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

Last Night At School Committee

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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