A group of white and Asian-American parents - and their California-based law firm - this week asked the US Supreme Court to overturn rulings by federal courts in Boston that the School Committee did nothing wrong when it changed the way students are accepted to the three exam schools by including Zip codes in addition to grades as a criterion. Read more.
Boston Parents Schoolyard News reports students and teachers at BLA are petitioning BPS to keep Rajeeve Martyn, who heads the departments of history and world languages, and Jane Victor, science department leader - now scheduled to be laid off as part of an effort to cut costs.
Students and teachers say their losses in particular would be devastating for the exam school.
The Supreme Court today declined to hear a case involving allegations of racial discrimination by an exam school in Virginia that had its admissions policies changed in 2020 to try to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment through a new selection process that takes into account which neighborhoods applicants live in. Read more.
Screen captures from one parent's phone of the message parents got.
Police ordered Boston Latin Academy into "safe" mode early this afternoon after a parent reported her daughter had just called her to tell her another student was inside the school with a gun. Read more.
A federal appeals court yesterday rejected, again, a bid to block Boston Public Schools from changing its previous grades-and-test-score criteria for admissions to Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy and the O'Bryant School. Read more.
Parents, teachers and alumni at the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science tonight urged the School Committee to keep the school in Roxbury rather than moving it to distant West Roxbury, while people affiliated with Boston Latin Academy mostly urged the committee to find a new head of school who won't belittle and ignore teachers and students - although some praised and supported current Head of School Gavin Smith. Read more.
Some 85% of teachers at Boston Latin Academy voted "No Confidence" in Head of School Gavin Smith.
In e-mail tonight, BPS told parents of prospective exam-school students that neither BPS nor an outside auditor initially caught the error at first in the way seventh-grade eligibility is calculated, but that they still expect to send out actual invitations in early May - still on schedule for BPS, but later than other area schools with selection policies. Read more.
A parent volunteer found "a small bag of bullets" during a staff-appreciation event at Boston Latin Academy around noon on Friday, BLA Head of School Gavin Smith said in e-mail to the school community. Read more.
WFXT reports a bag of bullets was found on a Boston Latin Academy loading dock around 1:30 p.m. today.
The Patriot-Bridge in Charlestown, home to Charlestown High School, which Eliot School parents want to remake as an innovation school reports that parents are now upset because of a BPS plan to penalize their kids 10 points on their GPAs to try to level exam-school admissions across the entire BPS district. Read more.
Yes, three Boston School Committee members got all racist. And, yes, city attorneys screwed up in trying to withhold evidence of racially-tinged texts by two of them from a parents group suing over the way kids got invited to the exam schools this year. But no, the plan used to invite students without exams was not racist, a federal judge ruled today - again. Read more.
School Committee members discussing the new plan.
The Boston School Committee today unanimously approved a new policy for admissions to the city's three exam schools that relies less on a test and more on grades - and on socioeconomic data that will benefit students in public housing, are homeless or attend schools with a high number of poor families. Read more.
A School Committee lawyer argued today that leaving out the "Westie whites" exchange from text messages handed over to the Globe and a woman who turned out to be a secret member of the parents group suing over exam-school admissions was an innocent mistake, not part of some nefarious scheme to hide racial hatred by School Committee members. Read more.
The group representing mainly West Roxbury parents that sought to put the exam back in exam schools for the coming school year is asking a federal judge to reopen its case because of "clear racial motivation and anti-White racism" on the part of two School Committee members in text messages exchanged over the course of a nine-hour meeting on what to do about the Covid-19-forced cancellation of exams. Read more.
A federal appeals court today upheld a judge's decision to let Boston Public Schools use a combination of pre-Covid GPAs and Zip codes to determine who is offered admission to the city's three exam schools for the coming school year, saying the plan is fair and the parents who sued waited so long that a ruling in their favor would have caused "chaos" that would disrupt the lives of thousands of Boston families. Read more.
A group of White and Asian-American parents are appealing a judge's decision that the Boston School Committee did nothing wrong in the way it came up with a non-exam way to admit students to Boston's three exam schools for the coming school year. Read more.
A federal judge ruled today that the Boston School Committee can proceed with selecting students for the city's three exam schools via a formula based on grade point average and Zip codes, rather than using GPAs and the traditional entrance exams. Read more.
A federal judge today held off any action on a bid by a group of White and Asian-American parents to block the way the Boston school system plans to enroll students in the three exam schools until at least March 16 to give the two sides - and lawyers for groups representing Black, Latino and other Asian-American parents - time to try to agree on the basic facts of the case. Read more.
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