City Council - Ways & Means Committee Hearing on Docket #1669

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For the record, my name is Brian Worrell, District 4 City Councilor, and I'm Chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Ways and Means. Today is November 17, 2025. The exact time is 10.09 a.m. This hearing is being recorded. It is also being live streamed at boston.gov backslash city-council-tv and broadcast on Xfinity Channel 8, RCN, Channel 82, and Fios, Channel 964. Reading comments may be sent to the committee email at ccc.wm at boston.gov and will be made part of the record and available to all counselors. Public testimony will be taken at the end of this hearing. Individuals will be called on in order which they signed up. We'll have two minutes to testify. If you are interested in testifying in person, please add your name to the sign-up sheet near the entrance of the chamber.

If you're looking to testify virtually, please email our central staff liaison, Karishma Shohan at K-A-R-I-S-H-M-A dot C-H-O-U-H-A-N at boston.gov for the link and your name will be added to the list. Today's hearing is on document number 1669. Order for a hearing to discuss Boston Public Schools FY27 budget. This matter was sponsored by Councilors Brian Worrell, Julie Mejia, Ann Henry-Santana, and was referred to the committee on September 17th, 2025. Today, I'm joined by my council colleagues in order of arrival, Councilor Flynn, Councilor Breadon, the vice chair of the committee, Councilor Pepén and Councilor Murphy. I'll now turn it over to my colleagues in order of arrival for any opening statements, starting with Councillor Flynn. Councillor, the floor is now yours.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the administration Panel that is here to the BPS team. Also want to recognize many of the advocates that are here also probably testifying, I think, including of an exceptional organization in the South End, St. Stephen's Youth Group, who I have tremendous respect for, but they have a program there that they train mostly women, but they train them to be into the school system and it's an exceptional program as almost like as a teacher's assistant or a teacher's aide. Those are the types of programs I want to see continue but I also want to see how we're supporting students with disabilities providing

The critical mental health counseling that they need and they deserve and other aspects as well, including transportation, but my primary goal is working to ensure that we provide students with disabilities and all students with the tools and resources they need to be healthy and productive in school. And that also means Supporting the parent or supporting the guardian with services as well, such as food access or other services that the parent may need. To educate the child, it's also important to ensure that the family is healthy and the family has the food access that they need and they have the ability to provide the best support they can for their child. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and Mr.

Chair, thank you for the important work you have done on this issue as well as the Chair of Ways and Means. Thank you.

Thank you. The Chair recognizes Councilor Breadon. Councilor, the floor is now yours.

Thank you Mr. Chair. Good morning. Good to see you. It seems like a few minutes since we were all here before talking about the budget. I'm excited to get into the conversation this morning to hear about how we're handling the Thank you very much. Do more with less if need be. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on all of that this morning and thank you for being here.

Thank you. The chair recognizes Councillor Pepén.

Councillor, the floor is now yours. Mr. Chair, thank you so much for holding this hearing. Thank you so much to the panelists from Boston Public Schools for being here. It's such an important opportunity for us to just have this conversation always to make sure that Our priorities are aligned in terms of what resources and funding our students are getting and I think it's also a great idea that we're doing it so early on before anything is passed. I just think that this is This is a very smooth process for us, and at least for us to even start thinking about what kind of investments we want to see in our respective districts and schools across the city. So thank you so much for being here. Looking forward to answering questions. Thank you.

The chair recognizes Councilor Murphy. Councilor, the floor is now yours.

Thank you. Thank you, David, Colin, for being here. As you know, David, every year, four years now, I voted against the BPS budget, but Not because I don't think that our students, our educators, our schools deserve the most, the best. They do. But there have definitely been concerns that I've had as A student in the VPS system many years ago as a parent raising my kids in the city doing what most parents have to do figure out school placements and which ones are performing well enough and what our schools are offering. And then obviously I spent 24 years as an educator in the BPS system. So I know that there are definitely schools and programs that need more funding, but at the same time,

We do need to, on this council, I feel, use our political will to make sure that when there's things that we know need to be better and our students and families can't keep waiting generations for it to get better, If it's like St. Stephen's parent programming or inclusion, which I taught at the Henderson and know there are times it can be done right, that I'll just continue to advocate and uplift the voices of the kids and making sure that families because unfortunately we still have many underperforming schools and over 80 percent of students reading on grade level so there are wonderful things happening of course but our job in this role is not to just You know, celebrate those. There's a time and place and I love and enjoy doing that every time I can. But I do think these important conversations have to be had

and we really have to see how can we use $1.7 billion to make sure that every single student is getting the education they deserve. So looking forward to this and of course many more conversations with you, so thank you.

Thank you, Councillor. I just want to say good morning, everyone, and just also thank BPS for being here. I want to just continue to advocate for More investment in programming outside of the traditional school bell. I believe research shows that after school hours and weekend hours and enrichment It boosts academics, also supports our students' mental health, but it also helps out Our families in a real impactful way. And I know there's so many different nonprofits and programming, but our families should not have to have to scramble to find what program for tutoring, what program for learning a different language. BPS, that all should be integrated, I believe, inside of the system. and the reason why we're having this conversation now in November

is that the BPS budget comes to the school committee in the late winter and is then voted on by the school committee in March. And then in April, we're getting The budget and then we're only solely focused on appropriating those funds so this is the council's time and then also the public's time to help with you know making that budget you know what investments do we want to see and many more. BPS, the leadership team, and Superintendent Skipper, and all the great work that the team has done. But now there's always room to do more and room to improve. So we're looking to just talk more about that. I know that there's a lot to balance.

whether it's declining enrollment, whether it's threats to federal funding being pulled, not only from the district, but from some of our partners, which can impact some of the resources or support that we were used to getting. So just know that there's so much to balance and just want to make sure that When we are looking at those things, we're not sacrificing the things that we see to be working, whether it's our multilingual learning supports, our inclusive education, or our values when it comes to DEI. So looking forward to the conversation. And before I pass it off to the panelists, I just want to acknowledge that Councilor Santana has joined us. But now the floor is now yours and you can introduce yourself and dive into your presentation.

Good morning. Thanks for having us, counselors. I am Dr. Colin Rose, senior advisor strategy within the Boston Public Schools. I'm going to start off today First kind of just to frame how we see strategy and budget kind of as one thing and what we're trying to kind of push this year and into the future. Before I hand it off to David, We'll have much more of the details and be able to answer a lot more of your questions. So I want to start with our strategy. So we've outlined three kind of strategic focus areas born from foundational initiatives. Counselor, you talked about some of them. at Equitable Literacy, the BPS Inclusion Plan, the Long-Term Facilities Plan, Hub Schools Model, which talks about before, after school, all that stuff, among others. These focus areas are focus area one, equitable literacy, including asset-based approaches for multilingual learners,

and students with disabilities, right? So this is all about how do you increase literacy proficiency across all grade levels in all subjects with all student groups. Right, so that's the first kind of main focus. Surrounding that focus is focus areas two, holistic student supports. So how do we ensure students are ready for school, engaged in grade-level work by increasing the access to and effectiveness of holistic student supports? Right, so making sure that the student's whole and the family's whole is gonna make our literacy efforts much more stronger. And then focus area three, quality programming and facilities surrounding that. Right, so growing access to a high quality student experience through better programming and facilities, right? So those are our three broad focus areas with objectives underneath that.

