4 Questions for Today's Council & School Committee Meetings
13 Mayoral Zoning picks need Council approval & School Cmte's determines their official Superintendent's Evaluation
The final week of summer is usually a quiet time, but today’s City Council and School Committee meetings are both going to feature major decisions for members. At both meetings there are hints that some members may not to follow the rules of what School Committee Member Brandon Cardet-Hernendez recently termed “Boston niceness”:
Here is what SCM Cardet-Hernendez said - he is Speaker 2 and this statement starts at the 1:12:18 mark in the transcript:
And I often say this as someone who is newer to Boston, there's a sort of Boston niceness that I think really serves folks well sometimes, but we've seen the historical outcomes here. I think that sort of gentle approach to feedback has not been good for kids.
Here are the agenda items at this week’s School Committee and City Council meetings that BPI is focused on, and below are two questions for each body that we hope to see answered:
The School Committee will vote on their body’s official “Superintendent’s Evaluation” - with Boston Public Schools now on the last year of the agreement that allowed it to avoid state receivership in 2022, School Committee Members (SCM’s) were all over the place on their grades of Skipper’s work over the last year.
The City Council is voting on 13 mayoral picks for various zoning boards, including the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Zoning Commission, and the Highland Park Architectural Conservation District Commission, all three of which have recently been in the news.
QUESTIONS FOR THE SCHOOL COMMITTEE
This meeting starts at 6 PM tonight. You can watch it online here and check out the agenda for the meeting here.
1. Why didn’t Superintendent Skipper follow the traditional evaluation schedule and release her self-evaluation at the end of July?
This year Superintendent Skipper violated a long-standing tradition in how her evaluation process works. Usually, the BPS Superintendent released their self-evaluation in late July, a whole month before the School Committee’s first meeting focused on that issue. Superintendent Skipper followed that traditional schedule last year, releasing her self-evaluation at the end of July, a whole month before the School Committee met to do their own evaluation.
This year the Superintendent’s self-evaluation was completed in July, but it was not released to the public, only to School Committee members - SCM Dr. Alkins is Speaker 3 and lays out this timeline in comments that start at the 29:23 mark in the transcript. The decision not to release the self-evaluation to the public meant that those outside the official process - the public, press, and outside experts - lacked important context going into the School Committee evaluation meetings.
2 . What does the Superintendent believe has caused an almost 40% decrease in the number of school leaders who think that the central office is accountable? What concrete steps is she planning on taking to remedy this collapse?
As can be seen in the table above, only 28% of BPS’ school leaders agree that “the district office is held accountable to providing the highest level of services to their school communities,” down from 45% in the previous school year. This metric is particularly worrying because since Superintendent Skipper was hired two years ago there has been an increasingly amount of anecdotal evidence that high-ranking people of color are being mistreated inside BPS:
Two wrongful termination lawsuits were filed by former high-ranking people of color at BPS just this year - one who alleges she was terminated after “she raised concerns over advancing hundreds of unprepared students learning English to a regular classroom” and another who claims “district didn’t support him after he was targeted by racist staff with sexual assault allegations.”
High profile criticism of how BPS treats leaders of color from respected education leaders in Boston, which started as an appeal to Superintendent Skipper before she started in 2022 and has grown louder throughout her tenure; and
The publication of ‘Silence Speaks’ an extremely critical report about a toxic culture of BPS’ central office - read the report here.
So far, Mayor Wu has been able to dismiss these complaints about BPS, as she did when asked about the allegations contained in the ‘Silence Speaks’ report on WBUR’s Radio Boston back in June - this question and answer starts at the 15:33 mark on the interview:
I would never say that there is no validity to experiences that educators have had around discrimination and disproportionate or unfair treatment. We know the roots of that are similar to what was covered in the court case five decades ago.* I think this particular report stems from a few specific instances, and in those cases personnel decisions that I have seen specifically referenced here, I have seen the files of what happened there . . . In the cases that I have been aware of that are specifically mentioned there was a set of protocol that was followed, there were investigations that were done, there were reasons that they resulted in how they resulted if it was a termination or a different kind of outcome.
*Mayor Wu is referring to court-ordered busing
With a hard metric that is part of a formal evaluation process for her hand-picked Superintendent however, the Mayor’s dismissal may no longer be enough.
QUESTIONS FOR THE CITY COUNCIL
This meeting starts at 12 PM today. You can watch it online here and check out the agenda for the meeting here.
1. The first high-profile decision that Highland Park Architectural Conservation District (HPACD) Commission nominee Angela Ward Hyatt will face is about the proposed 1 Elmwood Street development. Has she read the Boston Globe article about the project or followed the development process in any other way? If she has been following the process, does she believe that this project should be approved?
The HPACD Commission is at the center of fight over development and housing in Roxbury that became much better known after the Boston Globe covered the developer’s years long struggle in an article published in late July 2024. The article attracted some attention in Boston, but it got a lot more on Twitter, where YIMBYs (Yes In My Back Yard) pointed to the project as an example how Boston’s complicated zoning and development process seems designed to prevent housing from being built. Check out a tweet from local YIMBY Jonathan Berk:
Asking Ward Hyatt for her thoughts is particularly important because she did not attend the August 12 hearing of the Planning, Development, and Transportation Committee either virtually or in-person, opting instead to send a letter - watch the meeting here, the nomination is at the 57:21 mark in the transcript. That means that unlike the Zoning Board of Appeals nominees who will get discussed for the next question, City Councilors have not had an opportunity to ask Hyatt Ward any questions.
2. Will any other Councilors join District 1 City Councilor Gabriela Coletta Zapata and get Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) nominees on the record about their awareness and views of the other neighborhood specific plans - for example PLAN: Downtown or PLAN: Mattapan, both of which got recent updates? Will any Councilors ask nominees about other on-going issues, like ADU legalization at Zoning Commission, or alleged City Hall interference that the Landmarks Commissioners complained about in their April 9 letter?
At the August 12 hearing of the Planning, Development, and Transportation Committee Councilor Coletta Zapata showed what a prepared and motivated Councilor can do, closely questioning a ZBA nominee on why the board granted variances to developers that went against the new guidelines created in an exhaustive neighborhood planning process. The answer was illuminating for those who follow Boston’s development process and embarrassing for Boston’s new Planning Department, which staffs the Zoning Board of Appeals - Speaker 2 is Clr Coletta Zapata and Speaker 11 is Sherry Dong, and this exchange starts at the 25:45 mark in the transcript:
Councilor Coletta Zapata’s questions, and then the coverage of those questions in her district’s weekly newspapers, also show how much control these little-noticed appointees and the City staff who support them wield in Boston with little Council oversight. Board and Commission members who come before the Council will be the decision-makers on everything from ADU legalization to parking minimum reform to whether to change how major developments are approved - if more Councilors follow Coletta Zapata’s example, BPI will make sure to include it!
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