FYI from BSF, 5.24.24
At Wednesday night’s Boston School Committee meeting, no new major facilities projects were announced. The presentation included a comprehensive list of various programmatic shifts. The two more major items will result in the sharing of a current building (Hennigan) and an unknown future use for one of the city’s newer school buildings (Frederick).
There has been a lot of discussion about the need to upgrade and consolidate school buildings in Boston. The city itself reported in January that “[t]he Boston Public Schools of the future will have fewer total schools and more larger sized schools in its portfolio.”
Why is this necessary, what brought us to this point?
The story starts in 1965, with the passage of the Racial Imbalance Act, a Massachusetts law requiring school desegregation. As everyone knows, Boston School Committee refused to do so, until the federal government forced it to in 1974.
By 1980, Boston Public Schools was radically different. Like many other American cities of the time, Boston had quickly lost population, as birth rates declined and suburbanization began (and along with new patterns of segregation).
The first initial enrollment shock downward never reversed. After two decades of steady enrollment, the student population began to decrease around the turn of the century, and fell further through the pandemic.
Over this period of time, district enrollment was cut in half. What wasn’t?
The number of schools.
The result was a fundamental reset of how schools are enrolled in Boston. Average student enrollment, as the math would follow, fell by nearly 50% as well. Well before national attention and philanthropy, Boston had adopted “small schools.”
There are costs associated with carrying a larger number of schools with smaller enrollment. You need more principals and custodians. You have extra gas bills. You probably need a few more buses. These operational inefficiencies, however, are not what drives the ~$200M the city has spent on empty seats in school buildings over the past few years.
It’s your labor cost. The long budget memos that enumerate the “soft landings” to ensure underenrolled schools have enough money don’t have line items for lightbulbs. Those dollars are paying for staff and programs.
This has only become more strained in the past two decades. At there were fewer students and fewer students per school, the system added more teachers.
Over the past two decades, there are ~14,000 fewer students and ~450 more teachers.
There are clearly needs and benefits. The growth of the populations of students with special needs and English learners requires more specialized staff and smaller ratios. The smaller student-teacher ratio means each adult has the capacity for more time and attention for each child. Strong compensation means you retain and have more experienced teachers.
But there is a cost, not just for the workforce, but also for a model that has been baked into the district over the past 50 years. And we aren’t even addressing the actual quality of facilities here.
If we all can acknowledge this sounds like a pretty big challenge to take on, it can only stand to reason you will have to do big things to address it.
notes in the margin
Boston School Committee meeting materials here.
The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education met on Tuesday. Full materials here. Boston gave its first update on the systemic improvement plan that averted receivership in 2022. Like we wrote about last week, the state is reporting declines in chronic absenteeism.
So, what does it take to get a student to return to school?
The $800M question: what education priorities may receive more funding with more millionaire’s tax revenue coming in?
Professor Tom Kane may have some ideas. For the better part of the two years, Kane has been sounding alarms on the severity of learning loss and widening achievement gaps. Massachusetts has the widest achievement gap by income in the country.
A profile of Secretary of Education Pat Tutwiler.
A closer look at counseling in Massachusetts schools.
As school budgets tighten, more teachers are voting no confidence.
Did desegregation result in fewer Black teachers?
The fiscal cliff is higher for districts that hire.
other matters
Some BPS scholarship winners were announced.
Boston middle school students, Fenway, and kickball.