We coined the implementation of these areas as it takes a village, something that you heard Mayor Wu verbalize in the State of the Schools Address. We intend to work with the full BPS community. to leverage all of our resources and energy for collective impact in these areas. I think the better we're able to delineate these areas, the more we can both internally and externally ask folks to buy into what we're trying to do. This year we started down the road of aligning budget conversations to these strategic areas. David and his team. have been working with offices to report out their proposed work streams, their personnel, as they connect to these focus areas so that we're ensuring that our budget clearly outlines our investments in those areas. Obviously, these are not the only areas of work within the district, right? For example, we need to have operational excellence.

and efficiently run systems connected to compliance. However, this will give us a chance to ensure we're putting our resources towards our values and our strategies and transparently communicating that both internally and externally to the BPS community. Right now, as we speak, folks from different departments in the district are working together cross-functionally to build out implementation goals and action steps connected to these focus areas. We anticipate that with clear implementation goals, Action Steps and Metrics, this process will be stronger year over year, allowing us to evaluate and leverage what is working and stop things that aren't working, both in strategy and practice and obviously the budget connected to them. So that's kind of broadly how we're approaching this. I think clear implementation goals with metrics will give us a better chance to both support the things that work in the district and pull back things that do not.

And with that, I now hand it over to David to talk a bit more about the FY26 budget and the upcoming 27 budget.

Thank you so much, Colin. Thank you, Councilor Whale and the rest of the council for having us here today. My name is David Bloom. I'm the Chief Financial Officer for the Boston Public Schools. I'm going to start by giving the council an update on the progress towards our key FY26 budget objectives before we look at sort of a first look at where we're headed, building on the strategic work that Colin just outlined. So we're in the second year of our rollout of inclusive education practices for students with disabilities. In FY26, this rollout moved to grades 1, 2, 8, and 10. As part of our budget process, as we discussed with you last year, our focus was rolling out a new process of service mapping, where we look at who are the students that require specific services based on disability or language needs, What services do they require on their IEPs or any English language development?

Where and how should we group students within classrooms and pull out spaces to best provide services while maximizing access to grade level learning across their peers? And it may sort of seem like None of that was money talk. But in schools, the primary place we spend money is time, is the time for our educators. Organizing how educators are spending their time and doing that more effectively is one of the best ways we can make use of our resources. Moving forward, the rollout will continue for FY27 in grades 3, 4, and 11. with one more year to follow after. Our FY26 budget has also continued our work to rapidly expand our bilingual programming in our schools. We've opened new Spanish-English programs at the Blackstone and the Sarah Roberts. and we also have a program director who's working diligently to lead the planning for the Cabo Verde and dual language program at the Frederick for next school year.

We've also hired dedicated bilingual instructional coaches for these programs. as well as to support programs in lower incidence languages that had previously existed at the Mather and the Matahon. As we move into FY27, we'll be working to continue to grow these programs as they roll out and upgrade levels and to continue to identify areas for continued program growth. In addition to those two main academic initiatives in inclusive education for students with disabilities and multilingual programming, we also have expanded in-school swim programs Seven schools, Charlestown High School, Madison Park, the Humana Academy, the Mason Elementary, Mildred Ave K-8, the Murphy K-8, and the Quincy Elementary.

as well as updating new library collections and or furniture as needed at Bada, Boston Collaborative, the new Carter School, the Chittick, the Mel King, the Roosevelt and the Sarah Roberts. So that's what we've been focusing on this year. And as Colin mentioned in his opening remarks, we're really now looking at all of the work we're doing, not just those new initiatives, to think about how can we best align our budget to this clarified set of strategic objectives. It's also important to note, as we look into FY27, we're facing some significant financial headwinds. Enrollment in BPS is down, and down significantly. This is a continuation of a long-standing trend as people have fewer children later in life and more of our older citizens are able to age in place, which puts pressure on our housing stock.

All of this was true before the pandemic and remains true today. If you look at the number of resident births in Boston, they're down significantly over where they were 10 years ago. This was masked for years by immigration. We were welcoming new families into our city and they were supporting BPS enrollment and we were supporting their educational opportunities. Obviously that is way down over the last year, as we know, and that has sort of unmasked the structural decline that we're dealing with in our system. Health insurance costs are also rising at a rate faster than inflation, which puts significant pressure on our budget, since the vast majority of that budget is spent on salaries and benefits, and this is a per FTE cost. and while inflation has slowed, higher prices remain and they've impacted our budgets on everything from curriculum to facilities maintenance and more.

Finally, we have significant uncertainty around the federal budget. President Trump's most recent budget plan included funding for Title I to support low-income youth, IDEA to support students with disabilities, and funding for school meals, which are our three largest sources of federal revenue. However, entitlement funding for Title II for teacher professional development, Title III for multilingual learners, and Title IV for student supports were not in the President's budget framework and are seen as more at risk. This is a potential $8 million liability for the district. In addition to those annual entitlements, over the last nine months, we've seen removal of a number of one-time grants on everything from student counseling to electric vehicles, As Councilor Worrell mentioned earlier, some of those reductions have come to our partners and not to BPS directly. But either way, they've impacted our ability to invest more in services we think are important and to support our students.

My final comment was going to be as a reminder on the process, but Councilor Worrell sort of did that for me already. Just do the quick version. So as a reminder, we release budgets to schools and school communities in December. and we have a school committee meeting in December that gives them an overview of where we are and what our initial draft of sort of the budget framework is looking like. First Wednesday in February is when we bring our proposed budget School Committee on the fourth Wednesday in March is when they vote. In between those two meetings, we'll have multiple meetings with you and your teams to get you briefed and get opportunities for your feedback and to prepare questions. before we have our formal city budget process and appropriation in the spring. And with that, we'll turn it back to you, Councilor, for questions.

Thank you. I just want to acknowledge that Council Weber, Council Mejia, and also Council Fitzgerald has joined us. Now I will turn it over to my council colleagues in order of arrival for First rounds of questions, starting with Councilor Breadon. Councilor, the floor is yours.

Thank you. So David, you mentioned that the enrollment has fallen. Do we have enrollment projections and do we have How many school-age students are not just public BPS, but all students in the city of Boston? Do we have any numbers on all of that?

I have not seen those reconciled numbers yet for all students for this fall. So we send our numbers in. There's like a matching process that gets done at DESE, and then we can view the total data. Our team might have it, I just haven't seen it yet. That's certainly something we can get for you.

Because part of the budget, the federal budget goes to student supports for students. Special Needs in our private and parochial schools as well. So I'd love to get some numbers on that just to figure out. And also, you know, I really do feel that we The other question I had was really with regard to The service mapping, you mentioned service mapping. How does that look across the system in terms of What different schools in different parts of the city are able to offer and have the capacity to offer?

