Boston Public Schools

commuter guy

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Boston.com has an extensive series of articles regarding the state of Boston Public Schools and the student assignment policy. The articles do delve into the social and economic ramifications on the city given the current state of schools. I think it's unfortunate for the city that so many with the means to leave do leave in frustration when their kids reach elementary school age. In my opinion, this is another area where Menino has failed to deliver over all his years as Mayor. Here is a link for those interested in the topic:

http://www.boston.com/news/educatio...king_a_chance_making_a_choice/?p1=Local_Links
 
This article is very slanted in my opinion, and suited toward the demographic the Globe hopes to capture -- yuppies who've moved to the burbs. It identifies a problem in somewhat catastrophic terms by selecting particularly poignant stories, but then fails to make the case with data. Per the article, 10% of families do not get their first choice. That's really a pretty reasonable figure. The only way to improve it is to build spare capacity into the system so that fewer schools have every seat assigned. That's terribly inefficient.

And the truth of the matter is that most families don't really know the system until their kids are there. It is often the case that the first choice isn't even the best choice for your child. My daughter didn't get our first, second, or even third choice. But my wife and I were foolish in how we made our selections. Every school we picked save one was on the highly sought after list. The one that wasn't was fairly close and we put it down as an after thought. We are now on our third kid at that school, and we think it is fantastic.

The problem for the profiled families is that they are afraid of trying to commit to a public education. They like the idea in principle, but they can't face up to it unless it's the school their neighbors or friends told them is the only acceptable option. Most of the schools are good if your child has additional resources. Failure at BPS is reserved for children who have other obstacles -- poverty, violent neighborhoods, learning disabilities.

And the implication that all middle class families leave is patently wrong. My neighborhood is filled with middle class families that send their children to BPS schools.
 
Too many BPS schools are known for being daycare for welfare broods and pre-prison programs for the thugs of tomorrow. Not that the reputation is always deserved, but in some cases it is sadly true. That's before even taking into account poor student behavior and a curriculum with a heavy handed political slant. Add in busing with neighborhood schools often being a non starter thanks to the lottery system, and it's easy to see why many middle class parents say, "the Hell with this".

Henry do you live in Brighton?
 
Another article about the Boston Public School assignment system. This article is of particular interest to me, since it features a street in Roslindale that was just around the corner from my former home. With 3 kids, I eventually sold as the kids entered school age and moved to a suburb with a neighborhood school right up the street. I had mixed feelings about the move because we really liked our former city neighborhood, but overall I would make the same choices if had to do it all over again.

The article is a bit long, but will be of interest to anyone with children in Boston or those who are interested in the role neighborhood schools can have on building ties within a community and neighborhood stability.

