Boston School Committee

On a frigid morning in 1964, students crowded into the assembly hall at St. Mark’s Social Center in Roxbury. Bundled in winter coats and boots, some students wore excited smiles while others stayed straight-faced, waiting. Outside, school buses carrying suburban students waited among piles of snow.

The city of Boston is approaching a 50-year milestone. We are about to observe  the anniversary of school desegregation.

The Boston School Committee is considering a new admissions policy for Madison Park Technical Vocational High School. The policy would require a statement describing why the student is interested in a vocational education program and wants to attend Madison Park.

Parents, students and teachers expressed a litany of concerns about a proposal by Mayor Michelle Wu and Superintendent Mary Skipper to relocate the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science to the West Roxbury Education Complex. 

With each superintendent and mayor comes the fabricated commitments of “transparency,” “community engagement” and “equity.” As we approach Superintendent Skipper’s eighth month on the job and only three short months from the end of the school year, BPS families have continued to wait for quality BPS leadership, visionary goals and transparency.

What happens to our public institutions when democracy fails? When elected officials ignore the will of the people, governing bodies lose their independence, and the fundamental right to local democratic control is stripped away?

By now you’ve heard that Mayor Michelle Wu vetoed the proposal to restore an elected school committee and reverse Boston’s position as an outlier with the only mayor-appointed school committee in the commonwealth.

Last Wednesday, Boston City Council members passed, albeit narrowly, a home rule petition that would have created an elected Boston school committee. Two days later, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu vetoed the measure, putting a decisive end to this round of political maneuvering, and leaving little ambiguity on where she stands on a return to a fully elected School Committee.

Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper announced a $1.4 billion budget for the 2023-2024 school year — an increase of $65 million over the previous year.

Members of the City Council are preparing to vote to reestablish an elected school committee in Boston for the first time in more than 30 years, since the elected committee model was abolished and replaced by a mayor-appointed committee in 1991, and more than a year after Boston residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of an elected committee in a non-binding ballot referendum

The Council of the Great City Schools last Wednesday released a report on school safety recommending among other things that Boston Public Schools convene a focus group of stakeholders and administrators to consider whether the district should form an internal police department.yawu

In their first meeting of 2023, Boston City Council members offered up what amounts to at least a partial agenda for the new year.