Sure. So what service mapping does is ensure that students have access Service mapping is at its core a compliance exercise. The focus there is making sure that schools have the resources they need to meet either students' individual objectives in their IEP or their required ESL minutes otherwise. Historically, the tricky thing is we always relied on ratios. So one student for every 20, or one resource teacher for every 20 students, for example. but we know that those 20 students could look really different from one school to the next on that caseload. So now what the teams do is, They actually look at the details of the IEP and the exact services the kids need and group them together. So at the Winship, you might need a third grade reading group for 90 minutes,

but only fourth grade might only need 45, right? Just because of the nature of what those IEPs say. And then of course the teacher only has a set amount of time in the day. So you sort of add up all the minutes of all the groups and that will tell you how many teachers you need to provide the services. The other thing that that service mapping helps us do is a little bit of advanced planning on the schedule. Rather than waiting in the summer to the summer to do the schedule, you start to have a sense of, OK, one teacher can cover third and fourth grade, but I need Three teachers to cover first and second, let's say. So you sort of can start to figure out the exact math of how things work.

So I think one of our biggest challenges is that so many of our students are not reading at grade level. And I don't know. I've been in this job for six years at this point and I haven't seen the dial moving anywhere very dramatically given the amount of money that we spend on our education system. What do we need to do to really address? My biggest concern is that there are students leaving high school who don't have a functional literacy. That they basically haven't the level of literacy that they need to succeed out in the world. So we have to sort of really take this as sort of a moonshot project. And if we do nothing else for our students, the fact that

Especially students that graduate from our comprehensive high schools that they need to be able to read and have math skills and work skills that they can function in. and get a job and be successful in life. We talk about the Mississippi miracle. If Mississippi can figure this out, Boston can figure it out. What do we need to do to fix that? It's a huge injustice to our students. And we've been fiddling around with this for years. We're not getting anywhere. So what's the solution?

I think some things that folks have started gets us down the road a bit. So thinking about what rigor looks like in the classroom, high quality instructional materials, but I think also focus on literacy. Straight up in the strategic plan coming out, the first strategic focus is literacy. And that means that everybody has to have a coherent understanding of what literacy is. and others across our grade bands, but also with the community. So kids are in school 20% of their waking hours. What are they doing in that before and after school space? What are they doing at home? And so I think the better we are able to clearly define like what are the skills we're working on and what are our expectations at our grade levels and we can share that with the full community. The more touch points we have with students around literacy. So I think part of the job, and again, there's cross-functional teams working on it right now. How do we bring coherence around what literacy is in this district?

How can we distill that in a way that everybody across the community understands what literacy is? Across our grade levels, across our subject matter, and within the community I think the better aligned we can be with our resources our time and the things that we're actually working on.

I think the secret sauce in Mississippi and I haven't been down there to see it in person but The secret sauce seems to be that everybody's responsible for literacy, right across the board. Every person who engages with that student is responsible for literacy.

And that's the exact first initiative of the strategic plan is how do you bring in everybody in understanding of what literacy is. I always give an anecdote around I was a math teacher. and I taught literacy. I taught annotation skills so kids understood what the problem was asking them, if it was a word problem, but how do we bring coherence and link that across the experience of students within the school day and then outside of the school day.

They also feel that literacy in their native language and their parents' literacy, you know, literacy is literacy. It transfers. If you're literate in Spanish, it helps you be literate in English. Absolutely. Yeah, so we shouldn't see that... The fact that a student speaks Spanish as their first language is a detriment. That's an asset. And bilingualism is a huge skill that should be valued much more than we do, I think. Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor. The chair recognizes Councillor Pepén. Councillor, the floor is now yours.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you once again to BPS for being here. First, I just want to say that I'm very glad that we had the first ever State of the Schools This year, I feel like it finally built a sense of camaraderie amongst BPS and just bringing all the leader schools together. I think that's a right step in direction when it comes to feeling a little bit of disconnect sometimes with folks even outside of BPS. So good job with that this year. My question to you is, More on the effects of how the current state of our federal government might impact funding for our Boston public schools. I wanted to know, has BPS been impacted so far by any federal budget cuts? Are we preparing for this? How are we preparing for this? And also, are we worried about any partnering organizations or institutions that may say, hey, we gotta take a pause with our relationship with BPS because we're losing budget?

Yes. Yes, this is a real significant issue for us. So in the spring, the main things that the administration was going after were These sort of specialized grants that were relatively newer. So we were standing up a program, I'm gonna blank on which university it was with, to train bilingual educators with a multi-million dollar federal grant that was canceled. and we just the grant just disappeared now we didn't lose it hadn't started yet but that was a recent program we were really excited it was going to be a tremendously impactful we believe and and it was gone We know there's been a lot of slowdown on electric vehicle rollout. So a lot of those programs have been paused or canceled. There's been some impact in our ability to electrify our bus fleet as a result of that because we were very reliant on federal funds to pay for the increased costs of electric buses.

And then finally, we are starting to see some of these impacts on our partners. Some of them are small. The National Board of Certified, that certifies teachers for this sort of high quality teacher excellence, and many more. We lost a federal grant in the middle of the year and had to shut down their program. Now this was like a probably $100,000 impact to us, so not the most significant. Thank you. Thank you. UMass, I believe, lost a grant that was supporting some college and career counseling in BPS that had been in, I think, nine or 10 of our schools, and that program unfortunately folded. It wasn't a BPS run program, but it was an impactful one.

As we move forward, our focus is mostly on some of our bigger grants. The entitlement grants that we get every year. The only sort of slight silver lining we have in schools with this is education funding is funded from the previous years federal budget. So the current year federal budget is actually funding next school year. And so If the federal government is not able to get a deal on the budget and they just do continuing resolutions throughout the rest of the year, that actually weirdly helps us because the current funding level is Preserves our funding for one more year. Now, we saw in the summer the federal government tried to stop about $8 million of our funding unilaterally before they reinstated it.

in the face of lots of lawsuits. So it's sort of unpredictable what the future could hold. And so what we're having to do because of that unpredictability and because of how late breaking it was. So the funding pause they did this year happened after you had already appropriated BPS's allocation. Our budget process was done. And then out of the blue, we got this notification that funding that had already been appropriated by Congress was being paused. So we're working really collaboratively with our partners in city finance and also to some extent with the state as well to just do some mitigation planning. What would we do if this happened? And I think the most important message we want to give is If the federal government stops funding for multilingual learners, we're not going to shut down our investment in multilingual learners. We're going to figure out how to keep those priority initiatives going, even if we lose federal funding. So we're putting together some contingency plans for that. As of right now, the funding's still in.

And so we're just sort of having to monitor and it feels like month to month things are changing.

Okay. And you mentioned partnering or reaching out to the state for potential partnerships there. I was recently looking at the millionaire's tax numbers that have been brought in so far. and it's far exceeded the expectations of what it was going to bring in when it was passed. I wanted to know how does Boston and if Boston receives any support from that tax that could potentially to help boost our BPS budget.