GETTING IN | INSIDE BOSTON?S SCHOOL ASSIGNMENT MAZE

A daily diaspora, a scattered street
Every morning, children in Boston disperse to schools all over. Childhood chums, and neighborhood feeling, can be left behind
By Stephanie Ebbert and Jenna Russell
Globe Staff / June 12, 2011
? Fourth in a series of occasional articles.
Every weekday on Montvale Street this fall, Abel and Aryana Saavedra will leave their second-floor apartment at 6:45 a.m. for Forest Hills Station, where they will board separate buses bound for schools in Wellesley. A half-hour later, their next-door neighbor, Seamus Folan, will emerge from his condo so his mother can drive him to his Hyde Park charter school. Soon, Sophie Rousell will be shooed into her mother?s Jeep for the 5-mile drive to a Chestnut Hill private school ? followed by five other kindergartners who will appear on their porches and disperse to at least four other public schools.
In September, the 19 school-age children who live on this one city block in Roslindale will migrate to a dizzying array of 15 public, private, and charter schools, from West Roxbury to Wellesley, traveling a combined 182 miles each day. There was a time ? some here remember it well ? when all the kids on Montvale went to nearby Wolfgang Mozart Elementary School, making the short walk together in a familiar, noisy pack with neighborhood playmates who were almost like brothers and sisters. Now, the children on this and other streets across the city scatter every morning, due to a lottery system that allows them to travel beyond their neighborhood for a chance to attend a better school ? or drives them out of the public schools altogether by assigning them to a disappointing choice.
The daily exodus costs the city dearly, both in sky-high transportation costs ? almost $80 million a year ? and, some sociologists and education specialists say, in weakened ties among families, which can strain the tenuous fabric of neighborhoods.
Frustration with the system?s shortcomings has fueled repeated calls for a return to neighborhood schools, which would dispatch children to the nearest school. But in a city with schools of uneven caliber, a return to the old ways would mean many students would lose, primarily minorities, who would be yoked to the struggling schools in many of the city?s poorest neighborhoods. Because of that racial subtext, and the scars from court-ordered busing 40 years ago, even the talk of change is fraught with difficulty.
That has left many in Boston ? parents who want the best for their children; officials who want to staunch the flow of middle-class families to the suburbs ? locked in a deep and mostly silent struggle about how to move forward.
It has also left some parents feeling like they have lost something precious.
?It?s not like we?ve got this great neighborhood feel,?? said Denise Kitty-Rousell, a mother raising her two children in the Montvale Street duplex in which her husband grew up. ?And I think part of that is because there?s no school. There?s no community.??
Her family is one of 13 the Globe is following through Boston?s student assignment process this year and one of several who long for a less complicated system that would help keep neighborhoods intact. To get a glimpse of a typical block in the city, where children who live side-by-side set out for separate schools each morning, reporters spent time on the Rousells? block.
. . .
With its mix of single-family homes and three-deckers, apartments and condos, lifelong residents and transplants, Montvale Street presents a snapshot of middle-class Boston life. Residents include an ultrasound technician; a real estate agent; a hairstylist; a commuter rail dispatcher; graduate students; and retirees. The street is home to a high school biology teacher and middle school principal and several other city and school employees who are required to live in the city.
Near the border of West Roxbury, where the leafy neighborhoods have a decidedly suburban ambiance, Montvale Street still feels slightly urban. Its residents tend to know mostly their immediate neighbors ? the ones who live closest or who have children of the same age ? and they come and go with barely an acknowledgment, buckling kids into minivans or hatchbacks rather than walking. After the school day ends, the street is oddly quiet but for the rumble of trains passing through the commuter rail station a few blocks away. Theresa Folan, Seamus?s mother, said she seldom sees children playing on the street.
?I?m always shocked around Halloween: Where do these kids live??? she said.
It?s a far cry from the days when Lori MacLeod grew up here. Back then, the families who lived around her had seven, eight, and nine children ? enough to field neighborhood softball and football teams ? and the kids played in the street from dawn until dinnertime in the summer. The families organized block parties and at midnight on New Year?s Eve, MacLeod and a neighbor got a couple of kids to walk up and down Montvale Street banging pots and pans.
?We all knew each other,?? said MacLeod, now 54 and still living in the house where she grew up. ?Unfortunately, now the kids that grow up in the neighborhood don?t have that anymore. So many go to parochial schools.??
