During the past year, Arlington has developed new mission and vision statements, which are the foundation of a new five-year strategic plan.​​

The vision of the Arlington Public Schools is to be an equitable educational community where all learners feel a sense of belonging, experience growth and joy, and are empowered to shape their own futures and contribute to a better world.
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​Mission Statement: The Arlington Public Schools focuses on the whole child to create inclusive and innovative learning opportunities for all students, values diverse identities and ways of learning, prepares all staff to maintain high expectations while providing necessary supports, and sustains collaborative partnerships with families and the community.

Paul participated in the community visioning process that developed these statements, and will continue to work to make our vision a reality.

As a former teacher, principal, and central office administrator, Paul Schlichtman is uniquely qualified to work with his colleagues on the school committee to transform our vision into our reality.

The plan is organized around four strategic priorities.​

Ensuring Equity and Excellence

The Arlington Public Schools will ensure equity, excellence, and access to rigorous learning experiences for all students. All graduates will be prepared to achieve their choices of post-secondary education, career, and community contribution.

Paul's work in the Lowell Public Schools focused on research, assessment, and accountability. He worked with teachers, principals, and department heads to identify trends in student achievement, and to devise improvement strategies.
As a school committee member, he will continue to support Arlington Educators in this work. Our schools will be focusing on closing achievement gaps using a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) model, which provides additional supports to meet student needs.
Based on current achievement gaps, the district's focus will be based on five focal groups:

1. ​Students, and the families and teachers of students, who have IEPs;
2. Students, families, and staff who identify as Black or Hispanic/Latino;
3. Students, families, and staff who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersexual, and asexual (LGBTQIA+);
4. Students who are multilingual learners (MLs) and their families, as well students and families who speak a language other than English as their primary language in the home; and
5. Students and families who are low-income.

Paul enthusiastically supports efforts to close achievement gaps for the five focal groups. Paul's has extensive experience identifying and closing achievement gaps. Read more about Paul's work Ensuring Equity and Excellence for students who have IEPs and who are multilingual learners.​

Valuing all staff.

​The Arlington Public Schools will recruit and retain an excellent and diverse workforce by creating a collaborative and supportive culture for all staff; providing high-quality and relevant professional development; expanding opportunities for leadership and shared decision-making; and prioritizing representation, diverse perspectives, and expertise.

Arlington is fortunate to employ excellent educators. Teachers and administrators enjoy working in Arlington, which is seen as supportive of quality teaching.
Arlington has a collaborative relationship with our unions. This wasn't always the case. When the committee's relationship with the Arlington Education Association (AEA) was strained, MIT Professor Emeritus and Arlington resident Robert B. McKersie volunteered to work the committee and the AEA to incorporate Interest Based Bargaining (IBB) into our approach to labor negotiations.
As a member of several negotiating teams, Paul continues to use his IBB training to maintain a collaborative, cooperative climate while working with our unions.
However, the challenge of recruiting and retaining great educators goes beyond the context we create with our labor agreements. While we have made progress toward a more competitive pay scale, we still trail other districts in the Town Manager 12 in teacher and paraprofessional salaries. 
Teacher salaries are becoming a more critical factor in recruiting and retaining staff, as housing prices in and around Arlington continue to soar. Many teachers are forced to find housing far from Arlington, and endour a long commute through other towns with significantly higher salaries. We are seeing an increasing number of teachers leaving for jobs closer to home.
While teacher salaries are below the Town Manager 12 average, Teaching Assistant salary scales are up to 40% below average. Combined with a low per-diem rate for substitutes, we are experiencing staffing shortages that impact day-to-day operations.
All districts in eastern Massachusetts are challenged as we seek to hire educators who reflect the demographics of our student population. 
Any successful effort to hire more educators of color needs to include outreach outside of Massachusetts. Unfortunately, Massachusetts' teacher licensing regulations require applicants to negotiate an extensive teacher testing program. This testing regime is expensive, and applicants must pay hundreds of dollars to pass Massachusetts tests. These tests, which are not valid indicators of classroom performance, discourage out-of-state educators from relocating in Massachusetts.
That's why Paul wrote a resolution calling for the elimination of the Massachusetts teacher testing program. After it was adopted by the Arlington School Committee, it was adopted by the delegate assembly of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, and is now a major item in the association's advocacy agenda.

Improving infrastructure, operations, and sustainability.

The Arlington Public Schools will maintain a system of schools that is safe, well-maintained, sustainable, and fiscally responsible, with the appropriate tools and resources to support best educational practices and an optimum teaching and learning environment.

Paul has actively supported school infrastructure projects since the Ottoson Middle School renovation was presented to Town Meeting in 1994.
While we are in the midst of the high school project, we also need to keep our eye on buildings when they are 25 years past their most recent renovation.
As climate change brings us warmer spring and summer days, we need to plan for new energy efficient HVAC systems that provide cooling and move us toward Arlington's Net Zero energy goals.
While Ottoson Middle School is moving to the top of the list of buildings for significant work, the Bishop (2000) and Hardy (2001) were renovated (and not rebuilt) during the last phase of school building projects. As a result, these buildings will need more attention as we upgrade our buildings to meet current standards.
Paul has been an advocate for working toward Net Zero goals, moving from fossil fuels to renewable electricity. He wrote the state's first EV policy, which calls for a partnership with the town to meet staff demand for EV charging stations at our schools.
Paul recognizes that fiscal responsibility in Arlington goes beyond the limits of Proposition 2½. As a densely developed community, Arlington's new growth is among the bottom 10% of municipalites in the state. Meanwhile, changing demographics results in Arlington having one of the largest rates of enrollment growth (a 21.13% increase from 2012 to 2018) in the state.
The value of our investment in our homes depends on the quality of town services, including our schools. This is why it is fiscally responsible to set budgets and tax rates at a level that supports the services we expect, even when prudent expenditures exceed the limits of Proposition 2½. 

Sustaining collaborative partnerships.

The Arlington Public Schools will partner collaboratively with families in meeting the educational needs of all students; facilitate consistent two-way communication; and provide timely, transparent, relevant, and accessible information to all stakeholders.

The focus group summary report, conducted during the process of searching for our new superintendent in 2020, showed that the community thought the school administration was "thoroughly competent and dedicated to students, but low key and uncommunicative in many respects. Parents and faculty repeated a theme that the next superintendent must have an effective strategy for identifying issues, sharing information on the process of addressing them, and updating the public regularly on developments and key areas of concern."
Superintendent Elizabeth Homan has worked with the school committee to make significant improvements in communicating with the community. The school committee has included resources in the operating budget to support better communication, including an improved district website.
The strategic plan also commits resources to two important initiatives that will make our schools more responsive to the needs of our parents. Paul shares in the commitment to expanding access to our very limited after-school programs, and ensuring that programs are available for early release days and non-holiday weekdays when school is not in session. Paul also supports the establishment of a welcome center for families, which will help connect parents with school and community resources, and will facilitate the registration of new public school students.

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