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

Last Night At School Committee

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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