Ten years after MacLeod started at the Mozart, the city began busing students across neighborhoods to integrate schools and many white families began abandoning the public schools for private alternatives. Steve Rousell and his siblings ? whom MacLeod occasionally baby-sat ? left the Mozart for Holy Name Parish School. By the time the Rousells? next-door neighbor Ricky McMahon was in school in the 1990s, mandatory busing had ended but the exodus continued, due to the lottery. The complex assignment system, designed to compensate for the sub-par schools in many Boston neighborhoods, gives parents an edge in gaining admission to the closest schools, but also lets them vie for better options elsewhere.
?I never went to school with anybody from my neighborhood,?? said McMahon, 30, who graduated in 1999. Nor, he said, did he go to high school with his friends from middle school. The lottery dispersed them once again.
?I ended up with Dot High and my friend ended up with Hyde Park and one in West Roxbury,?? he said. ?It doesn?t make sense to me all around. I think it also ruins friendships.??
. . .
Society has changed in innumerable other ways since MacLeod?s childhood. Today?s parents are more fearful about young children playing outside unsupervised, even on a street like Montvale where they feel safe from crime. More mothers are working, so more children are attending after-school programs rather than roaming backyards with their neighbors. Working parents can seldom spare time to walk their kids to school and when they drive, young children must be strapped into car seats, making carpooling a challenge.
But the absence of a common school has played a role, too. Families are less likely to know each other when their children don?t attend school together, specialists say, and their children lose out as a result ? on stable, sustaining friendships that could help them weather adolescence and on a safety net of interconnected adults who know them and look out for them.
?It definitely hurts the neighborhood,?? said Lisa Gonsalves, a University of Massachusetts Boston education professor who examined the city?s school assignment system as part of a task force in 2003. ?The neighborhood loses this bond between families if the children in it aren?t friends. Some parents remember growing up with strong connections to their neighborhood, and when they see that their kids don?t have that, there?s a nostalgia.??
Yet they quickly add the caveat that neighborhood schools wouldn?t be a fair alternative unless every neighborhood has a good school to offer ? a goal that seems so elusively out of reach that it brings the debate to a screeching halt.
But Mayor Thomas M. Menino sees the problem differently: He maintains that all the city?s elementary schools are good and that the school district suffers from problems of perception.
?The issue is that we have to convince parents that the school near their home is a good school,?? Menino said. ?We have to do a better job of selling our schools to parents, of getting the information out that these are quality schools.??
Kitty-Rousell, 36, was among a group of Roslindale and West Roxbury parents who urged school officials last year to overhaul the lottery system and reconsider neighborhood schools. They soon learned how loaded a term ?neighborhood schools?? is, harkening back to the days when white Bostonians resisted the integration of schools across neighborhood lines.
?If I had known that ?neighborhood schools? was code for racist . . . I certainly would have second-guessed it,?? added Theresa Strang, a former West Roxbury resident who formed the Coalition for Neighborhood Schools and who, in her own childhood, left the public schools after busing began in Boston. ?When I think of neighborhood schools, I think of walking to school with my sister. Another mother picks you up, you go to a friend?s house two doors down.??
In practice, reverting to neighborhood schools could leave Boston?s schools more segregated, because of the city?s demographic patterns. But if that concern could be addressed, said Mark Warren, a sociologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, there is reason to believe that children going to school in their neighborhoods could help make schools better.
?There?s a lot of evidence that strong forms of family engagement are essential to school improvement,?? he said. ?In Boston that?s extremely difficult, because kids are coming to school from a wide area. When kids live in a different part of the city, their parents aren?t taking them to the school playground or to community events held at school. They?re probably not walking them there. A lot of times, [parents] are only called in when there?s a problem.??
Even some parents disillusioned with the lottery system and the schools their children were assigned to still bristle at the notion of returning to neighborhood schools or revamping the lottery.
?Neighborhood schools wouldn?t improve the quality of schools overall. It just lets them untether themselves from a segment of society that maybe they don?t feel that they should have to be involved with,?? said Jeff Rogers, a black father from Roxbury whose children?s experience with the school lottery is also being followed by the Globe.