Yeah, the biggest impact this year has been in some state earmarks. So working with our, oh my God, I'm forgetting the word, but all of our representatives and senators, who sit in the state, who support the state budget. They were able to get us a number of year marks to support different initiatives at maybe a dozen BPS schools. A lot of that were important capital projects or facilities upgrades, which are, once again, very important, but actually A chunk of that also goes to community organizations such as St. Stephen's, which I'll mention completely coincidentally, not just because they're sitting right behind me. And they receive some resources directly from that earmark as well. You know, there are some good examples of that being put back into the community and I think the state right now has been hesitant to make anything permanent.

but the earmarks were sort of a temporary way to infuse some resources and we're hopeful that there may be some more permanent fixes going forward.

Okay. Well, thank you for that. I know my time is up. I do just want to . Thank you. The chair recognizes Councilor Murphy.

Councilor, you have the floor.

Thank you, Chair. So I'm just going to be honest. I have to deal with the family issue. But thank you. And I know my colleagues. Sorry, I don't know why I'm crying right now. But it's important that I'm here for this conversation, but I do need to step out and I trust that my colleagues will ask important questions and we'll continue to work alongside to make sure we do the right thing for our kids. So thank you.

Thank you. The chair recognizes Council Santana. Councilor, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Councilor Worrell, and my thoughts and prayers are with Councilor Murphy and her family. I want to thank you for convening us today. I also do want to give a special shout out to St. Stephen's just for all the work that they do in and out in our schools. I benefited personally from programs like this. I fought last year and last year's budget to make sure that they and many more. Thank you. If we can start those conversations now.

Yeah. Thank you for your continued advocacy on behalf of BPS. You know, it's too early to say the impact on any specific program of our FY27 budget. We're still in early planning. But I will just say as we look across the broad budget, I think, you know, There's going to be some hard decisions that need to get made as we look across all the different programs and services we're providing, given the potential limitations

Thank you for your candidness, you know, for being honest. I will say that, you know, I think I heard it out and clear in terms of, yes, Finances how we are right now and you know federal dollars and going away. I do believe programs like st. Stephen's You know deserve to be at our school and these are programs I think even through these rough times I think We should look at how we continue to invest and continue to grow in these programs because it's serving a great need in our schools and it's serving our most vulnerable population. So I'm going to continue to advocate, not just to see level funding, but to see how we can continue to invest and programs like St. Stephen's. Chief, you talked about enrollment being down. Do you have any numbers in terms of retention? How many students are we keeping year after year?

I'm so glad you asked that. This is actually one of, I think, the most underlooked stats. So BPS lost just about the fewest kids we've ever lost this past year, which is very discordant with enrollment being down. but just to say so if you look at just grades K-2 to grade 11 right so not the seniors who graduated not our new kids in preschool but just look at great you know K-2 to 11. year to year, October to October, which is what we look at, the number of kids BPS lost was about as low as it's ever been. I'm not sure if it was the absolute lowest, but it was within sort of shouting distance of the lowest it's been. The big impact on our enrollment is two factors. It's not kids leaving the district. Number one is just smaller cohorts of kids moving through as there are just less children in Boston, right? As that is happening, there are just smaller

groups of kids in elementary school than there are in secondary and high, and that is trickling through the system. And then the second is we saw a really significant decrease in our year-over-year rate of new students arriving. That was another big impact. So those two things together are what explains the vast majority of our enrollment decline. It's not kids leaving BPS. It's less kids coming because of federal policies primarily. and our sort of natural enrollment decline as a student population in Boston grows smaller of resident births.

Well that's good. I'm glad to hear that. We're keeping our students and the students want us to stay here. So that's really good. We'd like to see that continue being the case moving forward. And then I think you talked earlier in your statement about mental health resources in our schools. I think St. Stephen's is part of that, making sure that loving adults are inside our schools. But when it comes to As counselors and all of these other resources that we have, can you talk about any potential cuts that we're seeing in that area, or are we seeing investments?

Yeah, we're certainly not anticipating any significant reductions in mental health supports in our schools for the upcoming year. There may be some small changes district-wide as we serve fewer students and operate fewer schools through the long-term facilities plan, but that's not an area where we're looking to make significant reduction.

I'm glad to hear that. And then, Colin, you talked about the three, I think you gave three. Can you just go over those very quickly again? I'll give you the bullet points, I got you.

So focus area one, equitable literacy including asset-based approaches. for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. So that's like, how do you increase literacy proficiency across all of our grades and all of our subjects and all of our student groups to holistic student supports? So ensuring students are in school, ready to engage in grade level work through increasing access and effectiveness of holistic student supports, including mental health. And then focus area three, high quality programming and facilities. So growing access to high-quality student experience through better programming, better facilities, everything connected to long-term facilities planning. and, you know, everything from dual language to dual enrollment in college.

That's great. Thank you. I want to touch on that last one. Can you just go, facilities, I mean, what's the plans for our facilities? Right now we are working on, you know, renovating as many schools as possible right now. I think more than any, you know, in any gap in history. Can you just give us maybe, you know, what the next few years look like?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think I have all the details on looking out beyond this year but I know the city is still really committed to capital upgrades to our facilities and we have a robust pipeline of projects. We're working on. And I think it's important to highlight, you know, we announced the project and then it will take a couple of years in the design and the planning phase. So we're still working collaboratively with the state on Ruth Batson. on the Shaw-Taylor School, on Madison Park, right? And these are just important, significant investments as we move our work forward.

Awesome. Thank you. I hope the Blackstone could be added there as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I appreciate BPS being here. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. The chair recognizes Councilor Weber. Councilor, you have the floor.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you both for Thank you for being here today. David, in terms of the federal funding, they had this debate. It was last summer. and you're saying that so in the end the things at risk were like the title two three four those were the main things for us yeah okay and so yeah the title I I guess title two is primary, like 2A is professional development. Exactly. Three is English language learners. Yep. And four is after school programs. Yeah, and some other enrichment. Okay. And some IT stuff in there, too. And the three of those together is about $8 million a year? That's right.

So I guess what is our, you know, contingency plan for what happens if that, those are completely, because those are proposed, it's zero funding, I think, by the Trump administration. That's right. Okay, so what happens if we don't get those funds?

Yeah, so we're building the plan, but what I would say is it's a combination of things. I think one is... There are probably some reductions we could take that would be lower impact, right? As are with any budget, we could sort of find the things that are the least impactful and sort of just stop those. The second is We often have some unspent funds from the year before because these are all two-year grants. So one of the things we're trying to do is just make sure to leverage any of those unspent funds. This happens if you can imagine. So Title III, for example, pays for a number of multilingual instructional coaches. If one of those positions is vacant for six months, we come in under budget. That's okay though because we can carry the money forward into a second year and spend it on something like curriculum or summer programming or other things like that.

