Tag: Boston School Committee

  • In 7-0 vote, School Committee passes $1.73 billion budget

    The Boston School Committee on Wednesday unanimously passed a $1.73 billion budget for next school year, a more than 4.5 percent increase over this year’s spending plan, but ongoing financial pressures and declining enrollment will put between 300 and 400 jobs at risk. 

    Advocates are calling for the city to invest an additional 1 percent of its operating budget, about $48 million, to avert cuts to student services. The School Committee holds exclusive authority to revise line items in the budget. The City Council and Mayor may approve, reject or reduce the total recommended budget, but do not have the authority to revise individual items or increase the budget. 

    During a February budget presentation, Superintendent Mary Skipper said certain reductions would be necessary as costs continue to outpace revenues. She said fewer teachers would be needed because of an enrollment decline of about 3,000 students over the last two years. Other top financial pressures includee labor contracts, transportation expenses and rising health insurance costs. 

    Increased expenses have contributed to an estimated $53 million budget deficit this year, which led to a hiring freeze announced in January.

    “The budget that the city has proposed for the schools is not adequate to meet the needs of all of our members, particularly students with disabilities and multilingual learners,” said Boston Teachers Union President Erik Berg. “The restoration of any necessary services for our students is a move in the right direction. We’re seeking additional funding added into the BPS budget so they can restore some of the services that are currently [cut].”

    Those proposed cuts would primarily impact teaching and aide positions, as well as administrative roles and other support staff. Special education and bilingual faculty are to be especially affected.

    Mary Stenson, a school nurse at the Melvin H. King South End Academy Elementary School — a specialized school for students with increased social and emotional needs — said she has seen the effects of reductions first-hand, adding parents who have students with similar needs should find these cuts “alarming.” 

    “People see our students as ‘bad kids,’ but they just need their emotional needs met. Bigger schools can’t meet their needs,” Stenson said. “Listen to educators. Take it from the people in the buildings.” 

    Formerly known as the McKinley schools, the Melvin H. King Academy offers speech therapy, physical therapy and dental and vision care, among other services. Julie Cass, a paraprofessional, said it’s not uncommon to need multiple staff members to address the behavioral needs of one student. Reducing special education staff in favor of inclusion models could create unsafe environments for other students and staff, she said.

    “We do intense and effective work. Some kids can coast by, our kids can’t coast,” Cass said. “Many students come in with low self-esteem. They get to find out how smart they are.”

    Sumaya Sheike, a fifth-year educator at Dr. William H. Henderson Inclusion School in Dorchester, said cuts will “hurt” her students and may make the work of remaining staff more difficult.

    “There are a lot of steps to go through before eliminating student-facing roles,” Sheike said. “You can’t talk about the successes of BPS without the faults.”

    For Simel Rodriguez, who has a fifth grader at Blackstone Elementary in the South End with both behavioral and multilingual needs, cuts to special education services could mean losing communication with her daughter. 

    Rodriguez’s daughter has an IEP — an Individualized Education Program — and benefits from speech therapy and additional support in math and reading. 

    “All students, regardless of diverse needs, need this staff,” said Rodriguez, translated from Spanish. “By cutting these things, you limit all learners.”

    Rodriguez was one of dozens of parents, union members and advocates who rallied outside City Hall before the City Council budget hearing Tuesday, to call on the Council and Mayor Michelle Wu to prevent service cuts. In an overflowing chamber, Boston Public Schools students presented legislators with letters of intent tied to flowers and many more gave oral testimony.

    Ahead of the 7-0 vote on Wednesday, School Committee members discussed the allocation of transitional funds for schools that will close, improvements for future budget seasons and the role of public comment in amending the budget.  

    “I’m sure there are things we are doing in our schools because we’ve always done them, that may or may not give us the outcomes that we’re looking for,” said School Committee Chair Jeri Robinson, calling for an audit of the BPS central office and at the school level. “It’s time to do some self-reflection. Student outcomes don’t change until adult behaviors do.”

    The budget now goes to the City Council and Wu for final approval.

  • Robert Cappucci makes yet another bid for mayor; one of three challenging Mayor Wu

    Robert Cappucci. Georgia Epiphaniou photo.

    Robert Cappucci has been campaigning for public office for more than five decades, with runs for state representative, Congress, City Council and now, for the fourth time, mayor of Boston. 

    “A winner, as they say, never quits, and a quitter never wins,” says the 80-year-old one-time Boston Police officer.