Yet Rogers is among those who untethered his own children from his community, finding alternatives outside Boston public schools.
?And that?s why I?m a hypocrite. And that?s why I feel guilty,?? he said. ?I understand this argument fully but when I have to look my kids in the face, I wasn?t able to send them to a school where I thought [they would] be coarsened prematurely, where I thought untalented kids would take up teachers? time.??
. . .
Montvale Street?s neighborhood school, the Mozart, is no longer considered as desirable as it once was. But the lottery, which provides choices but no guarantees, means that parents can look farther afield. The youngest students here have their pick of two dozen elementary schools and early-learning centers in their area of the city, including the Patrick Lyndon and Joyce Kilmer K-8 schools, two of the area?s most sought-after, with some of the most impressive test scores. Most Montvale parents compete to get into at least one of them; but next fall, only one of the 19 students on the block will be attending each.
The Rousells were among the families who applied for the Lyndon and Kilmer schools, though Beethoven Elementary in West Roxbury was their top choice. They got none of their choices in the lottery and enrolled Sophie in a private school in Chestnut Hill.
Directly across the street, 6-year-old Gabriella Semanduyeva lives close enough to wave and call to Sophie out her window. Her family requested the Mozart but got into Phineas Bates Elementary, her second choice.
Sophie?s next-door neighbor, Jake Shamon, is going to the Mozart, although his family had requested the Haley. Jake?s close friend Sam Feathers ? who lives in the condo right above Jake and who might, in another town, be his classmate in kindergarten ? is going to the Bates after requesting the Kilmer, Philbrick, or Beethoven schools.
Most of the children in the neighborhood who left the Boston public schools ? eight in all ? first tried their luck in the lottery. Some left for private schools but returned years later after winning entry to the city?s competitive exam school, Boston Latin. Some families had backup plans all along.
?I graduated from the Boston schools and I didn?t want my children going to the Boston schools,?? said Alex Saavedra, 36, who lives four houses up Montvale from Sam and Jake. ?I just felt it was one of those situations where some teachers cared and others were there for a paycheck.??
So he got his children enrolled in Metco, the state-funded program that sends more than 3,000 Boston students of color to school in surrounding suburbs to promote diversity. His children go to Wellesley schools, where Saavedra said parent participation is tremendous. Still, Saavedra has to leave his job at the city?s Ohrenberger Community Center twice a day to pick up the kids from their separate buses. (His wife doesn?t drive.) His 7-year-old daughter, Aryana, typically doesn?t get home until 4:45 p.m., a full 10 hours after the first-grader leaves her house.
?It?s such a long day for them,?? Saavedra said. ?But the great thing about Metco is, almost to a man, everybody will say the end result is something they wouldn?t trade for the world.??
Others started out with high hopes of remaining in the public schools but were worn down by the unwieldy process of getting their children enrolled. Juli Greenwood wasn?t worried about the lottery seven years ago when she and her former husband bought a condo near the top of Montvale Street, up the hill and across the street from Saavedra.
?I just thought it would work. We weren?t picky,?? said Greenwood, a 37-year-old product of public schools in rural Townsend. ?We know plenty of people who were like, ?If we don?t get the Kilmer or Lyndon, we?re going to do private.? I had 17 schools. I didn?t care. I wanted a good school but I wasn?t hyper obsessed with test scores.??
But her son, Eliot Giarla, was not assigned to any of those 17 schools. And again last year, he lingered on a wait list all summer. Just a few days before he started private school, he was offered a seat at Boston?s Beethoven Elementary ? too late, in his mother?s estimation.
?I felt like I had worked really hard the last few weeks of August getting Eliot excited about Holy Name,?? said Greenwood, who works in public relations. ?I just didn?t want to pull the rug out from under him.??
Now, with her 4-year-old, Nora, getting ready for school, Greenwood has lost her optimism about the Boston schools. She doesn?t want to deal with uncertainty from the lottery and she doesn?t think she can afford to send two children to parochial school.
?It?s frustrating, especially for those of us who really believe in an urban environment and the great things it?s going to provide us ? that we can walk everywhere, have a sense of community, go to museums,?? said Greenwood. ?It?s very hard to find realistic solutions. I need my kid to go to school. This should not be so hard.??
So instead of driving her kids to private schools every day, she?s reluctantly leaving the city for good. Her three-bedroom condo on Montvale Street is for sale.
Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at ebbert@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @StephanieEbbert.
Link: http://www.boston.com/news/local/ma...street_school_choice_creates_a_gap/?page=full
 
