More than 300 kindergartners in Boston do not know which school they will attend this fall as the city’s school system confronts rising demand in some neighborhoods and a shortage of seats.
The predicament, just weeks before classes begin, prompted the Boston School Department this month to add two kindergarten classrooms in East Boston and one each in Dorchester and the South End, as well as to hire several teachers at the last minute.
Comments
This is the SECOND year, very young children are going to be put on a yellow school bus and travel around the city to a school with an empty kindergarten seat! Even though students are supposed to get 1 of their 3 choices, if a parent doesn't like the BPS placement or their child spending 2 hours a day sitting in traffic and breathing in soot, they will be told to fend for themselves another year! Who is doing the student demographic at Court Street? In June of 2011, Dr. Johnson closed how many elementary schools? Where did she think that these students were going to go? Where is she going to put them next year for 1st grade, and the following years? Boston has 78 (?) elementary schools. We are talking about approximately 14 kindergarten classes. Court street drops the ball...again!
The time for neighborhood schools has come. The BPS needs the flexibility to move staff to meet the students. This problem is one of those that leads to head scratching.
The reason that have to bus all around is that every time they talk about neighborhood schools there are complaints that it is racist to have them in their own neighborhood. If they had neighborhood schools, then it would be so much easier, but some of these parents would prefer to have their kids on a bus for 2 hours to go to a special school and they ruin it for everyone else.
The BPS consumes over 1/3 of teh city budget in order to "educate" about 57K students. As a taxpayer that makes me really nervous. If I were a parent with school age children, I would be even more nervous that the system is run by the people who are in over their heads. These types of stories seem to be a normal part of teh mini dramas that make up the beging of school in Boston.
Maybe if the Alighieri ,East Zone ELC,Fifield Elementary,Emerson Elemaentary,Farragut Elementary,Agassiz Elementary,Lee Academy were not closed due to "too many empty seats " this would not be an issue and our children and their families would have access to their education . Shame on BPS shame on the School Commitee for the Unanimous vote and Shame on Boston City Councilors for the Uninamous vote approving the Budget with this flawed plan in it .
kennyjervis said it best.
budapest104a said, "The BPS needs the flexibility to move staff to meet the students." ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ It is not about moving staff around to different schools. That is not the problem here, BPS had to hire more staff, at the last minute, to cover the new classes they didn't plan for. BPS did not plan, for the second year in a row, for the "influx" of children. The demographic data is available, and there are people at Court Street whose job it is to ascertain how many students are coming into the system so they can plan for classrooms and teachers. Remember last September? BPS knew how many 3 year old, Special Ed students were going to need classroom seats and put it on the back burner. Parents had to bring a lawsuit. The Fifield School was finally re-opened for these families in April. We still haven't heard the travel time of these Special Ed 3 and 4 year olds.
T