BPS

Boston Public Schools parents, students and educators are led on a dizzying merry-go-round when it comes to their schools.

After teaching in the Boston Public Schools for four years, I left the system this summer. I witnessed how the system poorly responded to students during a pandemic that led to unimaginable loss, hurting communities that had already been dismissed for too long.

The Boston Public Schools has told the City Council that the district does not maintain a list of people who shouldn’t be hired or rehired, a practice that a former employee and the teachers union indicated they suspected was in place.

The mayorally appointed School Committee gave Superintendent Mary Skipper a mark of “proficient” upon completing her first year. But the formal evaluation’s results did not incorporate the many voices who testified to the broken promises of communication and community engagement, rash building decisions, persistent transportation disasters and a budget process that was embarrassingly uninformed.

The inconclusive findings of an investigation into Boston Public Schools’ treatment of senior administrators of color have left critics frustrated.

A prolonged investigation into allegations that a dozen Boston Public Schools administrators of color have been pushed out of their jobs has left the former administrators and their allies frustrated and concerned.

The city’s proposal to restore and expand Madison Park Technical Vocational High School and relocate the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science has been garnering a lot of attention in recent days.

Parents, students and teachers expressed a litany of concerns about a proposal by Mayor Michelle Wu and Superintendent Mary Skipper to relocate the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science to the West Roxbury Education Complex. 

On June 6, Mayor Michelle Wu and Superintendent Mary Skipper announced their proposal to move the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science from Roxbury to the West Roxbury Educational Complex. We understand many students, staff and families have conflicting feelings about this proposal, but as longtime Boston school teachers, we believe moving the city’s most diverse exam school to the least T-accessible neighborhood in the city is not in the best interests of our students.

School safety in the Boston Public Schools (BPS) is not as simple as taking a stand on police or metal detectors in schools. The real problem is that Superintendent Mary Skipper and Mayor Michelle Wu do not see schools as distinct communities.

With each superintendent and mayor comes the fabricated commitments of “transparency,” “community engagement” and “equity.” As we approach Superintendent Skipper’s eighth month on the job and only three short months from the end of the school year, BPS families have continued to wait for quality BPS leadership, visionary goals and transparency.

The Boston Public Schools is way up there among the state’s biggest spenders and must tighten its belt. That’s the impression you get from media reports, and also from top BPS administrators, who often speak of “unsustainable” spending that must urgently be reined in — for example, by closing small schools. But let’s take a closer look.