A blueprint for Boston’s school buildings

Boston has too many school buildings — 119 — due to a drop in enrollment. Most are too small to provide the “highquality student experience” that is the goal of the city’s team working on the Green New Deal for Boston Schools. The team has developed a valuable tool in the form of a decision-making rubric for major investments in Boston Public Schools.

Parents of children attending four schools within a few blocks of each other in Roxbury and Dorchester have participated in several workshops hosted by the city’s team, as well as by the Surround Care Coalition coordinated by Boston’s Higher

Ground, to learn about these plans. In a Dec. 21, 2023, letter to Mayor Michelle Wu and BPS Superintendent Mary Skipper, parents and guardians of current and former students attending the four schools committed to working with the city team to help shape the plans that would impact their schools. They know that by the time the building improvements are done, their children will have moved on to higher grades in other schools. Yet these schools are important resources within their community, and parents, students, educators, and neighbors want their voices heard in the development of the plans and their implementation.

The four schools — Higginson Elementary, Higginson-Lewis, Ellis Elementary, and Trotter Elementary — have a combined enrollment of 966 students, 61 percent of their peak combined enrollment of 1,595 students in school years 2015 through 2018. Some of the buildings are a century old, and the newest building, the Trotter, received the lowest score of the four schools in the recently issued dashboard of school physical conditions.

Three of the four schools were among seven schools listed in a May 2022 announcement by Wu of plans for a new school building in Roxbury that would be the future home of one or more of the schools. The community served by the four schools knows that one or more of the schools will probably merge or close and one or more of the buildings will be repurposed. Community members want to be part of the decisionmaking process from the start and not be placed in a position where they react after decisions have been handed down from the school district. They know that the options for reconfiguring the buildings include one of three options:

▪ Reconfigure, combine, or in some other way make better use of the network of local school buildings so that the costs of maintaining old buildings are reduced and more resources are invested in programs and curricula that improve educational outcomes.

▪ If one or more of the four schools were to be combined in the proposed new building, develop the plans together for reuse of the vacated buildings for affordable housing and community facilities.

▪ Given the many years it will take for a new school building to be built, make urgently needed improvements to the school buildings that children will be attending and will likely graduate from before there is a new building or major improvements to current facilities.

The parents and their community partners are prepared to engage in the difficult discussions now so that existing school facilities can be improved in the short term and together BPS and the community can make plans for the long term. The Dec. 21 parent letter to Wu and Skipper concluded with a demand that the plans “include the proactive voices of parents and neighbors at the beginning rather than reactive opposition at the end. We know that parent engagement in decisions that affect the education of their children results in improved educational outcomes. We welcome the opportunity to meaningfully engage with the Wu administration and BPS to do just that. Working together on improved school facilities is a good way to engage parents. We all care about the education of our children and owe them our best effort to create school environments that surround and embrace them with care and respect.”

The engagement demonstrated by the parents and community served by four schools is exactly the level and quality of engagement BPS has been seeking for the past two years and provides a good model for

BPS to consider in other neighborhoods.

Brandy Brooks is executive director of Boston’s Higher Ground. Shavonne Harrington is director of partnerships at Union Capital Boston.