Last Night At School Committee

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Ep. 88, Last Night @ School Committee: 6/21 Meeting Recap Jun 22, 2023

Show notes

Last night was the last School Committee meeting of this academic year, and it was an unusual one. There were no reports on the agenda (other than the Superintendent’s Report), and the meeting came in the wake of multiple controversies in the BPS community.

The meeting began with an update from Chair Jeri Robinson on the new admissions policy for Madison Park proposed last month. Chair Robinson shared that this policy created unintentional barriers for students, and that BPS will be reconsidering the policy and coming forth with a new recommendation in the fall. Next, School Committee member Lorena Lopera announced that she will be stepping down from her position after this meeting in order to take a new job and spend more time with her family.

The meeting continued with the Superintendent’s Report, which began with an acknowledgement of the recent news story concerning an adult woman who fraudulently impersonated a student at three separate BPS schools over the past year. Superintendent Skipper did not provide any further information about this fraud but said the Boston Police Department is investigating the matter. She then provided an update on BPS summer learning opportunities, sharing that enrollment data exceeded the goals set for this year with over a thousand more spaces filled than last year. After a short discussion of MassCore and a recap of accomplishments from the past year, the remainder of the Superintendent’s Report was devoted to a state-mandated update on transformation schools. This report contained only a brief mention of attendance trends among the 30 transformation schools and did not delve into any further data on performance or outcomes. School Committee members expressed frustration at the lack of content in this update, pointing out the stark contrast to the hours spent discussing the three exam schools. Members also raised the recent Boston Globe article about disparities among BPS high schools and pressed for the Superintendent and her team to develop a resource for parents that outlines the academic and extracurricular offerings at every school (similar to what was included in the Globe story).

The majority of the meeting was devoted to public comment, in which dozens of commenters testified against moving the O’Bryant School to West Roxbury, and others expressed their opinions on the personnel controversy at BLA. The lack of information about the O’Bryant announcement was a consistent theme throughout the meeting, and the meeting ended with a plea from the Committee for a more defined and robust public engagement strategy.

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Ep. 87, Last Night @ School Committee: 6/7 Meeting Recap Jun 08, 2023

Show notes

Last night’s meeting began with a discussion of a big announcement made the previous day by Mayor Wu and Superintendent Skipper regarding changes to several BPS high schools. On Tuesday, these leaders announced a vision that included relocating the O’Bryant School to the vacant West Roxbury Education Complex in a new, state-of-the-art facility and expanding the Madison Park School to fill the space vacated by the O’Bryant, allowing Madison Park to double its enrollment. Superintendent Skipper reiterated this vision in last night’s meeting, and members asked about timeline, budget, and public engagement, noting that members of these communities and School Committee members themselves were not briefed prior to this announcement. The Superintendent’s team shared that this work will not begin until 2025 and that a more comprehensive plan will be presented at a later date.

The meeting moved on to public comment, where 61 speakers signed up to testify. The majority of comments were from teachers and community members asking the School Committee to support a comprehensive ethnic studies curriculum in the district (School Committee Chair Robinson later noted that she has not seen any written materials on this and requested that these materials be made available prior to the next meeting). Additional testimony was given on four other topics. Many parents testified about Boston Latin Academy Head of School Gavin Smith, whom the Superintendent noted has been the target of complaints from the school community. Others testified about the O’Bryant School announcement, with teachers at the school expressing frustration about not being consulted in the decision. Several parents from the Shaw School spoke about their dissatisfaction with the ongoing merger with the Taylor School, despite the fact that this merger was approved by the Committee last meeting. And several parents and students testified in favor of amending the current exam school policy by changing the allocation of bonus points, adjusting the number of invitations in proportion to the number of applicants per socioeconomic tier, and adding more overall exam school seats, in order to solve for the many qualified students denied a seat under the new admissions protocol.

This was the focus of the remainder of the meeting, beginning with a presentation from BPS on data from the recent exam school admissions cycle. The report recapped the reasons for the adoption of the new policy and demonstrated that the policy did succeed in expanding exam school access to a broader array of BPS schools and neighborhoods. At the same time, the data showed that exam school admission was determined primarily by the socioeconomic tier in which a student was placed, with all students in lower tiers accepted compared to less than half of students in higher tiers. Similarly, students in lower tiers were accepted with a composite score as low as 64.8/100, while students in higher tiers were rejected with near-perfect (or, in one case, perfect) scores. Parents have repeatedly testified at School Committee about flaws in the setup of these tiers, with same streets divided into two tiers and vast income disparities within single tiers. Last night, members pressed for reconsidering certain elements of this policy – including awarding bonus points on an individual rather than a schoolwide basis – and for expanding seats so that every eligible student can be awarded an exam school seat, but BPS leaders held firm that they would not consider any changes to this policy for at least five years.

