lacrosse program going forward.

 

School Committee Designates New Emergency Zone

Marshall Middle School was designated an emergency shelter location by the Lynn school committee at the recent committee meeting. The committee heard a proposal from Lynn’s emergency manager, Fire Department Lt. Paul Ricchi, on the Office of Emergency Management’s proposal for creating a new emergency site at the school.

The Marshall Middle School will be used in emergency situations such as floods and power outages. The city’s only current emergency sheltering location is Lynn Classical which is only able to comfortably accommodate up to 300 people.

On what sitations wold call for opening Marshall as a shelter, Lt. Ricchi explained it this way “It’s a big impact on the city when we do open the shelter, we realize that it has a big impact on school operations but we really need to look at the fact that what we’ve been dealing with so far have been fairly small-scale incidents. If we do have a hurricane event or a large-scale power outage, especially in the winter, we have to have the ability to protect our citizens and the new Marshall Middle School site is ideal.”

On why the city needs a second shelter for emergencies, Lt. Ricchi said “Lynn Classical, believe it or not, it is in that Category 3 to 4 hurricane inundation zone, so that might be unavailable depending on the type of storm we get hit with. Hopefully it won’t happen but we definitely need a way to maximize our sheltering capability.”

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