Mayor vetoes elected school board
Setback for council progressives
Mayor Michelle Wu has vetoed the bill to overhaul the school committee, following through on her opposition to the matter and dealing council progressives a blow.
“I deeply respect that the proponents of this proposal are motivated by a commitment to supporting Boston’s young people — a commitment I share with urgency,” Wu wrote in the letter Friday saying she will disapprove the bill. “Respectfully, I cannot support legislative changes that would compromise our ability to stabilize and support the Boston Public Schools during this critical period.”
The Boston City Council earlier this week passed a measure to phase out the current all-appointed school committee and replace them with a 13-member all-elected body made of district and at-large representatives.
The council passed it by a narrow 7-5-1 vote, and the bill, as a home-rule petition, faced a tough slog through both a mayor who’d been regularly speaking against it as well as state legislators on Beacon Hill, which is rarely hospitable to these types of city-by-city changes.
But a potential state house grind is now a moot point, with Wu spiking the measure. The council can’t override a mayor’s disapproval of a home-rule petition.
Wu continued on to write that “a dramatic overhaul of our selection process for the Boston School Committee would detract from the essential work ahead.”
“I am confident that BPS is on the cusp of the kind of transformative change that our students, families, and educators have been demanding for decades,” Wu wrote.
Wu is signing the second school committee bill the council passed this week that would give that body two student seats that have voting power. That measure, which the council passed by an 11-2 vote, now does begin a trudge up Beacon Hill, requiring approval by both chambers as well as the governor’s signature.
Boston voters by nearly 80% voted in favor of an elected school committee in a non-binding 2021 ballot question, though the specifics of that vary from voter to voter and politician to politician. The board has been appointed by the mayor for the past three decades following a referendum, though opposition pops up every few years.
Boston’s the only city in the state with an appointed body.
City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo, the government operations chair and main sponsor of this legislation, said it’s clear the mayorappointed version of the school committee “has not served us well.”
He said Friday that the veto is “disappointing” in light of how all the councilors have said they want the composition of the school committee to change.
“I know all of us, the Mayor included, are united in making our public schools the best in the country and I do believe a governing change to the School Committee would help us get closer to that goal while empowering our school families and stakeholders,” Arroyo said.
Opinions on the school committee don’t break cleanly on a left-right political axis, but this change was something that Arroyo and the activist-aligned left wing of the council had a lot of enthusiasm about in their ongoing bid to pull the progressive Wu further along.
When Wu was running for mayor, she said she supported a hybrid elected-appointed committee, as several of the councilors who voted in opposition to this bill also said. Asked earlier this week whether she has any counter-proposals planned, she said, “I haven’t made any decisions on that.”
Several of the councilors who voted against the all-elected measure said they would prefer a hybrid model, similar to what Wu said.
One of those, City Council President Ed Flynn, backed Wu’s move on Friday, saying, “Now is not the time to make a major change in the governance of our public school system. We need to allow Mayor Wu and Superintendent Skipper the opportunity to improve education in every neighborhood of the city.”
The city school district is struggling with declining enrollment, aging school buildings, a troubled special education program and various transportation issues, and it narrowly avoided state receivership last year by signing an agreement to make and monitor changes. Superintendent Mary Skipper started her job this school year.