The next School Committee meeting will take place Wednesday, June 21 at 5pm on Zoom.

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Ep. 86, Last Night @ School Committee: 5/24 Meeting Recap May 25, 2023

Show notes

Last night’s meeting began with the Superintendent’s Report, which started with a moment of silence for the recent loss of two students. The Superintendent then discussed a recent Boston Globe article on chronic absenteeism, noting that BPS has seen a 7% improvement in its chronic absenteeism rate but still has a long way to go (chronic absenteeism is currently around 40%). School Committee members pressed the Superintendent for answers on two other issues that have been in the news recently. First, members asked about a recent controversy surrounding improper payment of a plumbing contract, to which the Superintendent noted that an external auditor will be reviewing procurement practices. She also noted that the district has hired a director to lead its internal auditing office but is still working to grow that capacity. Second, members asked for data on exam school admissions, seeking the number of students who applied and did not get a seat. The Superintendent was unable to answer this question but said she would provide this data at the next meeting. (For more information about the exam school admissions process, including an eleventh-hour change in the policy that was ultimately adopted, listen to our recap from that July 2021 vote).

The meeting moved on to public comment, where parents raised concerns about discrepancies in exam school admissions, overdue back-pay for educators, and the impending mergers of the Shaw/Taylor and Sumner/Philbrick Schools – a topic that would be brought to a vote later in the meeting.

After public comment, the School Committee voted on withdrawal from the Massachusetts School Choice Program. This annual vote is typically perfunctory, with School Committee members quickly adopting the Superintendent's recommendation not to participate in school choice, but last night there was a lively discussion and a close vote. Members questioned the district’s logic in opting out of participation, highlighting how this program could help create more pathways for students and increase enrollment in under-enrolled schools. The motion to continue opting out of participation in school choice ultimately passed 3-2, with one abstention.

After the school choice vote, the School Committee held two votes on merging the Shaw/Taylor and Sumner/Philbrick Schools. Again, members pushed for details about both the merger process – including a calendar for public engagement over the next year – and the specifics for each school – including who will lead the merged communities, what services will be provided to students, and how much funding the combined entities will be given. The Superintendent and her team said the work to answer these questions will happen after the vote and advocated for the Committee to move forward. The Committee approved both mergers unanimously.

The meeting ended with a report on a recommended admissions policy for the Madison Park Technical Vocational High School. In response to a state mandate that all vocational schools have an admissions policy, BPS presented a new policy by which students would apply and submit teacher recommendations, rather than being assigned to the school without applying (which currently happens for 30% of students). According to the new policy, students who apply beyond the current capacity will be selected by lottery. Members were receptive to this policy that gives students more agency in the schools they choose.

The next School Committee meeting will take place Wednesday, June 7 at 5pm on Zoom.

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Ep. 85, Last Night @ School Committee: 5/10 Meeting Recap May 11, 2023

Show notes

Last night was a short School Committee meeting beginning with the Superintendent’s Report, which focused on summer program enrollment. School Committee members pressed for details on exam school admissions, a topic notably absent from the Superintendent’s Report despite students having just received invitations last Friday, and multiple parents joined public comment to express frustrations with errors that led to their students being incorrectly rejected from their top choice schools.

The Superintendent and her team then presented on the Massachusetts School Choice Program – a discussion and vote required annually – and argued for the School Committee to reject School Choice at their next meeting. More than half of the districts in Massachusetts allow School Choice, meaning students from other districts can enroll in their schools and vice versa, while Boston and its surrounding communities do not (this map from 2017 shows interesting geographic trends across the state on school choice). BPS leaders cited increasing enrollment as a reason to vote against School Choice, while in reality the district has acknowledged that enrollment is declining. They also expressed concern that students from surrounding districts would flood into Boston schools but did not acknowledge that Boston would likely lose students to neighboring communities as well. The vote on this program will be held at the next meeting.

The last report of the evening was an update of the district’s Systemic Improvement Plan (SIP), which was intended to highlight the district’s progress in meeting key state mandates around transportation, student safety, special education, multilingual education, and data and accountability. The long presentation provided only a high-level overview of actions the district is taking but did not address metrics or outcomes, and Committee members pushed for answers about how BPS leaders are implementing plans and evaluating success. Members of the Superintendent’s team responded to these performance-oriented questions with process-oriented answers, and Superintendent Skipper stepped in on multiple occasions to provide further detail.

