Will a Brighton School Be On Tonight's Closure List?

A plan to close four to six schools will be unveiled at tonight's meeting of Boston's School Committee by Carol Johnson, Superintendent of the Boston Public Schools. The closures are being proposed to respond to declining enrollment and a budget shortfall.

Will an elementary school in Brighton be on the list of closures?

Superintendent Johnson has provided no advance warning of which schools will close, but has provided the latest indication that Brighton's Mary Lyon school -- which is currently a K-8 school -- will be approved to expand with a high school to become a K-12 school, according to the Boston Globe:

Her recommendations also include some new pilot schools to give administrators more autonomy to execute innovative programs. She said the Boston Teachers Union will start its own pilot school next year, while she'll support the desire of the Harbor Middle School to expand to grade 12 and for the Mary K. Lyons K-8 School to add a high school, which would be a pilot school.

The Mary Lyon high school would be the latest addition to Boston's twenty-or-so pilot schools, those with governance autonomy in setting their budget, work rules, curriculum, assessments, and school policies. It is not surprising that BPS would look favorably at the Mary Lyon proposal, since its elementary school is one of the best performing in the city.

The problem: Mary Lyon has little available real estate to accommodate the high school expansion. It's hard to imagine adding a high school building of any size to their existing property.

My prediction for the solution: Garfield Elementary School, which is literally down the block from Mary Lyon, will be on the list of schools to close. More specifically, Garfield would be "reprogrammed" in order to convert its elementary school buildings into the high school expansion proposal for Mary Lyon.

The Garfield facilities can accommodate substantially more students -- and it has done so in past years -- than current enrollment at the school. The unused facilities at the school are a visible symptom of the declining enrollment problem in BPS, which has experienced a 7 percent decline in enrollment district-wide since 2003.

Most other elementary schools in Allston-Brighton are unlikely targets for school closure in today's announcement, at least in my mind. The Jackson-Mann K-8 school has many programs which could not easily be relocated: pre-kindergarten; Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing; special needs class; and a community center. The Gardner Pilot Academy converted to pilot school status a couple of years ago and is showing signs of strong leadership and expanding community support -- although BPS turned down its proposal to expand to K-8 from K-5. Baldwin Early Learning Center is the only pilot school among the BPS's early education centers (which serve pre-kindergarten through first grade), and last year received accreditation by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. The Winship School has shown strong gains in MCAS scores recently, particularly with the school's recent focus on science education, and was recently renovated. Only the Hamilton Elementary School might be considered a candidate alongside the Garfield for closure in Allston-Brighton.

The challenge faced by the superintendent and the school committee is to justify any school closing not just on the existing realities of enrollment and budget, but also on how the modified schools in the area -- whether reprogrammed from elementary to high school, or students transferred to other surrounding schools -- will be improved in such a way to benefit the children. Will a new high school, building on the proven track record of Mary Lyon School, create a new center for learning in western Brighton that acts as a magnet for keeping families in the area? Will transferred elementary students now have access to improved science facilities, better after-school options, or expanded arts and music education opportunities? The committee and superintendent will now have a job of salesmanship, regardless of which schools they recommend for closure.

Sure, this is all speculation... and we'll know more after tonight's meeting of the Boston School Committee at the Edward Winter Chamber at 26 Court Street, Boston, at 6:00 pm.


Image of Mary Lyon from the National Women's History Museum.

Disclosure: the author is the co-chair of the Governing Board at the Baldwin ELC in Brighton, a pilot school. Any opinions expressed here represent mine alone, and not those of any other group or organization.

Gardner School's Summer Enrichment Program

The Gardner Extended Services School, at 30 Athol Street in North Allston, has concluded its Summer Enrichment Program for 115 K2-G5 students. The program was conducted in collaboration with Harvard Business School, who provided funding for 40 of the students.

The Gardner School has been rolling out their conversion to a Pilot School within the Boston Public School system; they will officially be a pilot when school opens this September. A science teacher at the school, Dean Martin, was recently awarded an Excellence in Environmental Education award from the state.

New State Pilot School Approved for Boston

Wednesday's Boston Globe reported that the state Board of Education has approved four chronically under-performing schools, including English High in Boston, to be converted to State Pilot Schools in order to improve their performance within two years.

Pilot Schools are an innovative strategy championed here it Boston that give greater control and flexibility to each school for budgetary, hiring, governance, length of the school day, and professional development time for the staff. Boston's Pilot Schools are part of the Boston Public School system, students are assigned according to the same procedure as the non-pilot schools, and the whole process is even spelled out and approved as part of the Boston Teachers Union contract.

Pilot Schools are distinct from Charter Schools: the former are, in Boston, formed and run as part of the school district; the latter are chartered by the state and run completely independently of any school district. Pilot School teachers are all part of the BTU collective bargaining unit and receive the pay and benefits spelled out in the BTU contract; Charter School teachers are not.

Boston has 20 such Pilot Schools (including two dual status Horace Mann Charter Schools). Pilot Schools in Allston-Brighton include: Another Course to College (G9-G12), Baldwin Early Learning Center (K0-G1), Boston Community Leadership Academy (G9-G12), and the most recent to convert to Pilot status, the Gardner Elementary School in North Allston (currently K1-G5).

The state is looking to copy that model. Unfortunately, they are using it as a tool to fix the some of the most problematical schools in the state in lieu of having a state-run takeover.

The article quotes Richard Stutman, president of the Boston Teachers Union, as saying:

"There isn't a shred of evidence that making people work longer hours without any rights and forcing students to go on extended day . . . will be a positive experience... We hope it works. But there's no evidence that it will work."

Not so. The Center for Collaborative Education's "The Essential Guide to Pilot Schools" (Overview, September 2006) states:

"[On] the whole, students are performing better than the district averages across every indicator of engagement and performance. Compared to other BPS schools, Pilot School students have higher performance on the statewide standardized assessment (MCAS), higher college-going rates, and higher attendance rates."

Their report can be found at the CCE website. (For the record: I sit on the Governing Board of the Baldwin ELC, and the CCE is the independent organization that provides onsite coaching, professional development, and networking opportunities for educators in the Boston Pilot Schools.)

Let's hope the state can replicate the success of the Boston Pilot Schools model, rather than just putting the worst-performing schools into this category as a poison pill to reject the model. The Boston model uses innovative methods to improve school performance, but is not necessarily the best model for turning around a chronically under-performing school.