by Marty Green ·
Friday, July 10, 2026
Linda Dwight. (Courtesy photo)
“I leave with the fondest of memories and very good feelings about it all,” Dr. Linda Dwight said, sitting at her nearly bare desk on June 29, her next-to-last day as superintendent of schools for Harvard.
Dwight has been part of Harvard’s school administration team for 15 years. She came to Harvard as the elementary school principal in 2011, having previously been a principal in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Three years later, the School Committee voted unanimously to promote her to superintendent. Since then, Dwight has led the district through the construction of the current Hildreth Elementary School, the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the numerous developments in educational technology and curriculum.
Asked what she most wanted the Harvard community as a whole to understand about the schools, Dwight responded, “I want the community to get that we are one town,” she said, putting a strong emphasis on the word ‘one.’
“A big part of the town are these amazing schools,” Dwight said, “but we’re not in competition with all the other needs and services in the town. … I think that probably because there are different boards and different departments it can sometimes seem like we’re at odds with each other, or fighting for the same resources. … But I’d say in the last couple of years that’s gotten better, less divisive. I think there’s more work between board members to communicate with each other, to understand each other’s perspectives, and that’s gone a long way to making it less tense.”
Looking back, Dwight said she had seen a number of changes in the district over the past 15 years. The town’s population has become much more diverse, she noted. And the school-age population has declined in recent years, although she thinks that trend may change. “I’m optimistic that enrollment will increase,” Dwight said, “particularly if they finish the places in Devens that they’re working on. I think if we can get another 20 or 30 students that come in, that will help the financial picture of this district.”
Dwight remembers a shift in emphasis that took place around 2016 and 2017 when Acton-Boxborough and possibly other nearby districts had several student suicides. “I would say that there definitely was a period of years where we were really focused on wellness, ensuring that our students weren’t so academically focused that they missed taking care of themselves and their emotional well-being,” she recalled.
And methods of education are constantly changing, too, Dwight observed: “Teaching has changed, it continues to evolve. We’re doing more that is Socratic method, discussion-based, interest-based—how to apply the learning. We’re still using technology in innovative ways. Classrooms are exciting, they really are.”
Dwight sees Harvard’s small school district as offering unique advantages. “There are these deep relationships that students have with each other, have with their educators, because our students stay together the whole time, and the educators are the same. It reminds me of the speech at graduation by Jacob Dangel. … He was thanking the community for creating a bubble of safety and security around their experience in school. I just thought that is such a great picture. Not a bubble of ignorance or of isolation, but a bubble of security, the opportunity to make mistakes, the opportunity to grow and learn. And I feel like that’s the kind of school district we created, and that I’m proud of.”
Dwight’s immediate future looks nearly as busy as her time in Harvard, with several different projects in hand. “I’m going to be mentoring superintendents,” she said. “I have four that are in various positions across the state. Massachusetts offers [new superintendents] a really good mentoring program for their first three years. I’ll start out with these folks as first-year superintendents and then work with them more limitedly in years two and three.” Dwight recalled how helpful her own mentor, retired Masconomet Superintendent Claire Sheff-Kohn, had been and said the two still keep in touch. She is also working with a mid-career facilitation group. And in addition, Dwight said, she is working with a small think-tank group on a middle and high school curriculum to teach students about the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and how to use it.