can we get this thread be moved out of the bowels to the Boston Architecture and Urbanism forum or move this post to a more current thread?

Boston plans to build or renovate a dozen schools....

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2...zen-schools/YECnZZffejnUJVIiEXUiQI/story.html

By James Vaznis GLOBE STAFF OCTOBER 17, 2018

Boston school officials are planning to build or extensively renovate a dozen schools, gradually phase out middle schools, and merge several elementary schools over the next decade, under a proposal being presented to the School Committee Wednesday night.

The most immediate actions call for closing two high schools in West Roxbury — Urban Science Academy and West Roxbury Academy — in June, due to deteriorating building conditions that almost prevented them from opening this September, interim Superintendent Laura Perille said Tuesday.

The proposal is the most comprehensive to be released under Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s four-year-old BuildBPS plan, which aims to spend $1 billion in city and state funding to overhaul the city’s 125 schools. That effort includes a new Boston Arts Academy in the Fenway, which Walsh broke ground on Tuesday.

“What we are preparing to share on Wednesday night is the largest school building plan in 40 years in Boston,” Perille said. “This will be new or expanded buildings in neighborhoods with high student need and low access. That is one of the driving principles of this. There will be continued investment districtwide for all school buildings and communities.”

contd
 
Globe: Big changes in store for Boston school buildings

I know it'll never happen, I know, but I'd love to see the planned reconstruction of the Quincy Upper School include a decking of the Pike between Washington and Harrison. Pre-approve the current JQUS Washington St. Campus for max-FAA height and sell it to a developer, then use that money to subsidize the decking for a new campus (with air rights conveyed for free from MassDOT / MBTA to BPS).
 
I know it'll never happen, I know, but I'd love to see the planned reconstruction of the Quincy Upper School include a decking of the Pike between Washington and Harrison. Pre-approve the current JQUS Washington St. Campus for max-FAA height and sell it to a developer, then use that money to subsidize the decking for a new campus (with air rights conveyed for free from MassDOT / MBTA to BPS).

Slightly off topic, but I've often wondered why we don't simply build low rise directly above the Pike and get it done, rather than pie in the sky 400 foot engineering marvels. Wouldn't it be fairly cheap to build a deck designed to hold 3-5 floor structures? That would completely eliminate the scar and stitch the city back together.
 
Wouldn't it be fairly cheap to build a deck designed to hold 3-5 floor structures? That would completely eliminate the scar and stitch the city back together.

Feasible, yes. Cheap, not so much.

Consider that none of the four "ramp parcels" on the Greenway (earmarked for nonprofits to develop) have ever gotten past the drawing board. I'm no engineer, but the **Greenway parcels are smaller, and have a lower degree of (geo)technical difficulty for development than the requirements for a K-5 Public School constructed above the Pike trench would surely have.

A better solution might be an arrangement similar to the podium of Gehry's Beekman Tower in NYC.


**The fallow state of these parcels is also due to the nonprofit requirement to earn development rights, a requirement that I feel should be removed, to encourage residential and retail development on all four sites.
 
Every time I drive through Newton Corner, I'm astonished by the presence of a Star Market and hotel above the Pike. How was that feasible back then but too costly now? Anyway, enough of a thread hijack. I certainly favor more creative use of real estate in order to fund school construction, along with libraries and other civic institutions. I think the Beekman Tower is a great example of the concept.
 
Feasible, yes. Cheap, not so much.

Consider that none of the four "ramp parcels" on the Greenway (earmarked for nonprofits to develop) have ever gotten past the drawing board. I'm no engineer, but the **Greenway parcels are smaller, and have a lower degree of (geo)technical difficulty for development than the requirements for a K-5 Public School constructed above the Pike trench would surely have.

A better solution might be an arrangement similar to the podium of Gehry's Beekman Tower in NYC.


**The fallow state of these parcels is also due to the nonprofit requirement to earn development rights, a requirement that I feel should be removed, to encourage residential and retail development on all four sites.

The ramp parcels are also complicated by the ramps themselves eating up most of the ground floor and greatly complicating access. The Pike parcel bounded by Harrison and Washington has clean terra firma access on both Marginal Rd (where a travel lane could be dropped) and Herald St. The other Pike parcels are trickier.

There's also much less political sensitivity around building over the Pike than along the Greenway.

Also, the Washington St JQUS campus is 6-7, not K-5. Quincy Elementary (on the other side of Washington St) is K-5, and there are no plans to rebuild that. With expansion the Washington St QJUS could become 6-8, and the Arlington St campus could be cut back from 8-12 to 9-12.
 

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