Weekly Transcript Round-up for 9/14/24: June '25 deadline puts BPS' failures on Gov Healey's radar; BPS' late buses dominate Council & School Cmte Mtgs
This week saw the first meetings of the City Council & School Committee since Boston Public Schools (BPS) had their first day of school, and BPS’ transportation’s historically low rate of on-time pick-up & delivery of students was the top issue at both meetings. While that specific failure got a lot of press attention this week, what has gotten less attention is how BPS’ failures are now issues that Governor Maura Healey will have to deal with.
In addition to why Governor Healey is likely watching BPS closely and BPS’ late buses, there were a number of other issues that got touched on this week:
The Council & School Committee are headed in opposite directions on the plan to turn White Stadium into a professional soccer stadium, with the Council filing information requests & the SC unanimously approving important action.
The Council had a number of interesting issues on its agenda: a grant from the MA Gaming Commission that got some press; a report on where students who attend Boston’s local universities live; two ordinances to make offices created by Mayor Wu’s executive action permanent; and an updated version of a resolution about the BPS Sunday program that Councilors publicly fought about last spring.
The SC had a discussion that showed how the lack of a long-term facilities plan is ham-stringing members and highlighted how BPS Superintendent Mary Skipper is taking a different approach to a $38M education grant than she did to a $10M grant when leading Somerville’s Public School System.
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WITH JUNE 2025 DEADLINE, BPS’ FAILURES ON GOV HEALEY’S RADAR
As a reminder: In June 2022, Mayor Wu and the Massachusetts’ Department of Elementary & Secondary Education struck an agreement which prevented a state takeover of Boston’s public school system. While Mayor Wu remained in control of BPS, in exchange she signed an agreement pledging that BPS would hit a number of major goals over the next three years. BPS has met some of those goals but on two biggest ticket items - a long-term facilities plan for school buildings and getting students to and from school 95% on-time - the district appears very unlikely to meet the June 2025 deadline.
Outside of those June 2025 goals, BPS also faces other major issues around student achievement: for example, only 32 percent of BPS’ 3rd graders scored proficient in last year’s English-language arts MCAS test.
With Boston on track to come up short on its end of the agreement, it will be up to Governor Healey to decide how her administration will react to that failure. Back in June 2022, under Governor Baker’s administration, then-DESE Commissioner Jeff Riley appeared ready to take over BPS - will Governor Healey feel the same way in June 2025?
There is not an answer yet, but BPI is monitoring this issue closely.
LATE BPS BUSES DOMINATE COUNCIL & SC MEETINGS
Both the Council and School Committee had their meetings on Wednesday.
The Council meeting was first and District 2 City Councilor Ed Flynn was the sponsor of a hearing order about BPS’ late school buses: docket #1349 was for a hearing on Boston Public Schools’ transportation in the first week of school - an issue that has gotten a lot of attention this week after BPS’ extremely poor performance.
BPS’ buses had their worst ever first day performance, not just under the Mayor Wu administration, but stretching all the way back to at least 2016, when then-Mayor Marty Walsh was in his 3rd year in office. Here is an excellent graphic put together by the Boston Globe:
The discussion of late buses starts at the 40:26 mark of the transcript and includes this critique of BPS from Councilor Julia Mejia - she is Speaker 10 and this comment starts at the 50:19 mark in the transcript:
I fought against the receivership, and here we are again upholding and defending a system that continues to fail our students. And so we can't come into this chamber and say we want to do things differently when we don't have the political courage or will sometimes to get it right.
After Wednesday’s meeting, Councilors Flynn and Murphy sent a letter to DESE, in which they “urge[d] DESE to take immediate and decisive action,” on the transportation delays by taking four specific actions. You can read a copy of that letter here.
The School Committee meeting on Wednesday afternoon also featured a lot of complaints about late buses. To answer School Committee members’ questions, the Superintendent brought along Dan Rosengard, who serves as the Executive Director of Transportation at Boston Public Schools, and he answered questions for about 30 minutes - he is Speaker 8 and this first comment is at the 29:42 mark and his last comment starts at the 1:00:35 mark, which can be read in the transcript.