If we do have some unspent money available in these three grants, we would plan to roll that money forward and help us sort of soften the blow and give us another year to plan. And then finally, I think we would be looking across our general budget at sort of additional reductions we could take because it happens so late in the year. It's not like we could adjust our You know appropriation before you like there's a decent chance we wouldn't find out until after you had already approved our appropriation and so what we would most likely do is just look across all 1.7 billion and think, okay, this is an $8 million reduction. Where are the best places we can take that to be able to minimize the impact on students and families?

Okay, and so I guess in terms of, 2A funding, I think we have a performance management team, I don't know what else it goes to. that sort of evaluates how we're doing. Yeah, that's right. Right. And obviously, you know, that has its value. And then title three for English language learners, where does that?

So all of that funding is utilized by the Office of Multilingual Multicultural Education. So the biggest single item on there is our multilingual instructional coaches. But there's also funding for curriculum and summer programs and other investments. And so that funding is obviously critically important and I think we would find ways to make sure all of that important work continued.

Do you know how many people are funded under that? There are full-time positions.

I'll have to double-check the full number across the three grants, but I can get it for you. It's a few dozen positions across the three grants. Okay, and the after-school pays for just staff? Yeah, it would be staff or, like, enrichment supports. A lot of it's in the vacation academies in the summer.

Okay. And then, so in terms of Title I, I guess, I mean, If it just shifted to block rent, there's ways that we get the money, but it's distributed in a way that is not good from our standpoint.

I would say there's sort of... Two ways that a shift in Title I methodology could impact us. The first is just shifting it to block grants and giving more flexibility to the states. That's where our alignment across the Commonwealth is very helpful. Like I don't think the state would then start redirecting that funding in sort of unusual ways. What is more significant is the risk of Adjustments to the formula that changes the distribution of funding between states and Massachusetts losing a share of their funding. What I would say is I think that process would probably take long enough. that we would have an additional year to prepare for it, whatever it was.

Okay. And does decrease in student population have We definitely would.

I think The thing that's interesting, though, is this is a national trend. I was at a conference of CFOs last week, and we went around the room and asked if anybody had seen an enrollment increase, and the answer was no. And these were districts from all over the country. Because the amount of funding appropriated doesn't go down with enrollment, if enrollment across the If it's roughly even enrollment decline across the country and across the Commonwealth, our per pupil would actually go up to offset some of the enrollment decline. So we'll have to see about that for sure. But there definitely could be.

Okay, Chair, are we doing a second round?

Yes.

Okay. Thank you very much, David.

Thanks, Chair. Thank you. The Chair recognizes Councilor Mejia. Councilor Yellerford.

Here. Hello again. Hello. David, I remember, and I'm not sure if you do, maybe seven or eight years ago, or maybe 10 now at this point, being at the Mattapan and what a great template that I believe Ron Dorsey was the education advisor then.

Yes, I think so.

And there was so much energy put into kind of rebuilding BPS and So that's why I think I first met you was there, so. Probably, yeah. Wow. And then Colin going way back when we were organizing and working with Colesbach, the Coalition Educating Black Boys. So I'm really glad to have you both here in this round of questions because a lot of the things that I was talking about 10 years ago are still the things that I'm talking about now. And I want to just kind of start off my questions specifically around the parent mentoring leadership initiative. I was a parent who was trained under that program, so I know how successful It was in my own leadership development and my advocacy. And then in my first term here on the council, worked alongside with

Then Superintendent Casillas to fight for those dollars that St. Stephen's needed to facilitate that work. And every year since then, we've fought for those allotments. I want to go specifically to that first in terms of infrastructure and long-term Stability for programming like that, what are we looking at for this year's budget in regards to the parent mentoring program?

Yeah, so unfortunately we don't have that level of detail yet for FY27, but we deeply value the program and we'll be

All right, so then I'm sure you might know this then, because if you don't know where we're going, then you might know where we've been.

Sure.

So how are you planning to sustain and expand the program for FY27, given that last year we allocated 550,000 and although we were told mid-summer that this amount would be reduced, my understanding is that the full 550 was ultimately allocated Can BPS then clarify for us what happened and how the program will be supported going forward? What I worry about is the fear of eviction. You know how when you, there's housing instability?

Yeah.

And I just want to make sure that this, like, What's the pathway towards stabilizing this program?

Yeah, I think one of the big things we're working on this year is, and actually collaborating with Colin on it in finance, is as we think about sort of our hub work, and our partnerships work across the system. How are we ensuring equitable access to these partnerships and schools across the system? So it's not just a select few schools that benefit, but that is really distributed across all schools that need it. are focused right now. You are, as usual, Councilor, your numbers are spot on, as is your history of the process, so I have nothing to add on that, because it was exactly correct.

Yes, I know. I live it. I just don't talk about it. Come on. I live and breathe this. Do you know this? I have nothing to add on that because you got it all.

Yeah, and it's aligned to CLSP, culturally and linguistically sustaining practices, the types of programs we want to see in our schools.

So I have two minutes and I have a lot of questions. So I'm going to ask two more and then I'm going to wait for my second round. The first one is around White Stadium and some allocations for the renovation of that and how we're grappling with that and juxtapose that to the Madison Park renovation. So we'd love to hear some thinking in terms of this budget.

Yeah. I mean, I think both projects are in the budget and fully moving forward.

I'm not sure. When you say that, can you give me some clarity? When you say that, what does that look like for both? So when you say Madison Park is moving forward, that means we secured the funding that we need to begin shovel ready this year?

So we're going through the MSBA process. So I had a site visit with them and a number of other people late September early October. It was a very encouraging visit. I think their board will vote this winter on moving us forward to the next round.

Is there a world in which you could potentially see Given all the financial uncertainty that we are experiencing, for us to reimagine what our White Stadium process looks like so that we can both meet the moment in terms of Reallocating some of those resources to other priorities within BPS. So a more manageable version of White Stadium to make some fiscal responsible decisions that could potentially go towards supporting Madison Park.

I mean, I think we're very excited about what the new version of White Stadium could mean for BPS and having that space available for all of our student athletes and also graduations and other events.

Well, we could still have those things, right?

We are able to do that and continue to move the Madison Park work forward.

So we could do that?

I believe so.

My time is up. I'll wait for the next column. The next one is on you, so get ready. But I'll be back.

Thank you. The chair recognizes Councilor Fitzgerald. Councilor, you have the floor.

Thank you, Chair. Mr. Bloom, Mr. Rose, thank you so much for being here. Talk to me about if... The enrollment is not going up. I can imagine that as we move along in the future, and I think it's planned anyway, school closures would have to almost necessarily occur to a point. I don't want to say necessarily, but I feel like we're probably there. Um... What is the effect of a school closure on the budget? If we close that school, what does it save in terms of how it affects both the bus drop-off and the bus budget and everything? Just all the tertiary patterns that might come around with closing one school. Okay, great.

