Amid growing concerns over violence in Boston schools,  finds that more than two-thirds of parents of Boston Public Schools students are worried about their children’s safety in school and three-quarters would support a return of police to the city’s schools.

The survey, conducted by the MassINC Polling Group for the Shah Family Foundation, found that 68 percent of Boston Public Schools parents were somewhat or extremely worried about school safety. The figures were even higher for parents of color, with 71 percent of Black and Latino parents voicing such concerns and 79 percent of Asian parents doing so. 

Concern was also greater among parents of high school students, 81 percent of whom said they were somewhere or very worried about school safety.

When it comes to strategies to address safety concerns, 75 percent of BPS parents said they favor returning police officers to schools. Police have not been stationed in Boston schools since the summer of 2021. Their removal came in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, and following passage of a 2020 police reform bill that required officers to obtain an additional 350 hours of training by July 2021. The district has instead deployed school safety specialists, who don’t carry weapons or handcuffs and don’t have arrest powers. 

The decision to remove police has been controversial, with some school advocates and a number of youth and education-focused organizations supporting the move, while others, including several city councilors, have called on the city to bring police back into schools.

“The safety of our children must be a top priority. We need to reconsider our public safety plan as it relates to our BPS community, and there is a role for police in our schools,” said City Council President Ed Flynn, one of four councilors who co-authored a letter to Superintendent Mary Skipper in February calling for school police to be brought back.

Flynn said he was not surprised by the poll finding of strong support from parents for bringing police back to the schools. “I hear those comments throughout my district and throughout the city,” he said. “Parents are concerned about the safety of our children in the public school system.”

Ruby Reyes, director of the Boston Education Justice Alliance, said parents’ reaction to safety issues and student views “can be completely different things.” 

“We know students don’t want police in schools,” she said. “What students have been asking for is social and emotional supports. I think there is a disconnect.”

Opponents of police in schools say their presence will lead to more Black and Latino students getting pulled into the criminal justice system and that non-punitive approaches to safety issues and school disputes, such as restorative justice strategies, should be used instead.  

Several high-profile, violent incidents have shaken the district in recent years, including a November 2021 assault on a school principal, who was knocked unconscious, and a stabbing last September at a high school. Support for returning police to schools was higher among parents of color. Support for police in schools was 60 percent among white parents, 72 percent among Black parents, 80 percent among Asian parents, and 87 percent among Latino parents. 

Meanwhile, 76 percent of parents said they support metal detectors in schools. Of the parents polled, 25 percent said their child’s school has metal detectors, while 64 percent said their child’s school does not. Eleven percent said they didn’t know or didn’t answer the question.

In February, the Boston Globe  that the Boston Public Schools and Boston Police Department were negotiating an agreement that would spell out the procedures for when police should be called to deal with situations in the city’s schools. 

The district did not respond directly to the poll finding on parent safety concerns or support for police in schools.

“We continue to work in close collaboration with the Boston Police Department on violence prevention efforts, including community engagement with Boston Police officers in our schools,” a BPS spokesperson said in a statement after the poll results were shared with the district. “We will continue to work tirelessly with our partners in government to address the violence we see across our neighborhoods and schools. Our staff will continue to work daily to ensure that all students have access to social-emotional support and a learning environment that makes them feel safe, respected, and academically challenged.” 

In other findings from the poll, 22 percent of parents say their children have fallen behind academically since COVID’s arrival, while 56 percent say their children have remained on track. Among those who say their children have fallen behind, only 25 percent say their school is doing enough to help them, while 67 percent say the school should be doing more. 

The poll is the sixth in a series of surveys of BPS parents, the first of which was carried out in August 2021. Overall satisfaction with the school system is trending down. In the first poll, 87 percent of parents were somewhat or very satisfied with the district. In the latest poll, which was conducted among 828 parents between March 22 and April 10, that figure was 73 percent, the lowest of any of the six surveys.

Some campuses could see those numbers rise further still: In May, a , which kept millions of people from seeking in the United States, is set to expire — a development that comes amid a crippling teacher shortage in parts of the nation. 

Newcomers’ impact on social services, including schools, has long been a talking point for politicians. It’s also been posited as by New York City’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, who began upon their request: His administration cited their rising numbers as a key factor in this month’s , including to the . 

The White House has taken note of the educational imperative. President Joe Biden, in his March 9 budget address, proposed devoting in fiscal year 2024 to help these students gain English proficiency — a over the current amount. He’s also pushing for an additional $90 million to build multilingual teacher pipelines through Grow-Your-Own initiatives and $10 million for post-secondary fellowships to further bolster the educator pool.

But it’s unclear if this new round of funding will meet the needs of one of the fastest-growing student groups in the country. English learners made up 10.4% of total U.S. enrollment in 2019, according to the most recent available , up from 8% in 2000.

To gauge how these students are being served, The 74 reached out to 13 school districts across the country representing hundreds of thousands of English learners requesting information about their numbers and their teachers’.  

ESL Student to Teacher Ratio

Responses received over the past several months show dramatic differences in student-teacher ratios ranging from roughly 4:1 in San Diego, 9:1 in the Houston Independent School District and 11:1 in both Chicago and Cypress Fairbanks, which also serves Houston. It’s approximately 23:1 in Los Angeles and Las Vegas’s Clark County schools, and 30:1 in Baltimore City, though school officials there say it’s usually closer to 40:1. 

“Most teachers are begging for there to be a cap on classes, but there usually isn’t,” said Pamela Broussard, a long-time educator who serves new arrivals just outside Houston. The magic number for her, she said, is 15, but the U.S. Department of Education does not regulate this figure, a spokesman said: It’s a state and local issue. 

A manageable class size, experts and educators say, depends on students’ age, English proficiency, level of trauma and the instructional model used to help them, among other factors, including the teacher’s own training.

In the classroom 

When queried about their experiences by The 74 on a Facebook group for English language instructors, dozens of educators replied, describing a vast array of conditions in the classroom.

Those with caseloads hovering around 20 or 30 generally found their workload manageable while those responsible for 75 or more multilingual learners found it untenable.  

Some say they have supportive administrators, make great use of related technology, employ top-notch curriculum and work alongside highly trained peers in a single building — with the help of paraprofessionals. 

Others say they are the only such teacher in their district, work across several campuses and struggle with scheduling, plus administrative duties and paperwork. Among the most exasperated are those who have little assistance and serve students of varying age, need and ability. 

“No limit for me,” wrote one Oklahoma teacher. “I’m personally responsible for around 80 and do paperwork and supervise over an additional 30 to 40.”

Jody Nolf, a literacy engagement specialist based in Palm Beach County, Florida, said the appropriate class size depends on whether, for example, students missed years of schooling or were unable to read in their home language — all of which can slow their progress.  

“Some teachers do well with 20 to 25,” said Nolf, who works with East Coast school districts. Others, she said, barely manage 10 to 15 when students’ needs are great.   

“Few of us, however, teach in ideal circumstances,” she said. 

If the primary purpose of English language instruction is for children to make gains in reading, writing, speaking and listening, Houston’s Broussard said, students need time to tackle all four tasks. 

“Smaller class sizes give children time to talk,” said the teacher, whose charges, many of whom hail from Cuba and Venezuela, have lived in the United States for less than six months. 

By the numbers 

New York City Public Schools reported roughly 150,000 multilingual learners among some in the 2021-22 school year. The figure excludes charters — and the who’ve enrolled in the past year. 

Some 77,000 of these children were identified as newcomers, meaning they had three or fewer years of English language learner status. Roughly 9,500 of the city’s teachers had either a bilingual and/or English-as-a-Second-Language credential. 

Teachers in bilingual education classes instruct students in two languages while ESL teachers focus on English — as do those labeled . 

Georgia’s Cobb County serves more than 12,000 multilingual learners — more than 1,300 are newcomers — with 274 ESOL teachers. More than 1,800 other educators have some certification in this area, the district said, but it’s not clear how many teach English exclusively to these students.

Baltimore also serves a substantial number of newcomers, defined by that district as those who have been in U.S. schools for less than a year and are at the lowest English proficiency level. More than 1,500 of the district’s nearly 9,000 multilingual learners fit this category.  

Brevard Public Schools in Florida has 723 such students out of 3,181 multilingual learners. It has 27 English to Speakers of Other Languages teachers to serve them. Seven positions remain vacant. The district also has 55 bilingual assistants — 16 spots remain open. 

Students assigned to Clark County’s Global Community High School, designed to serve newcomers, enjoy a 10:1 student-teacher ratio: It has just 165 students and 16 teachers. Another 3,792 newcomers are elsewhere in the Las Vegas school district. 

While many school systems across the country employ specially designated staff to help immigrant students build their initial inroads to learning, other districts, including Brevard, provide none. Houston ISD has 4,125 newcomer students and no specifically assigned staff to serve their unique needs.

Teacher training 

As with class size, there’s little agreement regarding what constitutes teacher preparedness, a fact evidenced by vastly different state standards. Some educators who responded to The 74’s Facebook queries said they earned their credentials after passing a single test — many sought additional training afterward — while others had to complete numerous courses and spend many hours in the classroom working with multilingual learners. 

No matter how they win the designation, said Diane Staehr Fenner, founder and president of SupportEd, which aims to provide educators with the skills and resources they need to serve these children, these instructors must understand how language works, use culturally relevant and responsive materials and have expertise in crafting and implementing effective lesson plans. 

They must also collaborate effectively with other teachers, design appropriate classroom assessments and know how to interpret the scores their students earn on the state-wide English language proficiency exams that determine whether they are eligible for services. 

Staehr Fenner credits the Teachers of English for Speakers of Other Languages International Association’s P-12 for the criteria. She said these educators must also protect students’ legal rights; they should “really empower multilingual learners and all of the teachers who work with them.”

Schools are legally obligated to enroll all children who live within their district boundaries, , according to the 1982 Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe. Almost a decade earlier in 1974, the high court ruled in that schools must provide appropriate services to students who do not yet speak English. 

But multilingual learners face ongoing discrimination: Districts across the country have been sued for failing to and these children. 

Boston Public Schools has been under court order since 1994 to direct a more equitable share of its federal funding toward this group, but last month a longtime legal monitor said Boston school leaders recently for the records documenting how it spent the money. 

Learning a new language   

The goal of providing appropriate services is to move newly arrived and non-English speaking students to the place where they are proficient and can learn in English without additional support.

Tim Boals, founder and director of WIDA at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, said studies show it takes either four to seven or five to seven years for a child to exit ESL services. But there are variations: Some children graduate from such programs in three years, he said. For others, it takes longer. 

“Being younger is assumed to be a big advantage, but that’s not always the case,” he said. “If kids don’t come with basic reading skills in their home language, that can slow things down. Arriving in high school can also be hard since kids have only four to five years typically to ‘catch up’ and accrue credits.”

Added time is unlikely in many classrooms as teacher shortages persist: While the English learner population is growing, staff are . 

Officials from Baltimore City Schools, who said they travel all over the country looking for staff and also recruit from overseas, hope to hire at least 25 more teachers in the coming months to serve this student group. 

The need was so drastic last fall that administrators and other leadership staff went back into the classroom to teach, with some staying on for months. 

“Every year has been hard trying to find teachers,” said Lara Ohanian, the district’s outgoing director of differentiated learning. “After the pandemic, with this national teacher shortage, we have seen even more challenges.”

Ohanian said the student teacher ratio varies throughout the year and is more typically 35 or 40:1. 

It can be difficult for schools to plan or predict class size as many children arrive long after the academic year begins, said Ferlazzo, of Sacramento, a city that has become from all over the world.

“Schools didn’t know a Russian invasion of Ukraine would cause an influx of refugees late in the school year,” he said. “Or know the Afghan government was going to collapse.”

Florida’s Duval County Public Schools has 9,597 multilingual learners and 2,747 teachers to support them: 329 held an English to Speakers of Other Languages K-12 certificate, which requires passing an ESOL K-12 Area test, and much of the remainder had an ESOL endorsement, which demands 300 hours of specialized courses. 

The district had 3,199 newcomer students and 77 teachers to support them. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, has 6,786 in grades 9 through 12 alone — and 19 dedicated staffers at three high schools to help them.

The Paradise Valley School District, which serves students in the Phoenix area, has 2,024 multilingual learners this school year and 69 properly endorsed teachers who teach targeted English language development. 

McAllen Independent School District, located on the Texas-Mexico border and long accustomed to serving newcomers, is home to 7,338 English learners and has more than 550 teachers to serve them. 

A trio of reactions to new arrivals 

The resources allotted to these students might depend on their reception by their school district: In some cases, Sacramento’s Ferlazzo said, immigrant students are considered an inconvenience. 

“Their needs are not prioritized,” he said. “That might result in putting (English learners) into classes with English proficient students with no extra support at all.”

Ted Hamann, professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, has long studied children who were educated in both America and Mexico as their families traversed the border. 

He said schools and communities faced with a significant uptick in new arrivals react in three ways: through a spirit of welcome, disquiet or xenophobia. 

In the first instance, people regard the influx as a positive development, a reflection of their town’s attractiveness to newcomers. In the second case, locals note the change with curiosity or uncertainty, but general neutrality. 

The last reaction is hostile, in which newcomers are cast as a threat or contaminant. 

“What is striking,” Hamann said, “is that in most of the communities we work in, we see all three.”

On campus, it’s up to school leaders to determine which reaction is dominant, he said, adding our duty to educate multilingual learners in this country should hinge on a belief that all children deserve investment, no matter where they come from — or where they are headed. 

“We owe in the present to these kids a future that may or may not be geographically local,” Hamann said. “What kind of world do we want to live in — where we have reciprocity to each other, or we don’t? Can we be generous to each other or is it this desperate struggle for survival?” 

When Paymon Rouhanifard accepted a seat on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education three years ago, he thought of it as a “sleepy, wonky” body that didn’t capture many headlines. 

But for the former superintendent of the Camden City School District — who wanted to step away from the public arena after five years leading a district under state control — the post has been far from quiet. The pandemic thrust the state board into the forefront of tricky decisions on school reopening and COVID mitigation measures. 

“Lo and behold, we were in the middle of this whole thing,” he said. 

Rouhanifard was inspired to go into education by the example of his immigrant parents, who fled religious persecution in Iran to come to the U.S. He earned a degree in economics and political science from the University of North Carolina before he joined Teach for America and taught sixth grade in the New York City Public Schools.

After a stint at Goldman Sachs, he held top spots in the New York City and Newark school districts before former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie appointed him superintendent in Camden. At the time, it was one of the districts in the state, with declining enrollment and crumbling facilities.

Rouhanifard oversaw the implementation of “renaissance schools.” Unlike charters that might lure families away from the district, the model involved nonprofit charter operators that had to take over existing neighborhood schools and show improvement. The results were . Critics derisively dismissed him as a reformer, but others found him accessible and skilled at navigating the politics of urban school districts.

His post on the Massachusetts state board has further cemented his reputation as an iconoclast.

Rouhanifard cast the last fall when the board voted to start the school year with a statewide mask mandate, and he continues to call out for focusing on rising case counts instead of hospitalization rates, when vaccines have been available for over a year. 

And now, Rouhanifard once again finds himself at the center of a debate over a possible state takeover of a district in turmoil.

The state board is weighing potential receivership of Boston Public Schools following a scathing report of a special education department in “disarray,” ongoing disruptions in transportation and inaccurate data reporting.

“The district has failed to effectively serve its most vulnerable students, carry out basic operational functions, and address systemic barriers to providing an equitable, quality education,” the report said.

Aside from his role on the state board, Rouhanifard is founder and CEO of a nonprofit that allows high school graduates to earn tuition-free college credit while employed in health care. 

In a wide-ranging interview, he discussed his current role, Boston’s crisis and the dangers of COVID “groupthink.”

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: There are some strong, opposing views on how to turn Boston schools around. How are the challenges there different from when you led Camden?

Paymon Rouhanifard: I was shocked by the fact that no one disagreed with the content of that , a review of all that has plagued the Boston Public school system. The mayor herself said, “We’ve long been aware of these issues,” and those who came to push back on any potential intervention from the state said the same thing. 

In Camden, there was a similar . The difference is that in Camden, there was political willingness at the local level to partner with the state. Different people have different views on whether that was the right thing to do. Was it always easy? Did everyone sing “Kumbaya” day in and day out? Absolutely not. 

Ultimately, Boston Public Schools is an institution, an organization of people serving young people and families that’s led by a superintendent. You would have thought that what we’re actually trying to solve is how the state commissioner of education and the mayor can find political allies and build a plan. That’s not what it is. They need a leader. They need a CEO, and we need to all give that person cover to do the really hard work of selecting and building curriculum, steeping teachers in it, improving facilities, righting all of the issues with the special education department.

You can’t do that without leadership. As long as there’s fighting at the political level within Boston and across the state, you will be guaranteed not to find a high-quality leader to come in and do that work. It’s just going to be the same revolving door with someone who’s going to get chewed up and spit out by warring factions.

So you can’t even discuss solutions until that division is resolved?

Exactly. I was lucky because the governor in New Jersey, the commissioner of education, the mayor and other senior political leaders in South Jersey agreed on the premise: We need radical change and we’re going to bring in someone to help us figure it out.

Do you think you could be the next superintendent in Boston?

No, no, no. Superintendent was the best job I ever had that I never want to have again. It seems sort of silly to rule something out a decade from now, but I don’t think I want to be a superintendent again. I feel grateful that I can play a small role on the state board of education here. The work at Propel is currently what matters most to me.

Talk about how Propel is different. With the pandemic causing students to rethink higher education, what have you learned about the transition after high school?

In Camden, we were incredibly proud of the progress that happened inside the four walls of the classroom — improved test scores, graduation rates, reduction in suspension rates and an increase in college-going rates. At the same time, I’ve had this dawning realization that our students have been floundering in life after high school. There’s been a commensurate spike in college stop-outs. Young people are making these decisions with very little support and face a false choice of either having to forestall income and accrue debt or having to forestall education and mobility to go take an entry-level job with limited opportunities for advancement.

Propel aims to create a third way. We call it jobs-first higher education. Young people from historically marginalized communities need a quicker path to economic stability, and traditional higher ed is the wrong fit for just that reason. Why can’t we just have the best of both worlds? Let’s get them into a decent paying job as soon as possible. In six months or less, and with no debt, they’ve got a legitimate amount of college credits in their back pocket if it’s something they want to pursue in the future. They can help grandma if something comes up or if a younger sibling needs them financially for support. These are the issues that ultimately have driven young people out of traditional higher ed.

What does it take to build that infrastructure, and do you see this model working in other industries as well, beyond health care? 

We would like to be in IT, advanced manufacturing. It can apply to all middle skill jobs. It requires employers to participate in this system. It requires higher education to build these credentialing opportunities that stack into … degrees. 

Community colleges, which were designed to be a workforce engine to address the needs of the labor market, have drifted away from that mission. They are mostly in the business of transferring students to traditional liberal arts college degrees, and the workforce side doesn’t interact with the academic side. We are the connective tissue that brings them together.

Is now the time to expand, with more students rethinking whether higher education is for them?

We feel much greater urgency for this work now that you see post-secondary enrollment down by double digit percentages. The good news is wages have gone up, but young people are going to be drawn to a job that requires zero training but pays $18-$19 bucks an hour. In the long run, that may not be in their best interest. That’s a headwind that we face in our own recruitment. A big part of our job is to make it very clear why college credits matter, how will it help them into the future. 

Are you seeing growth? 

We served 120 students last year and we’re close to 250 this year. We’re still a young nonprofit.

Back to your role on the state board, your views on COVID policies have tended to go against the grain when it comes to mask mandates, for example. How did you arrive at those positions? 

There has been a lot of groupthink in how policy decisions are made, and I thought it was particularly true as we were learning more about the pandemic. I, like most everyone else, took the pandemic very seriously. I was scrubbing my groceries, taking all the precautions, and I’m a triple vaccinated person. My eligible son is vaccinated. My daughter is 4. But as more information emerged, it just became increasingly clear to me that one’s position on COVID was reflective of their political ideology, and to me that’s problematic.

I strongly believe that public health has to be founded upon convincing all people of the benefits and the related drawbacks of specific measures. It can’t just be one specific ideology and the tribes that come to agree with you. You have to convince everyone, or at least the majority of people.

Or it’s not public health?

It’s not public health. It’s tribal public health. I started to feel that divergence. There was so much information, particularly in schools in the South that had long been open, many without mask mandates. We could study them and better understand what we should have been doing in blue states like Massachusetts. School reopening was … a far bigger issue … than masking ever was. I’m frankly more disillusioned by the inanity of the masking debate. 

It was in the fall of 2020 that I began to be a bit more vocal about: “What are the off ramps?” “How do we open up schools?” And several months later, “How do we think about removing the mask mandate and making that a local decision?” I saw armies of parents who were feeling the same way, many of whom are left-of-center, as I am. 

This is one of those things where you want to gloat about being right. But many people have come around on this issue and have acknowledged that we should have opened up schools sooner. We’re now dealing with the ramifications of school closures as it relates to young people’s mental health — above and beyond even the learning loss. I lived it firsthand as a parent. My then 5-year-old was really going through it, and he’s a very social kid. That, frankly, was as big a reason for my advocacy as anything.

If you were still a superintendent, do you think you would have taken the same positions? 

I do. The mandates can’t come at a state level. I could have [given] a commissioner of education, a state board of education some cover, to show it is possible at the local level. 

I don’t mind saying this on the record. I was just hurt by the lack of district leadership in the Commonwealth. They were at times silent, at times really on the other side of school reopening. At the crux of it, there was nary a discussion about trade-offs. All public policy is about trade-offs. When you’re focused on one variable, you’re a researcher or you’re an advocate — you’re not a policymaker. 

We’re either trying to get COVID to zero and implement every intervention under the sun, or we’re like Ron DeSantis and openly shouting at people who want to wear a mask. It’s about trade-offs. What are the benefits and drawbacks at this moment in time, given the information we know? It’s about acknowledging what we thought was true a month ago may not be true today, and to say that out loud. Tell your constituents, “I was wrong a month ago. New information has emerged. Here’s where we’re going.” 

It was hard for anybody to say that?

Yeah, because there are political consequences. Decision-making got sucked into the vortex of politics. 

What are your thoughts on the role the media has played in covering the pandemic? Can you point to examples that you think have been helpful and not helpful?

There has been legitimate uncertainty, and that drives a certain set of decisions. It’s not that I think there are these culpable parties who failed us as a country. It’s just that as the pandemic evolved with new information, we failed to act on that information in ways that were beneficial to our constituents. If there is a culprit, I would say local media and to a lesser extent, national media.

It’s a trite thing to say but anxiety-inducing headlines generate clicks. The business side of the media and the journalists haven’t always been aligned. I think Donald Trump in a way put a lot of fuel back into The New York Times and other media publications, but so did COVID. I always imagine the business side [saying], “Can you guys please write about something other than whatever the topic is that doesn’t generate clicks.” And then Trump happened and COVID happened, and they’re like, “Keep writing more of that. Now we’re on the same page.” 

It’s in the Boston Globe’s financial interest to write a story in May of 2022 about case counts surging, having quotes like, “This is only the tip of the iceberg,” and saying hospitalization rates are also surging. When you look at the curve, it’s a small bump, often near-nadir. People respond to that and it does us no favors. 

A surge now doesn’t mean what a surge did in 2020? 

Exactly, because the vaccine has been available for over a year and we’re going to be living with COVID the rest of our lives. By focusing on case counts, we lost the plot altogether because the initial focus was on flattening the curve — the curve being the hospitalization rates. There has been very little curiosity from the press, both regional and national, on what is happening inside of hospitals. There’s a lot of grayness in the data, and one has to actually be thoughtful and nuanced in representing it.

Mayor Michelle Wu warned that the most dire option, a state takeover, would be “counterproductive” at a time when she is trying to elevate district management, including reaching a tentative agreement with the Boston school bus driver’s union to reform a school transportation system that has been .

“No one is better equipped to accelerate the progress Boston has made than our Boston Public Schools communities,” she said at Tuesday’s meeting of the state board.

Wu was part of a stream of politicians, teachers, and parents who offered more than an hour of public commentary opposing a takeover and arguing that Boston should be given the opportunity to solve its academic and organizational problems. The meeting came a day after the state released a 188-page report outlining systemic problems facing the district and calling for “immediate” action on behalf of its nearly 46,000 students.

Massachusetts Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley didn’t show his hand on the subject of a takeover Tuesday, but called the audit’s revelations “extremely disheartening,” with structural improvements needed across six dimensions: safety, transportation, special education, English learners, data transparency, and facilities.

“There are just a myriad of problems here, many of them emanating from a bloated central office that is often incapable of performing the most basic functions,” he said.

State law stipulates that such an audit must be completed before a takeover, known locally as receivership, can proceed. pointed to a district office plagued by rapid turnover; inadequate services for English learners and special needs students; and what it called “a pattern of inaccurate or misleading data reporting” on issues as disparate as graduation rates, bus routes, and bathroom renovations. 

Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz — a Boston Democrat currently waging a progressive campaign for governor — addressed the board members as a former classroom teacher and current public school parent, evoking the difficulties of previous receiverships attempted in other Massachusetts cities.

“What I urge you to do today is to keep working in partnership with Boston to hasten improvements for BPS students rather than erode parent voice and local democracy by triggering receivership,” Chang-Diaz argued. “We have new leadership in our mayor and will soon have a new superintendent….They deserve a chance at bat.”

With the report now in public view, the next steps will be taken by Mayor Wu, who has already met with both Riley and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker to discuss a possible collaboration with Boston Public Schools that could initiate needed reforms while stopping short of full receivership. Riley said he hoped to have a “statement of assurances” from the mayor around the need for improvements in key functions — particularly transportation and data reporting — within “a week or so.” 

Matt Hills, a director at a private equity firm who is so far the only board member to have publicly supported receivership, advocated for a decision to be reached quickly, proposing that “if God was superintendent, God would need receivership to be effective here.”

After the statement aroused angry murmuring among audience members, he continued.

“When is enough enough? When are you prepared to act?”

From Aug. 16 through 27, two groups of rising sixth- through ninth-graders embarked on a weeklong intensive STEM camp dubbed DynaMIT, a play on the school’s name. Founded in 2012 and now organized by about 15 students enrolled in perhaps the country’s most premier tech university, the free program brings critical thinking, design, science and engineering concepts to life for young people who have never participated in STEM programs before.

Each afternoon, campers worked on individual capstone projects. Boston Latin’s Steven Miall coded a roleplay game in where a traveler decides between paths in the jungle, ultimately making it out safely or perishing by tiger or hunger.

“I didn’t know how to do any Scratch before the program, and at the end, I was really, I guess fluent,” Miall said of his 2019 cohort experience. “Knowing how to use Scratch could help with other different languages of computer science in the future.”

“We have a lot of access to technological resources and education,” DynaMIT’s 2021 co-director and MIT senior Daniel Zhang said. He described their mission as utilizing their school’s resources to “bring excitement about STEM” to students who don’t have the economic opportunity to participate in similar paid programs.

Roughly of Boston Public School students are low income, and many of the were cancelled this year out of caution for the pandemic’s changing conditions. The decision to make the camp virtual for the second summer in a row was made in accordance with MIT policy, and enabled 10 out-of-state students to participate for the first time.

Jacksonville, Florida 9th-grader Emma Lee found DynaMIT in an online search for summer opportunities where she could try her hand at all STEM subject areas, hoping to hone her interests. She said that this summer was the first time she’d been in an environment with so many kids with similar interests to hers.

“Here in Florida, I don’t think there are as many opportunities from the colleges because they’re mainly up North,” Lee said. “Ever since I was little, I’ve always been pretty interested in STEM. I really want to be one of those pioneering females in the future.”

Throughout the academic year, MIT student board members write grants, develop curricula and recruit and train 40 mentors to maintain their 2-to-1 student ratio. In Zoom breakout rooms, no more than two to three mentors and four to six students form a “family” for “personalized guidance and attention” and deeper relationships, Zhang said.

Programming begins with icebreakers and time for students and mentors to check in, and each day focuses on a new subject: math, astronomy, biology, chemistry and finally mechanical engineering. DynaMIT also hosts career panels, inviting scientists and researchers from the university to talk about their professional journeys.

In-person cohorts from past years have witnessed a in action — the conductive box redirects electric charges away from whatever’s safely inside, much like a car in a lightning storm. Until 2019, students also toured a pharmaceutical laboratory, Novartis, where many used pipettes for the first time. The company is one of DynaMIT’s local partners, and provided some materials for this year’s 116 at-home science kits.

Mentors prepared and mailed the packages, which included popsicle sticks for mini hydraulic lifts and modeling clay for human organ simulations, to students’ homes. For some activities, students also experimented with objects around the home, like trying to determine the acidity of cleaning fluids in a pH scavenger hunt.

DynaMIT’s smaller class sizes and final projects, which encouraged students to lean into their interests, helped them stay engaged via Zoom after another virtual school year. When comparing 2019 and 2021 test scores across the country, education researchers estimate deep learning losses in math, with low-income students appearing more adversely affected than their high-income peers.

From space camps in Texas, where reach grade-level thresholds in science, to video game coding programs, families sought out STEM opportunities to try to mitigate learning deficits and re-engage the younger generation this summer.

In Massachusetts, summer school as a way to boost STEM mastery — the state even committed . And Boston students are eager for more opportunities like DynaMIT, to replace Zoom lectures with project-based learning.

“It was just more personal. The way that it was taught was more of a pick your route, and choose how you want to do things, which I like a lot more than the traditional science class where it’s like, ‘This is your assignment, this is what you learn about,’” said 8th-grader Hannah Steves, a 2020 virtual alum interested in pursuing environmental engineering.

The organization is in the process of surveying alumni from the past decade to measure impacts. Of the 70 alum respondents, roughly 63 percent say DynaMIT has had a strong or very strong influence on their future career aspirations, according to survey results.

Willers Yang, a first-generation college student and 2021 co-director, said they try to excite an interest in all kinds of science — from coding and psychology to chemistry — before students internalize ideas about the difficulty or accessibility of those careers. fields.

“DynaMIT is probably a good program to lead students back to school in the sense that we’re not structuring our days as lectures, we’re structuring our days as a sequence of activities and experiments that they can have fun building …,” Yang said. “Showing them that they can have a place in STEM in the future as a scientist or engineer, giving them a closer look.”

With three children in Arizona’s Mesa Public Schools, Krista Puruhito has a vested interest in how the district plans to spend its $160 million in federal relief funds. When the district held a series of community budget meetings in May, she was among the more than 300 participants who voiced requests ranging from water bottle filling stations to more teaching assistants in the classroom.

Puruhito also wants to see expanded arts integration and afterschool enrichment programs — especially in communities where families can’t afford such extras.

“They shouldn’t be directing this to all the high-income schools that already have $100,000 in their PTOs,” she said.

Mesa, like every other district across the country, is required to undertake what the American Rescue Plan calls “meaningful consultation” with community members over how to spend $122 billion for K-12 before October 2024. Some districts are taking extensive steps to reach out to their communities, providing translation during virtual meetings and posting updates on how the money will be used. But leaders say it’s challenging to balance competing interests and some parents feel districts have taken shortcuts.

A from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, to be released Wednesday, shows that just over a third of districts have posted details about how they’re involving the public in designing their plans.

“This is surprising given this is a mandated expectation for receiving funds,” said Bree Dusseault, a practitioner-in-residence at the center.

With remote learning giving parents a stronger role in their children’s education over the past year, advocacy groups across the country have pressed for broad participation from diverse groups of parents, and for multiple opportunities to inform decisions about how the money is spent.

“We have been really pushing back against the idea that surveys are enough to check the box. It’s just not enough,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union. “Where we have parent power on the ground, our expectation is that we have a seat at the table.”

But will they be OK with the limits on that power? “A lot of people can’t tell the difference between engagement and decision making,” said Dan Domenech, executive director of AASA, The School Superintendents Association. “Listening to you and doing what you want are two very different things.”

The law initially gave districts three months to collect input and submit plans to their states, but AASA and the 19-member Large Countywide and Suburban District Consortium the U.S. Department of Education for more flexibility. The that districts could take longer to submit their plans as long as they were completed within a reasonable amount of time.

Owning ‘the final product’

The Center’s review highlights a few examples of what researchers call more “robust” examples of community engagement. The Baltimore City Public Schools the results of surveys and input sessions online, and the Boston Public Schools, which is making plans to spend $400 million in relief funds, created a separate commission to lead the process.

“When you have a lot of money, it’s often harder to spend,” Boston Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said in an interview, adding that she’s drawing on 10 years of experience as Minnesota’s education commissioner to give the public an opportunity to “own the final product.”

Over the course of six meetings — translated into at least eight languages — over 1,200 community members participated. The district released of its plan last week and will continue to collect feedback.

“It’s forced us to think about what investments pay dividends over time,” said Chris Smith, executive director of Boston After School and Beyond and a member of the commission.

Some of the funding will be spent on facility improvements to “show to the city what’s been missing for so long and what needs to continue,” Cassellius said. “We have schools without cafeterias, science labs, libraries.”

But another priority was getting funds to local schools as quickly as possible. The commission agreed to allocate the money to schools based on how many low-income students, English learners and students with disabilities they serve.

In Virginia, meanwhile, a June public hearing held by Fairfax County Public Schools provided a glimpse into how challenging it might be for district leaders to balance requests from different parties. Kimberly Adams, president of the local teachers union, argued for raises and bonuses for those who taught in person last school year.

“We’ve continued to lose ground in recruitment and retention,” she said. The district for hundreds of students with disabilities because of a shortage of teachers and the district in last year’s budget.

But Eileen Chollet, the parent of a student with special needs, said the district should be reimbursing families who spent money on therapists and private tutoring because their children missed out on services during remote learning.

“My daughter, like all the other children in this county, needs help now,” she said.

‘Time and input’

In Minnesota, parent advocate Khulia Pringle helped organize a virtual town hall for the Minneapolis Public Schools and wanted to do the same in neighboring St. Paul. Leaders were already in the midst of holding community forums, but added another with Pringle as a co-moderator.

“I let everyone know that this was rushed, and I didn’t like the process,” Pringle said.

Stacey Gray Akyea, the district’s director of research, evaluation and assessment, agreed the timeline for getting community input was short — from June 17-28. But she said there will be more opportunities for parents to provide feedback. While most TItle I schools are experienced at gathering parent input, Akyea said this level of engagement may be new for some districts.

“As a researcher, I feel strongly that we [shouldn’t] ask people to give their time and input without using it,” she said, adding that she told Pringle she would ensure parents would have additional opportunities to be heard. The district is now translating its report based on community input into four languages.

Typically, parents who are already plugged into district issues are more likely to be aware of opportunities to make recommendations on major initiatives.

“You work your way up the ladder,” said Puruhito, who took part in forums when the Mesa district was searching for a new superintendent. “If you participated in one, you get invited to more.”

But planning to spend what leaders have called a once-in-generation influx of federal dollars on K-12 schools is being held on a national scale and with specific expectations that districts will reach students, parents, unions, administrators, civil rights groups and others.

“Parents want school to look different and be more engaging,” Holly Williams, Mesa’s associate superintendent, said of the district’s meetings with parents. Surprisingly, she said she didn’t hear a lot of concerns about learning loss. “They weren’t worried that their kids didn’t know algebra. They were worried their kids didn’t have connections.”

Academic recovery is one of the ways districts are required to spend a large chunk — 20 percent — of their funds. Summer school, extending the school day and one-on-one tutoring are among the approaches districts are using. But community feedback in Atlanta shows that even a pandemic is not enough of a reason to mess with school start times.

The Atlanta Public Schools proposed extending elementary students’ day by 30 minutes this fall to address learning loss. But to make bus routes work, they would have needed to set an earlier start time for high school students.

That’s when the district ran into stiff from parents and students. The district later backed off and added 15 minutes at both ends of the elementary schedule.

It’s challenging to find a balance between additional learning time and “just burning out kids,” said Lisa Bracken, chief financial officer for the district. “You can only bring them out so many extra days and add so many minutes to the day before you hit a tipping point.”