Boston School Committee’s winding history

The Boston School Committee is no stranger to controversy as conversation again heats up around changing the body from elected to appointed.

From 1909 until 1983, the committee was a five-member body elected by a citywide vote. The later decades of that, though, were marred by criminal indictments and allegations of cronyism, said Larry DiCara, a former city councilor who studies Boston history.

“The School Committee then was the only job with income and no salary,” DiCara said, repeating what he said was a refrain in mid-century Boston.

Then, in the 1970s, the body opposed busing to racially integrate the district, leading advocates to push back. DiCara, then a councilor, said he was one of the officials who pushed for referendum votes to change the city charter — first in 1977, when the voters shot it down, and then in 1983, when changes to the council and committee makeups were approved.

“We saw five white Irish or and Italian men who mostly lived in the same neighborhoods,” DiCara said of the pre-1983 School Committee. The changes resulted in the committee consisting of nine districts and four at-large seats, as the current council is.

DiCara said the change did diversify the body, but corruption continued — including more indictments — and chaos reigned.

John Nucci was elected as one of the district committee members in 1983 right after the change, and then served in one of the at-large seats and was the body’s president before leaving to be elected to the City Council.

“They made the school committee too large, and they made districts that had nothing to do with the Boston Public School system,” Nucci told the Herald. “It became too parochial. It was well-intentioned, but it really just didn’t work.”

Then-Mayor Raymond Flynn led the charge for further change, eventually succeeding in getting a move to an appointed board approved, with the change taking effect to start in 1992 and Flynn appointing members for the first time.

Advocates and campaigning politicians periodically resuscitate the debate. Then-Mayor Thomas Menino, facing pressure in 1996, promised to bring the matter up for a vote every six years — and then backtracked on that.

A decade later, mayoral hopeful Sam Yoon ran against Menino, pledging to bring the school committee back to the ballot.

Two years ago, the Boston NAACP called for a look at making the body elected, and this year the advocacy group Boston Coalition for Education Equity surveyed all of the council candidates in a push to get the conversation about this topic back going. Many at-large candidates do call for change — though they differ on whether the committee should be all elected, partially elected or appointed by the city council in addition to the mayor.

But Mayor Martin Walsh doesn’t want to change the board’s makeup.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2q55twd