What time does the hearing go to? Yeah, yeah, yeah, tomorrow. Okay, I'll try to give the short one. Just in general. Yeah, so there is a few layers to it. So... Step one, so we are closing a couple of schools that were voted on last year in this upcoming budget. The biggest savings come from the school budget directly, right? It goes from whatever it was needed to operate the school to zero. That is offset to some extent by the need to add more capacity to other surrounding schools in the neighborhood, but generally, Thank you. Keep more of those costs. For the operating budget, I think the rest of those supports, I think you see two main things go on.

The first is you're able to reinvest in higher quality service to the remaining schools. As you operate fewer schools, your on-time performance gets better. Your ability to invest in healthy and nutritious meals gets better because you're serving You're having lower overhead costs of managing the number of sites you're able to manage. It will keep your buildings cleaner and better maintained. I think what we are trying to balance now is We know those operations areas need to improve. We know transportation needs to improve. We know facilities qualities needs to improve. We know food needs to continue to improve. And so it's a balance of taking savings from those areas versus continuing to improve the quality of service with a similar amount of funding. So that's just sort of every year we do this process. We're trying to balance those two things.

Gotcha. Well, I appreciate it. It's good to know that it can be reinvested. And I think, you know, thinking about the plan of also, and I know this isn't really under the CFO's and all those other costs Thank you. Could you talk about school safety and what in the budget is the percentage for school safety and what improvements or increases or decreases are happening around that?

I have to look up quickly the percentage and get back to you but so we have our office of safety services to start and so they have safety personnel who are working between buildings or sometimes assigned to individual buildings We also have investments in things like metal detectors and door locks and door alarms and other things that are needed to keep our school communities safe. But we also know that sort of the community itself is one of the biggest ways we keep our community safe, right? And so we also do a lot of training for all of our school staff on ways to keep the building and staff safe.

Gotcha. Looking at some of my other questions, thinking about what I got for time here. Got some around school start times, then the before and after school availability. Yeah. And I think... You know, I'm always a proponent of trying to make them all the same. All three of my kids who are at BPS, you know, we have and many, many more. It helps on the back end, kind of, right? So we don't have to do after school. Maybe. But even around that, I'd love to try and synchronize the times to be more informed so that we hit Cut back on the bus budget and again reinvest that money into the quality of the schools and teachers and services.

I think the work we're doing now a lot of it is about ensuring that parents like before and after school options aren't why you're choosing a school. That if there's a school you love that's close to home, that's great, the school hours shouldn't be the reason why you can't. and so on. So, investing in high quality before and after school programming and making sure all of our schools are able to offer that at the elementary level is really what we're talking about because high school is more enrichment. Is that, Colin and I could talk all day about that. Yeah. With our small kids. Yeah.

I'm right there with you. Yeah. And then the inclusion model, I know is the big, right? I mean, Do we have feedback on what we've implemented so far? If it's working, does it seem to be sustainable? Is the education there most importantly? And then going forward, are we continuing to make sure it's invested in properly to to either continue or improve upon the results of that data.

Yeah, I think as time goes on and more data is collected, we'll be able to have a better understanding of what is the best models, where is it working, The best some of it is it's new. Teacher training needs to continue on how to best kind of team teach when you have two adults in the classroom. What does that mean? So I think that's a long-term thing. I think as we get more data in those different models, we can make more of a definitive decision around which models seem to be most impactful.

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate this garden-themed panel that we have here with Mr. Bloom and Mr. Rose, and thank you all for your time. Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Councilor. I'm trying not to laugh. It was a terrible, terrible joke. Dad joke. Mr. Rose, you spoke about evaluating and the metrics needed to improve in Boston public schools. What metrics are we looking at? I know literacy is definitely probably one of them. Can you talk to me what metrics and how often are we going to be evaluating programs and initiatives to see if we need to retool them or revise them?

I believe in continuous improvement science. So we should be consistently measuring at different intervals depending on what the program is. But I think that's one of the goals of the implementation plan that we're creating is so that we have some Thank you. Thank you. All you want, you can talk about what seems to be effective. But having built out programs in the past, I think the most effective thing is to continuously Collect data, both qualitative and quantitative, to make sure that the program is actually effective. And then it's very easy then to go to David and the budget team and saying, we need to invest more in this. So if we can have a coherent system of collecting data, making sure our key action steps are actually being measured for implementation fidelity and then impact, the better we are going to be to

Thinking about pushing our resources in a way that actually moves student outcomes.

Awesome. No, I just like working with them.

And always disaggregating in there so that we're making sure we're not leaving different subpopulations behind and highlighting where there's gaps, I think is the other caveat to that.

and speaking of evaluations and programs that have been proven to work, one of the programs is Excellence For All. It was evaluated and there was proven metrics I believe it was, fourth and fifth graders, we saw an increase by seven to nine points. Are we looking to bring back this program? It has been evaluated. It seemed like it was hitting all the key metrics that were looking to advance in the district. And it was reaching, I believe, more than 1,000 students. Shout out to Barbara Fields, who's a big advocate for this program, and my understanding is That this was one of your initiatives when you were back at BPS. So can you talk to me about the importance of Excellence for All and is there any way that we can restart this program?

Yeah. Yeah, that program started about a decade ago. And the thought was, how do you bring rigorous, culturally responsive instruction and experiences to every kid across the city? And we were focused on kind of elementary. Like, what is the elementary model for that? So it grew, it was a pilot. The intention was for the practices that were working, for us to scale those practices across the district. I think that the types of things that we were looking at in excellence for all, some of it has stuck, right? When we think about kind of high quality instructional materials, and making sure there's rigor, but I think there's opportunities. I manage hub schools now. I think there's opportunities to bring back some of the experiences that we believe both connect to rigor and connect to community. So kids were doing project-based learning connected to issues in their neighborhoods. I think some of that stuff we can restart.

I'm not sure it's all that much of a budget conversation. It will be down the line maybe, but I think restarting that framework and thought around like that's the education our kids deserve is something that we'll definitely be embarking on during our strategy conversations this year and hopefully into the future.

Awesome. Thank you. And I think the community hub schools is a powerful model and definitely want to see what more can we do in bringing partnerships and getting our young people out into those partnerships and into the community and also Community into the school. So I think it's a very powerful model. When it comes to after school and before school programming, can you talk to me about the increase year over year that that line item has had, whether it's student support and I know we also do it on a school level, but my understanding is also a district line item as well.

Yeah, so most of our Most of our formal before and after school programs at the elementary level, what you would think of as like a traditional school-wide program are supported primarily by parent fees versus general fund appropriations. So those fees can range from sort of $25 to $60 a week based on income, and there's I think our budget for sort of those other enrichment and support initiatives took a real cut with ESSER because we were able to do a lot more when we had ESSER. But the general fund portion of those budgets has remained pretty stable over the last few years. Hasn't gone up, hasn't really gone down. Stayed pretty stable.

Now it's spread across fewer schools, so the impact might be a little bit better, but it's been pretty consistent.

And I just want to just advocate for student support and those programs on the weekend. I mean, a busy kid is a kid out of trouble, right? They're focused on whether it's playing sports, You know, enrichment, tutoring. So just want to just continue to advocate for weekend program and after school programming. For sure. You know, the data shows that Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. and Chief McCarthy that does a lot of that amazing work. And I also feel sometimes he doesn't get enough credit or BPS doesn't get enough credit for public safety, right? Because you guys are keeping kids, our students busy.

