Where: Baseball field at Stony Brook Elementary School, 384 Underpass Road, Brewster
Key issues
Dog park: A citizens petition, Article 21, requests that the town devise a five-year operational plan for the proposed dog park, including maintenance and waste removal, before any town land is allocated. Article 8 appropriates $1,247,118 of Community Preservation Funds, including $185,000 to help create a dog park on 2.4 acres behind the Brewster Police Station. The Stanton Foundation will contribute $225,000 toward construction. The Friends of the Brewster Dog Park would raise $50,000 to help furnish the $460,000 park.
School choice: Article 27 asks Brewster’s Select Board to ask the Nauset Regional School District to reduce the costs of the School Choice program, freeze the number of School Choice students in the district and add no new ones for the next seven years. The school committee should also reset the tuition fees.
The rate of chronic school absenteeism shot up across Massachusetts this academic year, with many Cape districts surpassing the state average of 17%.
In Barnstable the Cape’s largest school district the percentage of students deemed chronically absent climbed to 28.6% through March, compared with 15.2% during the previous academic year, according to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
In the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District, 37% of students were absent at least 10% of the time, more than double last year’s chronic absenteeism rate of 14.8%.
Statewide, the chronic absenteeism rate is four points higher than in the 2019-20 and 2018-19 academic years.