Boston School Committee voted unanimously on 111 agenda items

The Boston School Committee voted unanimously on 111 agenda items in the past year — every bit of business before the board with the sole exception of a 5-2 vote on the new superintendent, a Herald review has found.

The lockstep voting pattern is prompting advocates to question whether the seven-member board is just a rubber stamp for Mayor Martin Walsh. It has also resurrected calls for the School Committee to be elected instead of appointed.

“Right now with our appointed School Committee, you can clearly see their voting record is usually, like 99 percent of the time, unanimous on any particular topic. So there’s not actually any kind of discourse or dissent,” said Ruby Reyes, director of Boston Education Justice Alliance.

Over the last year, the School Committee unanimously approved all 111 action items up for a vote, according to records posted on the committee website. Members did abstain four times, but no one voted against any of the items.

The Herald emailed all seven members seeking comment. Chairman Michael Loconto told the Herald to stop reaching out to other members because “the chair speaks for the committee.” He stated, “I’m not interested in commenting.”

Boston Public Schools spokesman Dan O’Brien also declined to comment.

The agenda items over the last year ranged from approving international school trips to closing West Roxbury High School.

In one of four abstentions, School Committee member Regina Robinson remained silent on Dec. 19, 2018, on closing West Roxbury High. She was not reappointed to a second term.

The committee voted 5-2 on selecting superintendent Brenda Cassellius. Members Lorna Rivera and Alexandra Oliver-Davila voted for superintendent candidate Marie Izquierdo.

Lisa Green of Boston Coalition for Education Equity said, “You can only surmise that they’re acting on the mayor’s wishes. It doesn’t seem to be influenced by the testimony.”

Green added the “community engagement that we get from the School Committee is both not enough and doesn’t feel authentic.”

City Councilor and Chair of the Committee on Education, Annissa Essaibi-George, defended the committee, saying, “It is not unexpected to see a school committee act in greater unanimity and really work to build consensus around the positions they take.”

Walsh said in a statement, “For more than 25 years, appointed School Committee members have brought stability, expertise, focus, and broad representation to the oversight of the Boston Public Schools.” He added an elected board is “not the answer to the challenges we face, and would be a disservice to our children and a distraction to the work that remains.”

The seven members of the School Committee are appointed by the mayor to serve four-year staggered terms. The Citizens Nominating Panel is currently accepting applications for two board positions which will begin in January 2020 when Alexandra Oliver-Davila and Lorna Rivera’s terms expire.

Boston is the only city in Massachusetts with an appointed school committee.

The Herald review excluded votes on approving meeting minutes or adjournments, focusing on the agendas’ “action items” that required votes. There were 30 total meetings in the last year.

Greg Sullivan, government watchdog at the Pioneer Institute, said, “Committees that oversee gigantic bureaucracies should not be in the habit of just rubber-stamping everything that’s just laid before them.”

Sullivan said there is a tendency for committees to “essentially cede their authority to the appointed officials and the strongest sign of that is when you have 100 percent unanimous votes of proposals.”

Reyes said the lack of dissent would improve under an elected school committee: “If there was an elected school committee, the folks that were in elected to those positions — their responsibility wouldn’t be to the mayor who appoints them, their responsibility would be to the people who elect them.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/337cUSm