OPPOSITE APPROACHES ON WHITE STADIUM AT COUNCIL & SCHOOL CMTE
Both the Council and School Committee also discussed White Stadium on Wednesday.
The School Committee had more action and discussion on the issue: White Stadium was mentioned 25 times at Wednesday’s meeting by 16 different people. The mentions were almost all during public comment period.
The School Committee’s official action was short, with a vote by the School Committee that Superintendent Skipper explained would:
Grant me as the superintendent the authorization to enter into a lease agreement with Boston Unity Soccer Partners . . . The finalization of the lease agreement will allow the city's public facilities department to move forward with demolition of a part of the existing stadium this fall.
Discussion of the agenda item and the School Committee’s vote start at the 2:44:11 mark of the transcript.
The Council’s discussion of White Stadium was quite limited, with Councilor Murphy filing a 17F request for the following documents:
The documents identified in the Boston Planning Department’s memo related to approval of the project at White Stadium, including the lease between Boston Public Schools, Boston Unity Soccer Club, LLC, and any other interested or involved parties, the Stadium Usage Agreement, Cooperation Agreement, and Transportation Access Plan Agreement.
As a reminder, 17F refers to the City of Boston’s charter which states: “at any time the council may request from the mayor specific information as it relates to city business.” Councilor Murphy is Speaker 3 and speaks about the request is at 1:49:47 mark in the transcript.
CITY COUNCIL TALKS GAMING, STUDENT HOUSING, ORDINANCES, & CONTENTIOUS BPS SUNDAY PROGRAM
Docket #1135 was for the Council to approve a “Community Mitigation Grant” from the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, and was sent to Ways & Means for a hearing. The grant was just two pages of the agenda packet, but the whole grant application that Boston submitted is 52 pages long - read it all here. This is an annual grant, and Commonwealth Beacon wrote about how Boston is spending the grant money they were awarded last year, answering the question: does living near a casino impact youth gambling habits?
Reading the grant application, another question immediately jumps to mind: the City’s application asked for $2.6M but the award was only for $2.3M, so what was left out? This docket was sent to the Ways & Means Committee, so there will be a chance to answer that question.
Docket #1337 was the University Accountability Statistical Report. The report was just one page in the City Council’s agenda packet, but the table is actually the result of a much longer process. Check both the table the Council got in their agenda packet and how the City Clerk describes this report on his website:
Docket #1162 was for an ordinance to make the Office for Black Male Advancement permanent. This ordinance was sent to the Government Operations Committee, but in an unusual choice, the ordinance did not have a hearing - instead it had a working session. Working sessions are open to the public, but the Council treats them as effectively off-the-record: Councilors often refuse to say who proposed what in these meetings and there are no video recordings and no minutes. The choice to have a working session and not a hearing was even more unusual after Councilor Coletta Zapata described the meeting - she is Speaker 8 and this comment starts at the 28:49 mark in the transcript:
We heard from chair of the commission [former District 7 Councilor & 2017 Boston Mayoral candidate] Tito Jackson and executive director Frank Farrow and various other staff members within the office [of Black Male Advancement].
This is not a description of a working session, where Councilors are marking up a piece of legislation - it is of a hearing, where Councilors are asking questions to gather information. The ordinance was kept in committee, so there is more action to come on this docket.
Docket #1347, like the just mentioned Docket #1162, is an ordinance to turn an office created by Mayor Wu through executive action into a permanent part of Boston’s city government. This ordinance would institutionalize the Office of Labor Compliance and Worker Protections, and it is being proposed not by the Wu administration, but by District 6 City Councilor Ben Weber. Councilor Weber has already filed a number of proposals that this Office plays a major role in, and this ordinance appears aimed at ensuring those other proposals are firmly secured to Boston’s city government. By pursuing that inter-linked set of proposal, this ordinance also highlights that Councilor Weber is one of the few members of the body who is pursuing that sort of identifiable and achievable policy agenda. Councilor Weber is Speaker 7 and his remarks on the docket start at the 32:00 mark in the transcript.
