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City, state officials celebrate Mather School’s 375th anniversary

Yawu Miller
Yawu Miller is the former senior editor of the Bay State Banner. He has written for the Banner since 1988.... VIEW BIO
City, state officials celebrate Mather School’s 375th anniversary
New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, a Mather School graduate, and Mayor Martin Walsh chat with students during a celebration of the school’s 375th anniversary. (Photo: Isabel Leon)

When the Mather School first opened in 1639, Dorchester was a nine-year-old community settled by a handful of Puritans. The first class included six boys. And the colonists used a levy on cattle grazing in Dorchester to pay the salary of the schoolmaster, making the Mather the first publicly-funded elementary school in the United States.

Fast forward a few hundred years, and Mather bears little resemblance to the original one-room school house that sat near the corner of present-day Pleasant and Cottage streets.

The 1905 brick building on Parish Street the school currently inhabits holds nearly 600 children. When the students at today’s Mather School greet visiting alumni and city and state officials who have come to mark the school’s 375th anniversary, they open the gathering in the school’s auditorium with a rendition of the West African welcoming song, Fanga Alafia.

“All of us at the Mather are excited to celebrate this important milestone for the Mather and for public education in the United States,” announced Principal Emily Cox.

Now Boston schools are funded by property taxes, not cattle grazing levies. And black, Cape Verdean, Latino and Vietnamese children now dominate the student body.

“We reflect the wonderful diversity of Dorchester, the city and the country,” Cox said. “That diversity is one of our greatest strengths.”

As much as the Mather and Boston have changed over the last four centuries, the core value of providing a free education to all children remains at the heart of city and state government.

“We’re unique in Massachusetts and in Boston,” noted Massachusetts Education Secretary Matthew Malone. “We’ve preserved our sense of history and core values in ways the rest of the country wishes they could.

“This is where we open doors, close gaps and guarantee a pathway to the middle class. This is the central function of the entire state government. We are the greatest state in the country because we’ve invested in education. We don’t do oil. We don’t do corn. We do brains.”

Among those present at the Oct. 22 celebration were city councilors Frank Baker and Ayanna Pressley, state Reps. Evandro Carvalho and Dan Hunt, state Sen. Linda Dorcena Forry and Mayor Martin Walsh, who read a congratulatory letter from President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

Also present was New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, who attended the Mather in the 1950s, and Charlotte Golar Richie, whose daughters attended the school in the 1990s on their way to the Martin Luther King School, Boston Latin, Dartmouth and Duke.

“We have many wonderful memories of the Mather,” she said. “We’re still connected to this school. We love this school. It’s been great for us in so many ways.”

The Mather school backers’ claim that the school is the first public school is not uncontested. Boston Latin School opened in 1635 near present-day School Street in Downtown Boston. Its present day motto, “sumus primi” is Latin for “we are first.”

But that school was not originally publicly funded, as the Mather was.

Mayor Walsh, who proclaimed Oct. 22 Mather Elementary School Day, refused to weigh in on the centuries-old dispute.

“I’m not going to get into that argument,” he said. “All I know is I’m from Dorchester and we’re at the Mather.”