School district to cut special ed program

By Kristen Green, Globe Correspondent

The special education program attended by John Odgren, the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School sophomore accused of stabbing to death a classmate in January, will be eliminated at the end of the school year.

The Great Opportunities program has been offered for 15 years and has typically served seven to nine students a year.

John M. Ritchie, the Lincoln-Sudbury superintendent and school principal, insisted the stabbing did not prompt the decision to end the program. Instead, he said, the board of directors for the Concord Area Special Education Collaborative, which runs Great Opportunities, decided to drop the program, because its three participants are graduating, and no other students have applied.

"Independent of anything that happened this year, there will not be a GO program at L-S next year," he told the School Committee at a meeting Tuesday night. "It’s leaving because of attrition and economics, not for any other reason."

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