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Ep. 84, Last Night @ School Committee: 4/26 Meeting Recap Apr 27, 2023

Show notes

Last night’s meeting began with the Superintendent’s Report, which focused on acceleration academies and summer programming. The Superintendent discussed the district’s expansion of summer learning seats, announcing that BPS now has the capacity to serve 17,000 students this summer, with about 4,500 students already enrolled. There was no discussion of the process for choosing and enrolling in specific programs, which is a frequent concern among parents.

There were over a dozen public comments at last night’s meeting. Half of the commenters testified about systemic shortcomings affecting their child’s education, from a lack of special education services to buses that don’t show up. The other half of comments were from parents troubled by the district’s engagement process for school mergers, raising issues with efforts from BPS leaders to move ahead with these projects despite incomplete information and insufficient community input.

These comments directly related to the main presentation of last night’s meeting: a report on capital planning and school mergers. The Superintendent and her team discussed the need to consolidate given declining enrollment paired with expiring federal relief dollars – a notable tone shift from previous budget discussions – and also highlighted their desire to ensure every school is fully-inclusive through the merger process. The lack of clarity around the vision guiding the merger process was complemented by a lack of clarity about the process itself. The Mayor’s Office presented a process involving six planning steps to happen over eight weeks each in a repeating cycle over the next year as the district makes decisions about which schools should close and merge. School Committee members questioned the abstract nature of this outline, advocating for the district to instead provide parents with concrete dates and deadlines, but were left with more unanswered questions. The meeting ended with a comment from School Committee member Dr. Stephen Alkins calling on the Committee to improve how it communicates with – and reflects the desires of – the families it serves.

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Ep. 83, Last Night @ School Committee: 4/12 Meeting Recap Apr 13, 2023

Show notes

Last night was a short School Committee meeting, with only one report on transformation schools. The meeting began with the Superintendent’s report, in which she touched on two issues. First, Superintendent Skipper discussed an error in the exam schools admissions process that led to the miscalculation of student GPAs, affecting eligibility for dozens of students. The exam schools admissions process has been a major focus area for the Committee over the past three years, despite representing just a small minority of BPS students, and the Superintendent noted last night that both the district and its external auditor did not catch this critical error until it was ultimately flagged by an impacted parent. Second, Superintendent Skipper discussed ongoing issues with the Henderson School including errors in recent school job postings – a topic that was also brought up during public comment.

Following votes to approve several new union contracts, the only report of the night was an update on transformation schools. Transformation schools – a label given to the lowest-performing schools in the district based on state rankings – include about a quarter of BPS schools. The report highlighted several areas of concern at these schools, including chronic absenteeism rates of over 40% and high numbers of staff vacancies (Madison Park alone has 60 vacant positions). District-wide, BPS high school students last year missed an average of 31.5 days – more than six weeks – leading to concerns from Committee members about what’s driving increases in absenteeism and what steps district leaders are taking to address it.

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Ep. 82, Last Night @ School Committee: 3/22 Meeting Recap Mar 23, 2023

Show notes

Last night, the School Committee spent the majority of its time discussing and voting on the Superintendent’s final budget recommendation for the next fiscal year. The School Committee was split on the budget: some members expressed hesitance about adding to the district’s hundreds of vacancies and creating a fiscal cliff in future years, while others applauded the investments in the budget and emphasized the necessity of approving it. This conversation ultimately turned to confusion, as the Chair, Vice Chair, Committee members, and even a BPS legal advisor each expressed a different understanding of what happens if this budget is not approved. Ultimately, with remaining uncertainty about their own budget process, the Chair proceeded with the vote and the budget was approved by a vote of 4-2. The budget now goes to the City Council for final approval in May.

The rest of the meeting touched on a few other topics. In her report, Superintendent Skipper provided an update on summer programming, announcing that registration is open and that the district is working to engage as many students and families as possible. The Superintendent also addressed the annual Health and Risk Survey provided to schools in light of a public controversy around the wording of certain questions.

