Weekly Transcript Round-Up 8/30/24: Superintendent Evaluated; Council approves Zoning Appointees w/o more questions

WATCH FOR NEXT WEEK’S EMAIL: BPI IS RAMPING UP FOR THE FALL.

BPI will have a Primary Day look at where Boston’s City Councilors stand on housing production, an issue getting a lot more attention on the Democratic side of the aisle after Vice President Kamala Harris proposed building 3 million new homes and President Obama captured the issue with this line: “WE NEED TO BUILD MORE UNITS AND CLEAR AWAY SOME OF THE OUTDATED LAWS AND REGULATIONS,” at the Democratic National Convention earlier this month.

Here is a sneak peek of that post:

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This past Wednesday BPI sent out four questions we wanted to see get answered at this week’s City Council and School Committee meetings. The TL;DR: BPI’s questions didn’t get asked.

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CHECK OUT THOSE QUESTIONS HERE:

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Today’s WTR is going to go into a little more detail on what happened at each meeting.

SCHOOL COMMITTEE

First up is the School Committee meeting. You can read the whole transcript for that meeting here - it is one of the AI-generated transcripts that BPI provides to the public free of charge.

The meeting clocked it at more than three hours, so here is how the Shah Foundation’s ‘Last Night at School Committee’ summarized the Superintendent’s Evaluation part of the meeting:

The School Committee’s main vote of the evening was approving the Superintendent’s evaluation and performance rating. There was not any public comment on the Superintendent per se, but public comments about the Superintendent’s evaluation focused more on the process and criteria that the School Committee used to evaluate progress in the district and the superintendent herself. The School Committee unanimously approved the Superintendent’s evaluation and performance rating.

The answer to BPI’s first question for the School Committee got an answer in that summary. As a reminder, here is the question: Why didn’t Superintendent Skipper follow the traditional evaluation schedule and release her self-evaluation at the end of July?

The answer appears to be so that BPS can move as quickly as possible away from the deep and public disagreements on the School Committee and intense criticism from parents, teachers, and long-time observers about the Superintendent’s performance. For the view from parents, check out Boston Education Justice Alliance Executive Director Ruby Reyes’ public comment - she is Speaker 25 and her comment starts at the 1:32:40 mark in the transcript.

To illustrate the disagreements among the School Committee, and between them and the Superintendent, here is how Skipper’s own self-evaluation lined up with the School Committee’s:

School Committee Members and the Superintendent disagreed about how she performed over the past year.

BPI’s other question for the School Committee also didn’t get answered. Here is that question: 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? The reason was clear: the Superintendent does not want to talk the broad challenges facing BPS.

While BPI’s question focused on collapsing faith in the Central Office among BPS’ school leaders, there were two other issue raised repeatedly in public comments and by School Committee members that also didn’t get addressed:

• 80% of 4th graders not reading at grade level - read more from the Globe’s investigation of this issue;

• No real long-term facilities plan, eight months after the state’s deadline for that plan and with less than a year left on the Systemic Improvement Plan - read more from the Globe about the Skipper & Wu’s administrations unwillingness to address the issue.

Instead of focusing on school buildings or student performance, the School Committee’s meeting instead captured attention for its moves on Boston’s controversy of the moment: the plan to privatize White Stadium - check out the Globe’s article here and headline below:

CITY COUNCIL

Similar to the School Committee, the City Council spent little time asking more questions about the agenda items BPI was watching at their meeting Wednesday: the 13 zoning appointees whose were up for a vote - the debate over these dockets starts at about the 50:39 mark of the meeting and ends at about the 1:08:40 mark. Unfortunately the transcript for this meeting is not yet available, but BPI will provide time stamps from the video of Wednesday’s meeting.

Most prominent in their lack of questions was District 7 City Councilor Tania Fernandez Anderson. That’s because the first question that BPI wanted to see answered at this meeting concerned a development project in her district.

Here is that question: 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?

This was an important question for Councilor Fernandez Anderson to ask because she didn’t attend the August 12th hearing, and the appointee who was up for approval submitted a letter rather than appear in person or virtually. That means that no Councilor was able to ask her any question. On top of that, the body Ward Hyatt was appointed to refused to comment in the recent Globe article. That means that this Council approval process, which is intended to shed light on the important work that these zoning bodies perform, is failing.

Councilor Fernandez Anderson’s lack of interest in this appointee was even more puzzling because of a resolution she submitted calling for support for a different development project in her district that was having trouble with a body whose members require Council approval: Docket #1304 a Resolution in support of the New Madinah Community Development Project.

At Wednesday’s meeting Councilor Fernandez Anderson laid out in detail the issues facing that development project and criticized the decision by the Boston Planning & Development Agency Board not to vote on it. Here is part of the resolution - this is on page 151 of the Council’s agenda packet from Wednesday’s meeting:

As is made clear from the actions around the next question, a significant part of the reason that the City’s boards and commissions ignore complaints like the one made by Councilor Fernandez Anderson is that those serving on these bodies face little chance of ever being asked about their decision-making. Even when they are, as in the case of the recent Boston Globe article, they can refuse comment. Ignoring the opportunity to ask detailed questions and choosing to pursue other priorities - as Councilor Fernandez Anderson did in this case - only reinforces that reasoning.

The Council also failed on the second question BPI wanted to see answered: 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?

Councilor Coletta Zapata got some rhetorical support from her colleagues for asking a Zoning Board of Appeals appointee about whether she had been briefed on a recently completed planning process in East Boston. While that line of questioning got Councilor Coletta Zapata quite a bit of press and notice, none of her colleagues joined her in asking any additional questions of any of the 13 appointees.

The Council’s refusal to ask questions stands in sharp contrast with their very public frustration with how Boston handles development projects - highlighted this week by Councilor Fernandez Anderson.

If any other Councilors follow Coletta Zapata’s lead and put together deeply researched and well prepared questions about the various planning and zoning issues facing their own neighbors, BPI will include it in a future issue of Weekly Transcript Round-Up.

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