No vote, but strong opinions about the kind of leader BPS students need — (The draft home rule petition to restore an elected School Committee, which is now before the City Council, provides that one member of the new School Committee will be a student with full voting rights, elected by the Boston Student Advisory Council. In the meantime, the student representative can offer…

by the BuildBPS Stakeholders Coalition Boston’s process for choosing a school superintendent is broken and has been for decades. That is why Boston keeps churning through superintendents every few years. Boston Public Schools students and families suffer the consequences. This search especially has been a failure in not producing Black…

“They need to know we will show up” — More than 100 people demonstrated against state intervention in the Boston Public Schools early Tuesday morning at the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s meeting in Malden, including one protester who wasn’t physically there. Excel High School graduate Thy Nguyen, headed for Tufts University in the fall, wasn’t feeling…

“We have higher-needs students, we have a greater minority population. … So why is that the plan?” — Sumner School parents are angrily pushing back on a BPS and City Hall plan to split their school between two buildings while merging them with the smaller Philbrick School. They say the merger itself is fine with them. An indefinite two-campus plan is not. The BPS administration has called it…

The people with lived experience in BPS know the problems and have proposed ways to solve them. — [Our “Mr. Fix-It” governor thinks his team can put BPS on the right track. The mayor thinks she can do it. But parents, teachers, and students with first-hand knowledge have been putting forward solutions for years. …

St. Stephen’s Parent Mentor Program is a model — When parents are involved with a school, their children do better. The school also does better. School leaders are more responsive to family needs when parents are in the building regularly. That doesn’t happen at many BPS schools. But it does at the Blackstone Elementary School and other schools where…

Town hall speakers say the state’s narrow focus on MCAS would leave them less well prepared for life — State officials who want to intervene in the Boston Public Schools often say they are focused on students. But they haven’t done much listening to students. So last Thursday, leaders of the Fenway High School student government and the Boston Student Advisory Council organized a student town hall to give…

[The Mission Hill K–8 School is closing in a few days, and all its students are transferring to other schools. School closings are hard on students. Sixth grader Angel D. wrote this open letter to Mayor Michelle Wu and top Boston Public Schools officials. …

[The Boston School Committee, unaccountable as it is, does at least listen to all the members of the public who want to speak, and provides translators for those who don’t speak English (including one of its own members). The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, on the other hand…