    He has been successful twice: In 1987, and again in 1989, he was elected to the Boston School Committee. He didn’t have an opportunity to win a third time because membership on the school panel became an appointed position in 1991.

    Before, during, and in between his attempts to win public office, he has had his hand in different lines of work. In addition to his time with the BPD, he was a substitute teacher in the for Boston Public Schools and, for several years, he was involved in real estate.

    A lifelong East Boston resident who grew up with four siblings and served in the US Navy during the Vietnam War (1968-1974), he has never been married. He describes himself as a “workaholic.”

    In 2013, he announced a campaign for mayor but failed to turn in enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. In 2017 and 2021, he made the ballot, but did not advance beyond the preliminary municipal elections, receiving 6.7 percent of the vote in 2017 and 1.1 percent in 2021.

    Cappucci has roots in electoral politics. His father, Enrico, represented East Boston as a Democratic member of the Massachusetts House from 1937 to 1949. He says his father told him that he wasn’t cut out to be a politician. “I guess he knows what a politician is, and I don’t.”

    Still, Cappucci didn’t know exactly what his father meant by his assertion – Enrico died in 1976, two years before his son’s first run for public office, for state representative – but he later interpreted it to mean that politicians pander to different audiences. 

    “As I got older, I think of a politician as someone that is pretty good with their words, so they don’t really commit themselves,” Cappucci says. “A politician to me seems to have no — I hate to say it — conscience.”

    He is running as a conservative in a city that has had a Democrat in the mayor’s office continually since James Michael Curley took office for the third time in 1931. But Cappucci has never been deterred by the political makeup of his city, where 39.7 percent of voters are Democrats, 55.2 percent are unenrolled, and 4.3 percent are Republicans.

    “Although it’s a liberal city, there are plenty of people out there that have my way of doing things,” he says, “a conservative way.”

    John Dillon, a self-styled “liberal,” has supported Cappucci the office-seeker from his first run for School Committee through his bid for mayor in 2021. A knee injury has kept him on the sidelines this year.

    “He did his service on a nuclear submarine. Do you know what you have to do — to go through — to do that?” Dillon asked. “You’re put through all sorts of psychological tests and everything else, so it told me he was a real bright guy. And the fact that he always wanted to help the poor was another thing that really hit me.”

    Cappucci says he is running as a “unifier candidate,” which to him means bridging the gap between Democrats and Republicans on certain issues.

    In 2021, he was a critic of so-called “sanctuary cities.” Though he didn’t clearly lay out his stance for his latest campaign in this interview, he did say he favors President Trump’s efforts to increase arrests and deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

    “He’s going after, from what I have been observing, people that are very bad,” Cappucci said. “They’re killers, they’re murderers, they’re rapists. That’s who he’s targeting.”

    When pushed on this statement with examples of detentions involving undocumented individuals without criminal records — like Marcelo Gomes da Silva, a Milford teen who was detained by ICE on his way to volleyball practice in May — Cappucci said he wasn’t sure that media accounts were accurate. 

    “As my father always told me, being an attorney in politics, he said, ‘Don’t believe everything you read,’” he said. “So, when you get situations like that, I’m not sure we’re getting the truth.”

    Cappucci is a critic of incumbent Mayor Michelle Wu, especially with respect to her handling of the situation at Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, an area with a history of rampant substance misuse. 

    Richard Masterson, a Cappucci supporter and lifelong Roxbury resident, said no one is solving the problem. 

    “It seems like they just push it from one area to another area to another area,” he said. “There are people shooting up drugs, needles hanging out of their necks and out of their arms, and sitting on the curbs. They have nowhere to go.”

    Cappucci holds Wu responsible for the ongoing problem. He told Masterson that, if elected, he would seek to reopen Long Island Hospital, which offered addiction treatments but was closed in 2014 when officials deemed the bridge to Long Island to be in poor condition. 

    Among his other concerns about Wu’s mayoralty is the ongoing redevelopment of White Stadium in Franklin Park. “I really have a problem with trying to do things when you’re giving away the tax dollars,” he said. “We need that money for so many reasons.” He said housing, education, and infrastructure should take precedence over the stadium.

    Although wins and losses are out of his control, Cappucci says that running for office is what he wants to do for the rest of his life.

    “As a Catholic, I’m trying to do the best I can. So when I go before him — when I pass away — he can say, hopefully, ‘You did a good job.’”