Ep. 93, Last Night @ School Committee: 10/4 Meeting Recap

Last Night At School Committee

Last night’s School Committee meeting began with the Superintendent’s Report, which led to a lengthy discussion of the exam school admissions policy in response to a request from member Brandon Cardet-Hernandez to amend the allocation of the ten bonus points. First, Superintendent Skipper spoke about the release of a facilities condition dashboard that gives each building in the district a condition score. She also discussed a recent open house at the West Roxbury Education Complex for O’Bryant families and announced plans to move forward with the previously-announced relocation of the O’Bryant to this location. There was no update on plans for Madison Park Technical Vocational High School, which currently shares a facility with the O’Bryant.

The Superintendent went on to talk about the exam school admissions policy, saying she understands concerns regarding flaws in the policy but cannot change the policy at this time. She cited several reasons why BPS is unable to make any changes, including a five year waiting period included in the policy; lack of available data; complexity of applying data on an individual level; and respect for the task force that developed this new policy. Member Brandon Cardet-Hernandez pushed back on each of these justifications, pointing out that nothing requires them to wait five years; the task force changed their proposed policy at the eleventh hour; the individual-level data already exists at the state level; the current policy makes it mathematically impossible for students in certain schools to get into their first choice exam school; and allocating the bonus points to individuals rather than whole schools would better meet their original intention of providing opportunity to economically disadvantaged students. These arguments were echoed by public commenters who expressed frustration with the district’s unwillingness to address the flaws in this policy.

After votes on new union agreements and a charter amendment for Boston Green Academy, the remainder of the meeting was spent discussing the district’s 2023 MCAS results. The Superintendent’s team indicated that the district made improvements from last year, noting they are no longer performing in the bottom 10% of districts statewide and are now labeled as “not requiring assistance or intervention.” Many schools showed year-over-year growth, though BPS leaders acknowledged the need for further improvement, particularly among multilingual learners. While BPS named the schools who showed substantial improvement in their scores, we did not hear what those schools are doing that contributed to their improvement.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices