I am wondering if anyone here has had success in going around the middle-man to fund an urgent need. When BPS canceled many buses all over the city, it destroyed West Roxbury Academy’s successful after-school tutoring program to help struggling students, ESL students, and special education students–anyone who wanted extra help to restore grades or to pass their tests. I am an English and ESL teacher at the school. I tried asking The Boston Foundation for help, but they said they do not fund this kind of thing. They asked me doesn’t BPS have any emergency funds? Sigh. That is the problem. The buses were cut to save money and that money is not coming back anytime soon. We know because of how hard we have sought the return of these funds without success. Also, the timing for losing our after-school tutoring program could not be worse. We are being asked to raise test scores at the same time we are being deprived of our best hope for doing so. We have been expanding this after-school program in recent years because of its success. No student who has attended the ESL after-school program with which I am involved has failed the MCAS. A good number of them have raised their Needs Improvement scores to Proficient.
Please review the MBTA map for the Route 36 bus above. If you count the stops on the MBTA bus route from West Roxbury Academy to the Forest Hills Station, you will find there are 30 of them just to get to the train from the school. Once our students get to Forest Hills, they mostly take the Orange Line to the Red Line to reach Dorchester or Mattapan. From their Red Line stop, they have to make their way to their homes. Without a school bus to bypass the 30 stops and take them straight to Forest Hills, they do not get home before dark. Often their neighborhoods can be dangerous after dark, so their parents do not want them to stay after school. Eighty percent of our students come from poor, Title I families and this is one more significant disadvantage for them.
Does anyone know of a charitable trust or foundation which might be approachable about funding school buses for after-school tutoring? We need $30,000 to $60,000 for these buses. For us the clock is ticking. Some of my students have the MCAS retest in just two weeks! That is because by November they will have been in this country for a year so the state deems them ready to tackle Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and other classic and modern authors on the MCAS tests. A year is not much, so the after-school program has been a lifeline for them in the past. The majority of our regular students, ESL students, and special education students will have to take the English, math, and science MCAS in March, May and June. So the extra tutoring is needed year-round. Already we are behind where we were last year. My students are suffering the loss of the after-school tutoring. I would appreciate any advice on where to look for support.
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…you were right on in posting this in the Globe this morning, because this is the sort of solution that the Board of Ed should be looking at, rather than going Round 241 on charter schools. Could you send them a letter (or send someone in to testify before them)?
I could try formal testimony, either written or in person. We have been working on this within the system since the beginning of the school year, so I am not sure my testimony will change much. Still, we certainly have nothing to lose by bringing it up again. In years to come I do think the funds will be restored, but that does nothing to help the struggling students who need help now.
Delores, why not bypass the Boston Foundation (TBF) and go right to the “venture philanthropists” that give TBF money? The boys over at the Boston Foundation’s (TBF) billion dollar boys club are basically middlemen who move money for people that will recycle back into their own foundations using all kinds of investment “vehicles.” Rob Reich wrote an interesting article “What are Foundations for” in Boston Review and was joined in the discussion by Diane Ravitch and several other notable thinkers. Worth the read.
Many charter schools have millions in the bank. Yet they still receive chapter 70 funding. They way I see it they owe Westie. They owe the city of Boston. “I have more than enough money because of venture philanthropy, but I need more state funds because , well just because”. Those days need to cease and disist. Take the venture philanthropy money. Leave BPS’s money alone.
Dolores is from a a charter school. Is that the case?
Check the DESE profile. Were it a charter, I imagine it would have gotten a lot of love from the Boston Foundation. That’s what they’re in business for — to get business from their shareholders/donors.
West Roxbury Academy is in the Boston Public School system. Its after-school late buses have been cut from the budget.
West Roxbury High School (Westie…go Raiders!) was one of the many Boston Public High Schools cut-up by Gates into 4 small high schools under the Payzant reign. When the “small schools initiative” failed to show the results that Gates anticipated, he stopped the funding. Of course, he never left the money to clean up the mess he made!
In the Hyde Park Educational Complex, 2 of the small “failing schools,” that were set-up by the district with programs of ELL & SPed populations known to fail MCAS, were closed and those students and teachers were shuffled around the city.The 4 small schools at West Roxbury were consolidated into 2 schools, which received many ELL and SPED/SWD from the closed schools.
Six months later, the Massachusetts School Building Authority put the school department on notice that it wasn’t going to pay $12.5 in loans for an empty school building. Magically 2 pilot schools were move into the HP Ed Complex.
What a fiasco that was. This entire expensive program, all based on a complete misunderstanding of basic statistics.
The notion was that a large percentage of high-achieving schools were noted to be small schools. Therefore, it must be the smallness of the school that creates those high achievement numbers, and therefore large schools must be broken up into multiple smaller schools all located in the same building.
In our area, that meant hiring more administrators to administer the new “small schools” and also meant the elimination of a number of great electives that could only be filled when drawing from a large student population. We can’t have electives with kids from different virtual schools, that would disrupt the small schools model!
