Overcome with emotion, Edna Vazquez paused for a moment to apologize to the few dozen parents and children demonstrating outside Dorchester’s Dever Elementary School, before continuing to urge them to fight the school’s proposed closure. Boston Public Schools has eyed Dever as part of a slate of closures and mergers as a cost-savings measure . Families at the pre-K to Grade 6 school, where two-thirds of the students are Latino, said they don’t want the district to abandon Dever. Some question whether they’re being heard by the Boston School Committee, and wonder whether their school would be on the chopping block if they had elected school board members to represent their interests. “Unfortunately, we have no voice or vote,” Vazquez said in Spanish through an interpreter. “They make decisions without asking us, and this is one of the consequences of that.” The board’s seven members have been hand picked by the city’s mayors for decades. Past efforts to convert the board into an elected one has proved fruitless, but the Boston City Council once again is pushing to transform the School Committee into an elected body that proponents say would be more responsive to students and families. Wu, who is up for re-election in the fall, also faces a challenger in Josh Kraft, a non-profit executive who declared his support for rebuilding the board: “It is time to have elected members on the School Committee,” he said last week. As a mayoral candidate in 2021, Wu had pledged to restructure the Boston School Committee by having “a majority of elected seats for democratic accountability,” along with appointed members. She later reversed her position as mayor, and vetoed the city council’s 2023 attempt to put an elected board in place, saying the move “would compromise our ability to stabilize and support” the city’s schools. Jeri Robinson, the Boston School Committee chair, said she opposes changing the board’s structure, saying elected board members would be more concerned with re-election, rather than what’s best for students. “We’re digging our way out of 100 years of neglect in the city, of the decisions that were made,” said Robinson, a product of the Boston Public Schools, who pointed to the turmoil that gripped the school board in the 1960s and 1970s. “The issue was, people were not thinking about kids. They were thinking about politics and adults,” Robinson said. “And I think our issue is what’s in the best interest of the students of this city?” As Boston once was, the vast majority of school boards around the country are elected bodies. But in 1991, Governor Bill Weld signed legislation allowing Boston’s mayor to appoint the city’s School Committee after infighting and issues over spending, according to media reports from the time. But in 2021, voters overwhelming supported a non-binding ballot measure that called for an elected School Committee. The City Council in 2023 then passed a measure to create an elected board. But Wu, who previously said during her campaign that she’d support at least a partially elected board, vetoed it, saying at the time that changing the board could risk instability in the city’s schools. City Councilor Julia Mejia, who filed the current proposal alongside five of her colleagues, said in an e-mail: “Restoring an elected school committee in Boston is a civil rights and voting rights issue.” Some critics, like Mary Tamer, who was appointed by Mayor Thomas Menino in 2010 to serve a four-year term on the School Committee, argues the stewardship of the current board hasn’t met the moment. “I, like so many other residents of the city, have been pretty dismayed by the lack of accountability that we’ve seen from this appointed body,” Tamer said. However, Paul Reville, a former Massachusetts education secretary said the School Committee is held accountable, including through the mayor, at those committee meetings, and by state officials, he said. A debate around an elected committee takes attention away from other concerns facing the district, including addressing post-pandemic learning loss, transportation issues, erecting new school buildings, and shifts in enrollment, he said. “It’s a topic which pundits love, but it doesn’t address the complex solutions needed to turn around BPS performance,” he said. The Boston Municipal Research Bureau also labeled the proposed change in the board’s structure a distraction from the urgent work of improving BPS’s “operational and academic performance,” according to a recent report. “The current School Committee could be more effective by, for example, providing more rigorous financial oversight, which should be prioritized rather than shifting to an elected body that may jeopardize the stability and focus needed for meaningful progress,” according to the report. Sammy Nabulsi, who serves on a city nominating panel that vets School Committee candidates, and whose children attend Winthrop Elementary, likewise argued the district’s current leadership is taking BPS’s challenges seriously. “This School Committee, this superintendent, this mayor, are asking the tough questions,” Nabulsi said. However, Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who has studied the impact of elected school committees, has argued that having elected members on the Boston School Committee would create more opportunities for Boston’s Black and Latino communities to participate in elected office, and with decision-making within the schools. “You want elected board governance that involves marginalized communities in meaningful ways,” he told the Globe in an e-mail. In recent years, other cities, including Chicago and Providence, have swapped appointed school boards for elected bodies. Corey Jones, who was the highest vote-getter in Providence’s inaugural school board election in November, said the new governing structure makes him accountable to the voters, as opposed to the mayor. “I didn’t think that serving in an appointed capacity would give me the autonomy that I felt necessary to do the job in the best interest of students and families,” Jones told the Globe. In the three-plus decades since the city moved to mayoral control of the schools, Boston mayors have had unparalleled opportunities to shape BPS. Mayoral control over Boston’s schools hasn’t prevented the district from stumbling, including narrowly avoiding a state takeover after failing to make enough progress in addressing intractable problems, such as providing adequate services to English learners and students in special education. Lisa Green, the chair of Elect the BSC, a local organization advocating for an elected board, argues the board has no autonomy to oversee the district and rubber stamps policies put before them. “They’re really subject to the whims of the mayor, which is about the mayor’s re-election, not about the schools,” Green said. Robinson, who was first appointed to the School Committee in 2014 pushes back on criticism that the board is there to do the mayor’s bidding. “We make our decisions dependent on what’s in the best interests of students,” Robinson said, noting she is in frequent contact with residents and regularly visits schools. Over the handling of communications about proposed school closures and mergers, she said the district is talking about how these announcements are made. A Globe review of the board’s votes in 2022, 2023, and 2024 reveal the Boston School Committee unanimously approved 179 of 203 items before it during that period. (That tally did not include votes on procedural matters like accepting the superintendent’s report to the board, which were virtually all unanimous.) There were a total of seven “No” votes during those years. One member, Brandon Cardet-Hernandez who was appointed by Wu in 2022, cast five of those votes. Robinson said the near consensus is the result of long discussions between board members before it’s ever brought to a vote. At Dever during Wednesday’s demonstration, a few dozen parents, children, and educators gathered outside the building, chanting protests against the proposed closure. Kennekca Kindell, who has a daughter in the school, said if the School Committee were elected, families like hers would have a greater say in how the district was managed. “We should have an elected voice,” Kindell said. “Accountability is key. Right now, nobody’s [is] accountable.” Emma Platoff and Steph Machado of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
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