City and BPS officials present a facilities “rubric” — but no long-term plan
Skipper says the state is fine with that. Some School Committee members are not
By Alain Jehlen
First of two articles
Part two: Green New Deal team says 48 buildings can’t support a good school model — but which buildings?
City and Boston Public Schools officials told the School Committee at their last meeting that they won’t produce a long-term facilities plan by the end of this month — and maybe not at all.
That’s despite the agreement with state officials signed in June 2022 by Mayor Michelle Wu and former Superintendent Brenda Cassellius, who committed the city to “[b]y December 31, 2023, create and implement a comprehensive, long-term master facilities plan.”
It was not news to Committee members or to the audience that the deadline would be missed. The joint Mayor Wu–BPS “Green New Deal” team has been saying at community meetings that they were developing a “rubric” for making decisions about school buildings instead of a long-term plan.
But several Committee members asked how state officials might respond — whether there will be penalties.
Superintendent Mary Skipper said she’s kept state officials updated and they haven’t raised any objections.
“I cannot imagine in what world we could have had an entire master plan” by the deadline, Skipper said, and state officials “understand the magnitude of the work.”
If not now, then when?
But when Cardet-Hernandez asked how long it will be before the district does have a comprehensive facilities plan, Skipper said it can’t be done at all because it depends on funding.
“We have not talked about at what point that would be produced,” she said. “Capital planning is usually a five year out,” she added. “When you go beyond that it becomes questionable what you can get. But I think our goal would be to do up to the five years.”
Cardet-Hernandez did not seem happy with that. “I think it’ll remain difficult for us to continue to have conversations about mergers and consolidations outside of a plan,” he said. He pointed out such a plan has been promised for years.
Vice Chair Michael O’Neill said many people don’t trust the administration. “As we talked about, even earlier today, I think this Committee struggles with a trust factor, let alone our greater public,” he said.
He was referring to his angry comments and those of Committee Chair Jeri Robinson near the beginning of the meeting, when they reported on their visit to the Boston Community Leadership Academy — McCormack School building. They said they had seen firsthand that the administration broke their promises to create a modern school facility and that students are being harmed.
O’Neill had a proposal for building trust, one he has also put forward in past meetings: “We should be leading with the builds,” he said. “This city, this district, does not have the trust factor with our public to be able to say, ‘We’re going to close, we’re going to merge, but don’t worry, we’re going to build you something new.’
“The experience from other cities is, when parents and community members see buildings going up, that’s when they start to believe.”
The rubric
But the administration’s focus at the meeting was on their new rubric for making decisions about buildings. They said they will start using it next year for making proposals.
The rubric is based on the administration’s decision that there should be four basic school models in BPS:
- Elementary schools with either 356 or 712 students, and
- 7–12 secondary schools with either 1150 or 1620 students.
But BPS Chief of Capital Planning Delavern Stanislaus seemed to try to soften the edges of that decision, telling the Committee, “Schools with other great configurations will continue to exist and be considered for major investments.”
The Green New Deal team looked at each school building to see whether it’s big enough to support one of their four models, either in its current condition or with renovation and maybe an addition.
Black dots
They decided just 71 out of 119 buildings could do that. Forty-eight could not. But they left themselves wiggle room by saying some of those might be able to support one of the preferred models with “further analysis.”
The team presented a map that they said showed 119 Boston Public Schools buildings, color-coded to show all the buildings that can support at least one of the preferred school models or can be upgraded to support a model. The map uses black dots for buildings that the staff says can not be upgraded to support any of the models.
They did not list those buildings, but we have a pretty good idea which they are. (More on that in part two of this series.)
They did say that a black dot doesn’t necessarily mean a building must close. Two or more such buildings could be merged into one school. The Eliot K-8 in the North End, for example, is made up of three black dot buildings.
Rebecca Grainger, senior aide to Mayor Wu, listed factors that the rubric takes into consideration, including:
- How many students can the building accommodate?
- How many students live near the building? “Near” was defined as within one mile for an elementary school or two miles for a high school.
- How many of the students who live near the building are in the demographic categories of the School Committee’s Opportunity and Achievement Gap policy?
The presenters said neighborhood demographics should also be taken into account because schools are neighborhood resources.
An example comparing two schools
The staff showed the School Committee how the rubric could be used to look at potential projects to upgrade elementary schools in Allston-Brighton. They showed that investing in the Edison K-8 building would give more students access to a modern building, but improving the Gardner Pilot Academy could affect more students who live within a mile.
The data assembled for the rubric also includes the numbers of students affected in each demographic category.
Skipper said that with the rubric, members of the community can check what the BPS administration says when it makes recommendations about a building. “If somebody from a community runs the same process, they’re going to get the same data,” she said.
But that didn’t satisfy Cardet-Hernandez. “We’re still doing this like business as usual, just with an added layer, and maybe even analysis paralysis,” he said. “There’s just another added layer to small-batch decision making.”
“Given this tool, why wouldn’t we do something more masterful? … We could scope out the whole system. We may not have the money to do that work, but we could be transparent with communities, that over the next 10 years, this is our plan.
“What’s stopping us from doing the thing that everyone is asking us to do? Why continue to do it piecemeal?”
Skipper seemed very reluctant to go there. She talked about how much better the new rubric is than the old system in which, she said, “people get into a room and make recommendations, and then the community is like, ‘Well, how did we get there?’”
After much prodding, she finally said, “Yes, we will have a long-term facilities plan.” But she didn’t say when.
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Part one: Green New Deal team says 48 buildings can’t support a good school model — but which buildings?
