Traditional pencil push draws politics complaints
Hub hands out ‘Mayor Kim Janey’ items days before preliminary
Acting Mayor Kim Janey is drawing some criticism from the fact that city employees were out and about during the first day of school to hand out city-bought pencils and masks with her name on them.
“On the first day of school, Boston’s kids don’t need the Acting Mayor to hand out pencils promoting her campaign,” mayoral candidate and City Councilor Andrea Campbell said in a tweet. “They need someone leading the city who will get buses there on time, close the achievement gap, and enact transformative change.”
Purchasing records pro- vided by the city show that Boston forked over $8,968 to buy 59,000 purple pencils with “Mayor Kim Janey” and “Boston Public Schools” written on them. The city also provided a $940 order for 200 cotton face masks with similar branding with Janey’s name.
City employees, including uniformed police officers, brought around the pencils to kids starting school. The city said it uses a list every year of city employees who volunteer their time to bring the school supplies around on the first day of school.
In this case, Thursday’s back-to-school occasion comes five days before Tuesday’s hotly contested mayoral preliminary election, where Janey appears to be in a tough battle to advance to the general election. That’s what’s led to the sharpened pencil criticism.
Asked about all this, Janey said she’s simply following in the footsteps of her predecessors.
“There’s a long tradition that the mayor of Boston has done for decades,” Janey said of the pencil handouts. “I was glad to continue that tradition. It’s a joyful marker of back to school, and I was happy to continue that tradition this year — particularly this year.”
Janey’s correct that this is a perennial move for the city. Former mayors Tom Menino and Martin Walsh pushed pencils on the first day of school with their respective names on them — a fact for which Walsh similarly took flak just days before the 2017 mayoral preliminary. His opponent, then-City Councilor Tito Jackson, at the time panned the pencil ploy, though he took to Twitter on Thursday to defend Janey, who he supports for mayor.
The back-to-school swag doesn’t have Janey’s official moniker quite right. Per the city’s governing charter, her official title is “acting mayor,” which she rose to in March when Walsh departed to become U.S. Labor Secretary.