What To Expect On Boston's First Day Of School

Open Interviews For Boston Public Schools Superintendent Candidates — Boston Public Schools superintendent candidate Brenda Cassellius prepares to be questioned by the school committee panel during an open interview in Boston on April 23, 2019.

Arun Rath hosts the local broadcast of GBH’s All Things Considered.

Bianca Vázquez Toness is the Managing Editor and Correspondent for K-12 Education at WGBH Radio. She has covered everything from technology to immigration to presidential elections, but keeps coming back to stories about kids and schools. She's worked for Minnesota Public Radio, WBUR and Bloomberg News. She was a 2016-2017 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

Amanda Beland was the lead producer of WGBH News' In It Together, and an associate producer with WGBH News' All Things Considered until 2021.

September 04, 2019

Summer is officially over as many kids are heading back to school. Boston Public School students return to the classroom tomorrow.

WGBH Radio's Bianca Vazquez Toness of our Learning Curve team spoke with WGBH Radio’s Arun Rath about what parents and students can expect from the state's largest school district. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Arun Rath: So there is a new superintendent at the Boston Public Schools this year. What do we know about Brenda Cassellius?

Bianca Vázquez Toness: Well, she's not from Boston. She's from Minnesota. She is quite folksy and shows a lot of empathy for parents and students. She brings up with some frequency that she grew up on food stamps and that she relates to parents and teachers and talks about her own travails in school with her kids. She definitely has a different approach to families than I think we've seen in a while.

Rath: Interesting. So if I'm a student or parent in Boston Public Schools, will school seem different this year in any way?

Vázquez Toness: For some kids, it certainly will, I think. Elementary kids, for instance, will have more science. Boston Public Schools, in many schools, gave short shrift to science because it wasn't on the MCAS test. And so now it is on the MCAS test, and 12 percent of eight graders passed the science portion last year. So they have poured in a bunch of money, about $400,000, to overhaul science education for third through eighth graders, and it's going to be in classrooms this fall.

Rath: What are some of the other changes that we may see this year?

Vázquez Toness: More schools will have dedicated mental health counselors and nurses. There were a number of schools that didn't have them in the building, they might share them with another school. And this is a big deal, particularly for kids who have serious chronic health problems. I'm told that a student with diabetes, for instance, needs to go to a school with a dedicated nurse. And so you might be assigned to a school through the regular assignment process, but then find out you can't really go there because there isn't a nurse. So more schools will become accessible to all kids for that reason.

Also, mental health professionals and nurses are on the front lines for helping kids with all sorts of needs. They quantify there being 75 percent of kids in Boston Public Schools who are considered to be high need, whether because they're poor, they might be homeless, they might have special needs, and schools that don't have mental health counselors really feel at a disadvantage being able to help those kids.

Rath: Now when we're talking about Boston Public Schools, we're talking about more than a 120 different schools. We talked about science a bit. Many of them have vastly different outcomes and expectations for their students — this is something that you’ve reported on. Do you have a sense yet of what the new superintendent, Cassellius, might do about that?

Vázquez Toness: It sounds like this is one of the things that she's taking on first. Like you mentioned, there are vastly different expectations. Just looking at high schools, there's more than 30 high schools, and they each have a different graduation requirement, and those graduation requirements, oftentimes they're less than what the state recommends. So it seems like she's been thinking about this a lot and looking at how to raise rigor across the district. I asked her what the biggest challenge is to raising rigor:

"I think it's just to be able to build a strong academic core that's aligned to state standards," Cassellius said. "The gaps that we see in student learning are more about the gaps between what is expected and what's actually taught.”

So she talked about trying to come up with a way to meet state standards in sort of a flexible way. So a place like the exam schools can meet those state standards and still maybe require more. And also the vocational schools can meet those standards in their own way. And she hopes to have a plan that could be in place next fall for ninth graders.

Rath: So we might see changes along these lines next year?

Vázquez Toness: That's her hope, and it sounds like the way she does things that she's tried to include everyone, and she's trying to go out and talk to parents about this, I imagine. So this could be a very public discussion.

Rath: So we will probably see more engagement with parents, hopefully in that nice folksy way you're talking about?

Vázquez Toness: Right, exactly.