Paul Reville, former Massachusetts education secretary, joined Boston Public Radio on Thursday to talk about the Boston Public Schools (BPS) giving student incident reports to ICE.
"I trust Mayor Walsh's assertion that it has never been his intention that the school department do this and I know with this superintendent there was... no inclination to share this information," Reville said. "Apparently [BPS] shared it with a regional law enforcement data base to which Homeland Security, which supervises ICE, had access."
There are legitimate reasons to report incidents at schools involving violence, like fighting, Reville said.
"Information about crimes that happened at schools need to be shared with the Boston police department to protect the public more generally, let alone children in schools," he said. "So this is a tricky matter in terms of access to information."
Reville SAID does not think the BPS intended for the information to be available to ICE and that information sharing will now be tightened.
"It doesn't seem to me that this was a deliberate attempt on their part," Reville said. "This being revealed, and now being public, is going to cause a significant tightening of the sharing of information with anyone at this point."
Reville is a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, where he also runs the Education Redesign Lab. His latest book, co-authored with Elaine Weiss, is "Broader, Bolder, Better: How Schools and Communities Help Students Overcome the Disadvantages of Poverty.