I want to now turn to public testimony and then I'll go back into council questions afterwards. So when you hear your name called, can you please come to one of the two podiums, state your name, your neighborhood, any affiliation, and you will have two minutes to testify. I'm going to say two names at a time. And sorry if I say your name wrong. But Ayanna Fitzgerald and then David, I believe it's, I can't. It began with last name B. David B. and Ayanna Fitzgerald. Floor is yours.

Good morning. My name is Ayanna Fitzgerald, and I am a parent mentor at Roger Clapp Elementary. I work with St. Stephen's Youth Programs. and it's a beautiful thing. It's a wonderful thing. I am an English speaker. I wish that I had the opportunity to really, really learn another language as a child. It would have been life changing and I believe that There was a lot of help just getting rights for my people a long time ago, years ago, and I think that we should all help with our Latin and our Hispanic brothers and sisters and getting that same assistance in the schools because it's really important. I am an empath. And it's very sad that a child that has the intelligence won't be able to show it because they can't understand the test that they're given.

So I just don't... I'm like a child now. I don't understand why the tests don't come both ways. I don't understand why we can't put a little bit more effort into understanding each other. If we were all taught the languages, It would be so much more understanding and compassion. And so this is my first time speaking at a council meeting. I have a little bit I don't want to go over and I just I just really want to relay that I think that The languages, we need to get everybody on the same page. Everybody needs to get the same foot to be able to go out in the world and make a difference. and be successful and a really good member of society. So I don't know.

I think I just really wish that we could Thank you. And great first time and hopefully you come back.

It was great. David, and then followed by Natalia.

My name is David Jean Baptiste. And I'm Haitian. I speak Haitian, Creole, and French.

I live in . And I have two nieces who go to the Matterhunt School. I'm a parent mentor.

I'm not asking any questions. I more have a suggestion.

I would like to greet all of the authority figures who are here today.

especially St. Stephen's for this wonderful initiative that they've taken.

to work in the bilingual system.

It's a beautiful opportunity. It covers all aspects of life, regardless of your race,

And I would like to tell all the authority figures who are here.

Thank you very much.

and then followed by Josie and then Dora.

Good afternoon. My name is Nathalie Maté. I am the mother of three children. I come from Colombia. Actualmente vivo en Marapan. Mi hija de 11 años estudia en la escuela Blackstone, cursa el grado sexto. Desde que llegamos hace dos años, We have faced many challenges, especially in the English language.

My name is Natalie Dimate. I'm a mother of three children, and I come from Columbia. I currently live in Mattapan. My 11-year-old daughter studies at the Blackstone School in sixth grade. Since we arrived two years ago, we have faced many challenges, especially around language.

A mi hija se le ha hecho difícil adaptarse al inglés, aunque en el colegio han hecho un gran esfuerzo por apoyarla en su proceso para que pueda aprender el idioma. Yo también he tratado de acompañarla y ayudarla en todo lo posible, pero la barrera del idioma se me ha hecho difícil. Muchas veces se nos ha complicado comunicarnos y entendernos y entender completamente lo que ella necesita. For that reason, I consider it very important that schools have more bilingual teachers.

So for my daughter, it's been hard to adapt to English. Even though at school she makes a strong effort, even though her school makes a strong effort to support her in her process to learn English. I also have tried to support her and help her as much as I can, but the language barrier makes it sometimes really complicated to communicate and completely understand what she needs. And that's why I think it's so important that schools have more bilingual teachers.

This will not only help children like my daughter, but also many other families that come to this country looking for opportunities.

This would just help kids like my child, but also to other families that are coming to this country Looking for opportunities, but they need help to communicate in their language while they're learning English.

Contar con personas bilingües permite que los estudiantes no pierdan su idioma nativo, mantengan la conexión con sus familias y puedan avanzar Sin sentirse solos o incomprendidos, una educación bilingüe abre puertas, fortalece la comunidad y garantiza que más niños puedan tener éxito en este idioma.

Counting on bilingual staff allows students to not lose their native language, to maintain connection with their families, and they can advance without feeling alone or misunderstood. A bilingual education opens doors, strengthens community, and guarantees that more students can be successful without language being a barrier. Thank you.

Josie, followed by Dora. And when you're speaking, if you could lean into the mic a little bit more.

Can you get a little bit closer to the mic please?

I would like to know if I could get a few seconds more because I'm using interpretation.

Yes. Thank you. Hello, my name is Josie Clairvaux. I am a mentor. I live in West Wilkes-Barre. I went to school in Mataranda. I am here today because I believe in our young people and I believe in our strong community.

Good morning. My name is Josie Clairvaux, and I'm a parent mentor, and I live in West Roxbury. My child attends the Mattahunt School. I am here today because I believe in our children, and I believe in the power and strength of our community.

Every day in this classroom, I have a teacher to help my students. I know you have a lot of work to do, especially for those who can't speak English. This is where you can enter. We translate, we build trust, we make you feel like home. I can't think, I want, and I can't hope.

Every day, I see teachers working tirelessly to support our children, our students. They cannot do it alone, especially for children who are learning English. This is where parent mentors step in. We translate, we interpret, we guide, and we help children feel at home. We bring our culture, our hearts, and our hope.

I want to thank everyone who spoke this language, who understood it, who changed everything. I want to thank everyone who came to take the floor. Mwewe Profesor Kitabata, Juan Tolajma, Mwewe Kai Aklikol, Vin Pipri, Yonaklot.

I've seen shy children, afraid to speak up, slowly find their voices when they hear someone who understands them. I've seen teachers breathe a sigh of relief knowing a parent mentor is there to bridge the gap. I've seen families grow closer, stronger, and more connected. These moments may seem small, but for a child, they can change a lifetime.

This is an investment in bilingual education and parliamentary affairs. It opens doors for our people. It gives them the chance they deserve.

This is the power of investing in bilingual education and parent mentor programs. It opens doors for our children and gives them the opportunities they deserve. It turns fear into confidence, confusion into understanding, and isolation to Belonging.

Today, I want to ask all of us, please continue to finance and act and protect this program. Boston is a city of many languages. The school needs to reflect on this. We deserve this.

Today, I ask you to continue funding, expanding, and protecting these programs. Boston is a city of many languages, and our schools must reflect that. Our children deserve opportunities

Thank you for your time, for your commitment, and for supporting us to continue to build our families. Thank you for this event, because we are making this program possible, and to build our parents as well.

Thank you for your time and for supporting families like mine. Thank you to St. Stephen's for giving parents like me the chance to stand beside our children and to help them thrive. Thank you.

Thank you. Dora followed by Kate.

Buenos dias. Mi nombre es Dora Sandoval. Soy madre de tres niños. El tercer niño tiene ocho años y está en la escuela Hurley.

