City Council cancels hearing on expanding free museum program

The Boston City Council abruptly canceled a committee hearing to expand Mayor Michelle Wu’s pilot program offering Boston Public Schools students free admission to city cultural institutions to include students not enrolled in the city’s schools.

A notice to the city clerk’s office on Tuesday scheduled a hearing before the council’s education committee on March 18, according to the city website. A notice canceling the hearing came in after 5 p.m. Friday, according to the filings with the clerk’s office.

Councilors behind the effort to expand the program, which is partially funded with federal pandemic relief funds, are demanding answers.

“There’s no valid explanation,” City Councilor Erin Murphy, lead sponsor of a resolution to expand Wu’s BPS Sundays program. “It leaves me with many questions.”

The hearing would seek public comment on the program, which offers free admission the first two Sundays of each month through August for BPS students and up to three guests at the Museum of Fine Arts, New England Aquarium, Franklin Park Zoo, Boston Children’s Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, and Museum of Science.

Murphy and City Councilor Ed Flynn are calling to expand the initiative to non-BPS students, including those who attend charter schools or who are homeschooled.

Wu has said she does not intend to expand the program at this point. She said the city needs to keep it more narrowly focused and collect data before changing any parameters.

Murphy and Flynn, who both have clashed with the mayor on various issues, said they were frustrated by the cancellation.

Flynn said the city needs to provide “the same opportunities for all Boston families.”

A spokesperson for Councilor Henry Santana, chair of the education committee, said Santana supports eventually expanding the program, but wants it to run longer before trying to assess whether it should change.

“We’ll be in a better position to understand how the program is being utilized and to discuss how it could be expanded once the pilot program has been running for more than a few Sundays, and we have more data available,” Santana, a former Wu staffer, said in a statement Saturday night.

The program is one in a series of moves Wu has made to promote equity in the city. Last month, the mayor said the program drew more than 4,200 people in its first two weekends.

Wu’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

The program’s $1 million budget is funded through $300,000 in federal pandemic relief money and philanthropic support.

It benefits BPS’s 45,000 students, 81 percent of whom are Hispanic, Black, or Asian, state data show. But another 3,000 Boston children are enrolled in Metco, nearly 7,000 attend private or parochial schools, about 13,000 attend charter schools, and 273 are homeschooled, according to the resolution. Many of them are people of color, Murphy and Flynn’s resolution states.

Resolutions are not changes in law. When Murphy and Flynn introduced this one Feb. 28 and called for an immediate vote, City Councilor Sharon Durkan, a former Wu campaign aide, objected, so the resolution was sent to the education committee.

Jeremy C. Fox of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.