Docket #1351 is an updated version of a resolution that Councilors Flynn and Murphy have offered in the past: a hearing order to discuss the program that provides free museum passes to BPS students & their families. An earlier version of this resolution was sent to committee, where a hearing scheduled and then cancelled in what turned into a fight between different Councilors and the Wu administration. There was significantly more support for the resolution this time around, with Councilor Santana, the Committee Chair who controversially cancelled the hearing earlier in the year, saying he “look[ed] forward to the discussion.” He is Speaker 9 and his comment starts at the 1:06:54 mark in the transcript. Discussion of the docket starts at the 1:03:10 mark.
STILL NO LONG-TERM FACILITIES PLAN & ECHO OF SOMERVILLE FAILURE
Outside school buses and White Stadium, the other School Committee agenda item to watch was a request to increase enrollment at a BPS school, which touched on two issues. The first is the other unmet goal in the BPS-DESE agreement besides on-time buses: a long-term facilities plan. The second was how Boston and Somerville handled very similar grants very differently, which merits a closer examination because Mary Skipper was Superintendent in both instances.
The school that BPS was requesting to expand was the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers, which has been in the news this year after receiving a $38M grant from the Bloomberg CTE Healthcare Initiative.
Here is the exchange between School Committee member Brandon Cardet-Hernandez and Superintendent Skipper - he is Speaker 1 and she is Speaker 6 and this exchange starts at the 1:14:13 mark in the transcript:
CARDET-HERNANDEZ: We're adding a 100 seats and we're already experiencing decline, what's that journey? And is there a vision that this is happening simultaneously, right, or we're we're naming this expansion and identifying where we're reducing seat availability?
SKIPPER: Sure. We are not naming tonight where that offset would be. That will come as we talk about long term facilities plan and we do the routine that we've talked about in the spring.
This exchange points to the issue not having a long-term facilities plan raises for the School Committee: they do not know how this increase in seats affects the rest of BPS’ schools. In this case for example, the EMK’s focus on career readiness appears to make it a competitor to Madison Park Technical High School, which hosts similar programs and is currently going through a multi-million dollar renovation.
The discussion about the EMK and the need to meet the requirements of the $38M grant from Bloomberg - which include both expanding the number of students attending the school and getting the school into a permanent facility - echo an issue that Superintendent Mary Skipper dealt with in Somerville, where she led the public school system before coming to Boston. There, Powderhouse Studio won a $10M grant from an organization backed by the widow of Apple founder & CEO Steve Jobs, Lauren Powell Jobs, to create an innovative new high school.
Superintendent Skipper initially support the idea, but eventually came out against it - here is what Ed Weekly wrote:
Somerville schools superintendent Mary Skipper had been instrumental in keeping the approval process moving forward when prospects looked bleak. She wouldn’t be voting tonight, but she planned to offer a recommendation to elected officials. And then there was the $10 million. Resnick and Duffy had won the money in a national competition to finish designing and ultimately open and run their high school, and the pair knew it had helped maintain interest in their idea. Voting against them would mean walking away from a lot of outside funding.
The Somerville School Committee, which is elected by voters with the Mayor as an ex-officio member and Chair, unanimously rejected the Powderhouse Studio proposal in 2019.
The major reason the effort failed was cost - it is expensive to build, staff, and operate a new high school, and those costs become even greater when that school is recruiting students from an existing district. Ultimately, after an intense public process which is described in detail in that Ed Weekly article Somerville decided the costs were not worth it.
For observers of Boston’s school decision-making, reading the article shows how different things operate in Somerville, and raises further concerns about BPS’ lack of an answer to SCM Cardet-Hernandez’s question.
Fortunately, Superintendent Skipper played a major role in the Powderhouse Studio process in Somerville, and can talk about why she thinks the Bloomberg/EMK proposal is different.
If the Superintendent talks about these two processes, BPI will provide an update.
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