Turns out, oops, small schools get high-performance numbers in greater numbers than large schools for the same reason that small schools get low-performance numbers in greater numbers than large school: small sample size. One or two brilliant kids, or one or two dimwits, in a population of 50 students have a big impact on that population’s average, but those same students would have a very muted impact on the average of a population of 1,000.
The whole thing was a complete waste of money. I have often wanted to find out what PhD made a dissertation out of this, and go punch him in the nose, and then disband whatever school it was that allowed such nonsense to gain momentum in the first place.
without coming up with any conclusions except “good teachers make a difference.” Duh. Ask about 200 million former children in the US and they will all point to several teachers from their school days who made them more interested in the subject, want to do better, etc.
Not exactly research but kinda common sense.
a school system to hire more administrators. That’s the trend these days: hire more people who don’t carry out instruction or provide services to students. Curriculum director, data coach, etc.
Seems that way here. I don’t understand why there isn’t pressure to reduce the overhead to maximize the budget for teaching. Never mind that all of these BS positions rest on the assumption that teachers aren’t professionals capable of making a lesson plan themselves.
Seems like a gravy train for PhDs in Ed to act as “consultants.”
I had two great teachers my freshmen year at CRLS, when it lost accredidation and was undergoing significant restructuring, in spite of being in Cambridge and spending almost 25k per pupil. My English teacher was a proud union member and liberal, my History teacher was a bit of a curmudgeonly conservative and didn’t like the union, but they both agreed that the easiest way to save the district money while actually improving the ability of teachers to do their jobs was to cut all the ‘paraprofessionals’ and ‘advisors’ and ‘curriculum consultants’ who were paid 75-80k to sit in classes and watch teachers teach and then tell them how to do their jobs better, in spite of having less experience and no clue about our school. Cutting middle management is a great approach both sides should get on board with.
” I don’t understand why there isn’t pressure to reduce the overhead to maximize the budget for teaching.” Same reason directors give bonuses to corporate officers of failing companies: management looks out for management. The educational equivalent of the 1% looking out for itself.
Whereas I see them mainly as people who don’t have what it takes to teach, but still want to work in a school.
Our neighborhood sends our children to 10 different schools. Our streets are clogged with buses barely half full with little kids, our bus stops crowed with frantic middle school children with bus and train schedules in their hands worried about 3 or 4 different connections they have to make to get to school on time.
Broke my heart to see a big 14 year old neighborhood boy trying to hold back tears because he had missed the bus by 2 minutes and would be tardy again, and be disqualified for some after school activity. He has a 1 hour 15 minute trip on a good day.
So I hailed a cab .
To get funding for this bus? I know it runs partly through Sen. Chang-Diaz’s district, would she be a good person? Who’s the councilor there? Let’s crowdsource a solution here.
Took all spring for the school committee and city council to debate this money saving strategy and the parents organizations and Children’s advocates lost.
…that busing has outlived its usefulness, assuming it ever had any? The town I grew up in and still sub in, along with I believe every community in the immediate area, simply uses geographic districts for multiple schools serving the same grade level. It was in fact only last year I learned in conversation with a friend who is a Boston City Councilor that Boston still bused. My reaction was, “What is this – the 1970s?”
It’s worked in Cambridge for almost 40 years, and it is an essential component ensuring our schools remain ethnically and economically diverse. I think diverse schools were vital in my own education, and made me far better prepared for college and adapting to other environments as I’ve matured. We have more neighborhood level integration in Boston than we did just a few decades ago, but I wouldn’t change it unless you had a strong community based constituency that crossed racial and economic lines asking for the change.
I grew up in a very white town, but had no problem “adjusting” to a more diverse university environment, a word which I put in quotes because as far as I’m concerned there was really nothing to adjust to. I would prefer that we ensure that everyone have access to equal resources regardless of what building or neighborhood they happened to be in, which IS something my town could improve.
I remember when the elected school committee was abolished. “Leave it up to the Mayor”, Boston parents were told. “Sure you won’t have your local school committee member to complain to, but your mayor will be accountable. That, of course, was a con. It’s always a con when elected officials are replaced by appointed ones. The fact that no one has yet mentioned the mayor shows how accountable he isn’t.
In the old days, the “politicians” who needed your vote would never let something like this happen.
The current school committee owes their collective jobs to no one but the mayor. If someone put some pressure on him . . .
Say a group of parents showed up at his office and ask to borrow his limo to get their kids to afternoon school activities. Tell Mayor Walsh it would only be for a short time while the school committee found money to fund a school bus or two. Meanwhile they could give the mayor a Charlie ticket.
Mayor Bill Peduto in Pittsburgh was elected, in part, on a promise to bring it back. De Blasio is considering it, and it is the centerpiece of my good friend and educator Dr. Amara Enyia’s uphill campaign for Mayor against Rahm. It likely would’ve been the centerpiece for Karen Lewis had she not succumbed to a brain tumor and left the race. Hopefully, we can pressure Marty and others to restore it.
I had the pleasure of serving as a student member of my towns committee in Cambridge and I saw first hand how essential it was. A clear link between administrators and working families that wouldn’t exist otherwise.