June 17, 2022
Dear Shrewsbury Families, Colleagues, & Community Members,
As we close the school year, I want to share some recent news and celebrate some terrific student accomplishments.
• I want to thank Officer Mark Hester of the Shrewsbury Police Department, who has served with distinction as our School Resource Officer (SRO) at Shrewsbury High School since 2007. Officer Hester is being reassigned to other duties, and on behalf of the school district I thank him for all he has done to support our students, families, and staff. He has always been responsive, thoughtful, and effective in assisting with complex and sensitive student issues, improving our safety protocols, and contributing to the SHS community. I am also pleased to announce that the new SRO at SHS will be Officer Alicia Brownell. Officer Brownell is a veteran of the Army Reserves who has been a patrol officer in our town since 2016, and she has extensive training as noted in this SPD Facebook post. She is also a Shrewsbury High alumna who also attended Floral Street School (where I was her principal!), Sherwood Middle School, and Oak Middle School. We are excited to welcome Officer Brownell to this important role at SHS!
• We recently recognized 18 SPS staff members who are retiring at the end of this school year. They collectively represent 464 years of contributions to Shrewsbury schools, and we wish them all the happiest and healthiest of retirements! You can view their names here.
• Recently, we honored several student successes at School Committee meetings. These included the SHS Class of 2022 Senior Scholars; the SHS Esports Team for their state championships; two SHS Speech and Debate Team state champions (Shalini Biju for Informative Speaking and Rithika Prasad for Extemporaneous Speaking); a state science and engineering fair first place recipient (Nevin Thinagar, whose project can be viewed here); and two SHS students, Alex Kaneko and Arnav Sharma, who won the Mass STEM Hub's Student Industry Connect's first place award for High School Computer Science. We also found out that earlier today SHS student Siri Ural made it to the finals of the National Speech and Debate tournament in Impromptu Speaking! Congratulations to all!
• Earlier this week, the SHS Baseball team made it to the Final Four in the state Division 1 tournament, where they lost a tough game to the first overall seeded team after a dramatic last inning comeback to tie the game. Congratulations to the Baseball team on their success, as well as to all of the SHS and Oak athletics teams who competed this past spring.
Again, thank you to everyone who supported our schools over this past year, and I hope you have a terrific summer!
Respectfully,
Joe Sawyer
Superintendent of Schools