Following the budget vote, the School Committee also voted to approve the new transportation management contract with Transdev, along with a proposal to the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) for a new building space for a merged Shaw and Taylor School. The remainder of the evening was spent on three reports. The first two reports were on new contract negotiations with the Lunch Monitor’s Association and Boston Police Superior Officers Federation. The last report of the evening was a presentation on chronic absenteeism. The report indicated that chronic absenteeism in the district has decreased by 8% compared to last year, although rates still indicate high absenteeism, particularly among high school students, multilingual learners, and students with IEPs. The Superintendent and Committee members reiterated their concern about this data and discussed their proactive strategies to improve communication with impacted students and families.

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Ep. 81, Last Night @ School Committee: 3/15 Meeting Recap Mar 16, 2023

Show notes

Last night’s meeting began with a one-hour budget hearing, followed by a lengthy discussion of three main topics: budget, transportation, and school mergers. Superintendent Skipper began her report with an overview of a new organizational chart for BPS, increasing the number of department chiefs reporting to three deputy superintendents. School Committee members raised questions about the number of new positions created and how the Central Office will fill these on top of existing vacancies.

The first of three three main reports last night was an updated budget for the next fiscal year. This updated budget comes after three budget hearings over the last month, and it included additional funding for collective bargaining agreements with several unions. Committee members expressed concerns about the looming fiscal cliff after federal ESSER relief money runs out, given the addition of a substantial number of new positions paired with a continued decline in enrollment. The Committee will bring this budget to a vote next week.

The second report last night was on the district’s new contract with its bus management company. The Superintendent’s team presented its 5-year contract proposal with current vendor Transdev and explained the bidding process that resulted in only one bidder. As the district continues to face significant shortcomings with its transportation system, the Superintendent’s team reiterated that the new contract is structured to incentivize key improvements. Each Committee member pressed the Superintendent on issues ranging from why only one bid was received, to the status of discussions with Lyft about providing alternative transportation, to how the district will address the underlying complexities of its transportation system.

The third and final report of the night was a presentation on a statement of interest to the Massachusetts School Building Authority requesting funding for a new building to merge the Shaw and Taylor Schools. This comes as the district continues to audit school buildings as part of the “Green New Deal” planning process. BPS leaders noted that the current Shaw and Taylor facilities have not yet been audited, and there is not yet a plan in place for what to do with those facilities after completion of the new building. Members expressed concerns about moving forward with this request while the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and the Blackstone School communities currently lack adequate facilities, and members called into question the timing of this announcement while a master facilities plan is still under active development.

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Ep. 80, Last Night @ School Committee: 2/15 Meeting Recap Feb 16, 2023

Show notes

Last night’s meeting began with the Superintendent’s Report, the majority of which focused on transportation and transformation schools. Superintendent Skipper discussed the recent controversy over a pending RFP for management of the bus system that received only one bidder – current management company Transdev. She also celebrated the addition of new electric buses to the BPS fleet, the beginning of a $259 million effort to replace all 739 yellow school buses with electric alternatives. School Committee members raised concerns about discussing transportation without addressing significant underlying issues like student assignment and declining enrollment.

After a brief public comment period, the remainder of the meeting was spent on a preliminary discussion of the equitable grading policy. During the discussion, Chair Jeri Robinson raised a larger issue of BPS’ failure to prepare many of its top students for life after high school, and members raised concerns that important structural issues facing BPS are not being addressed in these meetings. These comments and the discussion that followed highlighted key shortcomings in the School Committee process and governance, an issue tied up in the larger citywide conversation about moving to an elected School Committee.

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Ep. 79, Last Night @ School Committee: 2/1 Meeting Recap Feb 02, 2023

Show notes

Last night’s meeting marked the beginning of the annual BPS budget process. The meeting began with the Superintendent’s Report, in which Superintendent Skipper discussed the district’s progress in implementing contractually-obligated back-pay for educators and new developments in the school merger process. The Superintendent noted that she has added staff to ensure employees receive appropriate pay, and she announced that the planned mergers of the Shaw and Taylor schools, and of the Sumner and Philbrick schools, will be delayed to future years to allow more time to engage the school communities.

The majority of the meeting was spent on the Superintendent’s preliminary budget recommendation. The Superintendent and her team presented a $1.4 billion budget, which represents a $65 million increase over last year and a 39% increase in per pupil spending ($28k per student). The proposal includes additional investments of approximately $12 million for transportation, $10 million for inclusive practices, and $6 million for multilingual education. The proposal also includes 209 new full-time positions, on top of all current vacancies. While the budget continues to grow year-over-year, the proposal lacked details on metrics and implementation, and members expressed concerns about how this money will be spent and why key structural issues are being kicked down the road.

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