Getting to the bottom of the safety crisis at Brockton High School
Adecade ago, Brockton High School was seen as a national success story, a place where high-achieving Black and Latino students were disproving assumptions about what big, urban high schools could accomplish. Now the state’s largest high school is in the news again for more troubling reasons: a surge in violence so severe that it prompted some local politicians to ask the governor to send in the National Guard. In the latest outbreak of violence at the school, a staff member was injured Monday during an altercation between students.
In the short term, new leadership at the school is attempting to tackle the violence problem and deserves community support. Longer term, though, the state ought to ensure there’s a thorough investigation of what went wrong in Brockton; it appears to be linked to sudden and unexplained financial problems in the district, a shortfall that led to layoffs and may have left the school with simply too few adults to keep order.
The behavior problems at the school, recounted in public meetings and media accounts, appear to be driven by a small number of students who are causing mayhem and interfering with the education of the thousands of kids at the school who are there to learn. Students have described fights breaking out three or four times a week. Even before the staff member injury on Monday, educators have been injured trying to break up altercations, and there have been reports of open student drug use and harassment of faculty.
Meanwhile, hundreds of students have been spending part of the school day sitting in the high school cafeteria with no academic instruction and barely any supervision due to teacher shortages and absenteeism.
There are several short-term measures the district should implement to begin tackling the widespread issues. The high school’s new principal, Kevin McCaskill, who started in January, presented an improvement plan that includes hiring six more safety specialists and retraining the 12 specialists already on the job; a mentoring program of volunteers; and a stricter enforcement of rules against violence, drug use, and the presence of weapons in the high school, for which McCaskill said he would use out-of-school suspensions.
The school also intends to crack down on cellphone usage, which appears to be a factor in the violence, since students are filming fights and sharing the videos online. Students will have to store their cellphones in locked bags during the school day. Additionally, the state will pay for a districtwide safety audit, similar to the one conducted at the Boston Public Schools.
Meanwhile, the city’s police chief, Brenda Perez, announced a few changes and recommendations during a School Committee meeting last week.
For instance, she suggested the district hire a school security director and conduct comprehensive security reviews every three years. “I found the school district’s most current security plan is approximately 10 years old,” Perez said. In a particularly puzzling revelation, she said that school resource officers assigned to the high school were only allowed on the first floor of the facilities and couldn’t access the second or third floors. According to Perez, that restriction was enacted by a previous administration but has now been changed.
Perez also disclosed that the Brockton Police Department received 1,100 service calls districtwide in the last school year, 80 of them for Brockton High
School. As of the end of January, there have been a total of 800 calls for the entire system, with 40 corresponding to the high school.
According to teachers and students, the basic problem is that there are not enough adults at the school. And that’s where questions around the district’s financial state intersect with the safety problems. The city abruptly announced a budget deficit last year and laid off about 130 teachers. The district’s CFO and his deputy were placed on leave, and the superintendent went on extended medical leave.
There have been two recent fiscal audits of the school system, one launched by the School Committee and another one recommended by state education officials. The latter presented selected findings early last month, which included more than 100 individual staff contracts with costly benefits, underfunded transportation and special education accounts, and major disarray in the school’s business department.
There’s more. Last fall, a district official said he’d seek whistleblower protection after he was put on leave when the district announced its multimillion-dollar deficit. The district’s assistant chief financial officer claims he warned the district’s CFO of the impending financial crisis in summer 2022.
What makes the financial issues especially disturbing is that Brockton Public Schools had already been losing some of its academic luster. So much so that in 2020, right before the pandemic hit, the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education conducted a districtwide review and found that the school system “has experienced a continual decline in academic outcomes according to the most recent state data, with 10 of its 21 schools now ranked in the lowest 10 percent of Massachusetts schools.”
In an interview with the Globe editorial board, Brockton Mayor Robert Sullivan promised transparency. “I don’t have the answers. We will eventually get to the conclusion of what happened. Whatever the findings are … I’m going to send them out to the general public,” he said. That’s a good sign. If the city and its elected officials can restore order at the school and level with the public about how it got to this point, they can rebuild trust among parents and students and rebuild Brockton High School’s once-impressive reputation.