Good morning. My name is Doris Sandoval, and I'm a mother of three children. The third child is an eight-year-old who studies at the Hurley School.

Es mi segundo año que estoy en este programa, so estoy aquí para agradecerles ya que el año pasado tuvimos el apoyo de todos ustedes para que el programa continuara.

This is my second year as part of this program and I'm here to say thank you to all of you because last year you supported us to make sure that this program could continue.

I think all of you are aware of the hard work that we do as parent mentors inside of our classrooms. Mi experiencia dentro del salón de clases durante el año pasado me di cuenta de muchos problemas que actualmente estoy escuchando aquí en esta mesa.

Last year, working in the classroom as a parent mentor, I realized a lot of problems that you've been talking about today at these tables.

Trabajé en el tercer grado ayudando a la maestra. Eso me dio la... Perdón. Me dio la experiencia de darme cuenta que era lo que estaba pasando dentro de un salón de niños. Me di cuenta que hay niños con dificultad para aprender con diferentes Necesidades, así como niños que vienen de nuestro país que apenas están integrándose aprendiendo el nuevo idioma que es el inglés.

I got the chance to work in a third grade classroom where I saw the teacher and I saw what she was doing and she had so many students that had learning differences or learning needs and also students like us that come, like our students that come from different countries.

Escuché también que se planea cerrar algunas escuelas, pero yo me pregunto, ¿cómo van a cerrar más escuelas? Y en los salones que yo estuve trabajando, la mayoría de los salones tienen de 20 a 25 niños. Eso significa que si se cierran escuelas, ¿van a incrementar el número de niños en los salones?

I've also heard people talking about closing schools, but I'm wondering, in the classrooms that I've been in, there's 20 to 25 kids in that class. So if they close schools, is the number of students in each classroom in the other schools gonna increase?

So, mi tiempo se ha terminado. Tengo mucho más preguntas, pero les agradezco que me escuchen y les pido por favor que sigan apoyando nuestro programa porque este ha sido un programa no solo para... Que me ayude a mí, me ayuda a todas mis compañeras que estamos llevando un trabajo duro y que estamos tratando de seguir adelante, estudiando y preparándonos para apoyar a nuestras familias y a nuestra comunidad.

I see that my time's out, so I'll stop now, but I just wanna say, I wanna ask you to keep supporting this program. This program that hasn't only supported, hasn't just helped me, but has helped all of my peers so that we can support our students and our community.

Gracias.

Thank you. Kate, followed by Jessica. Kate. No.

My name is Kate Phelps and I live in Roxbury. I'm also here as a supporter of the Franklin Park Defenders. I'm struck and moved by the passion and contribution of groups like parent mentors who supplement the work of the Boston Public Schools and do the kind of work, probably at lower cost, which is so essential for our current students. And at the same time, I'm watching this council, this mayor, and our Boston Public School financial people spend exorbitant funds on tearing down a stadium and projecting to spend we don't know what, 91 million was the last count, on a stadium that Boston doesn't need. We need a rebuilt high school stadium. that can be used by the Boston public school students and is currently fully available.

We do need that and there are proposals that this council has heard before suggesting that we do just that. Build a stadium. Some high school stadiums go up for $18 million. There are recommendations now to put up a fully public stadium for $60 odd million. I know Councilor Weber thinks it's ugly, but in terms of the needs of the Boston public school people and students, our suggestion is we look again. My one question for... David Bloom is how much has been spent already on destroying the stadium and preparing the site? I know you've been unable to say what will be spent, but my question is, as far as I know, there's been no limit set on what will be spent subsidizing a private soccer franchise to take over

Its needs in our public stadium and the public formerly owned by the Boston Public Schools White Stadium.

Thank you.

Can you answer that question?

No, all questions have to be directed to the chair. Thank you. Jessica, followed by Marianne.

My name is Jessica Oyer. I'm from Dorchester.

My children go to the Hurley School, which is a dual language school.

They speak Spanish and English very well.

Me gustaría que hubiera más escuelas duales y bilingües para que los estudiantes se beneficien de aprender dos idiomas o más, ya que es muy importante mantener el idioma nativo.

I would like to see more dual language and bilingual schools so that the students can benefit from learning two languages. two or more languages, since it's very important for them to maintain their native language to be able to develop better academically.

Tengo un ejemplo personal. Tengo dos sobrinos que no hablan español y se les hace difícil hablar con mi madre y familia. No hablan español, que no hablan inglés. Es ahí donde veo la necesidad de las escuelas que necesitan más programas bilingüe.

I have a personal example because I have two nephews that don't speak Spanish and it makes it very difficult for them to speak with my mother and their family that don't speak English. That's where I see the necessity that more schools need more bilingual programs. Gracias. Thank you.

Thank you. Mariani followed by Cynthia.

Buenos dias. Mi nombre es Marianne Romero. Soy una madre dominicana del vecindario de Roslinder.

Good morning, my name is Mariani Romero and I'm a Dominican mother from Roslindale.

Tengo dos niñas que pertenecen a VPS.

I have two children, two girls in BPS.

También pertenezco al programa de San Steven de Padre Mentores.

I also belong to the parent mentor program at St. Stephen's.

Este programa me ha abierto puertas nuevas, experiencias y conocimientos.

This program has opened new doors, new experiences and new understanding.

Dándome la oportunidad de desarrollarme como persona y profesional.

Giving me the opportunity to develop as a person and as a professional.

They were the first

They were the first to give me this work opportunity and this way of discovering that my vocation is to work with work for and with the well-being and development of children.

Esta institución no solo nos permite trabajar junto a los maestros en las escuelas de VPS, sino que también nos da la oportunidad y nos impulsa a estudiar el idioma inglés y una profesión.

This institution doesn't just allow us to work side by side with the teachers in the BPS schools, but it also gives us the opportunity and it pushes us to study English and to study a profession. This program pays attention to the well-being and development of every parent and child, bilingual or not, in BPS.

Por eso, de manera personal, quiero dar las gracias a cada una de las personas que con sus donaciones generosas nos ayudan al programa a poder seguir adelante. Y quiero también decirles que esperamos que nos sigan apoyando porque en verdad esto es un programa muy, muy bueno que nos da muchas oportunidades. Gracias.

So that's why I want to thank each person that with their generous donations they've made this program possible. We hope that you keep supporting us to continue advancing for a better future. Thank you.

Thank you. Cynthia, followed by Carolina.

Buenos días, mi nombre es Cynthia Soto y soy residente de la ciudad de Alston, Massachusetts. Soy madre de tres niños, estudiantes de las escuelas públicas de Boston.

Good morning, my name is Cynthia Soto. I live in Alston, Massachusetts, and I'm a mom of three kids, Boston Public School students.

Hoy quiero contar mi historia. Mi hija tomó un examen en una de las escuelas de examinación y por no dominar el idioma inglés, esta no lo aprobó. So today I want to tell my story.

My daughter took an exam from one of the exam schools, but she didn't but because she doesn't have strong English skills yet she was not accepted and that destroyed her dreams of And to see her not achieve that just because of the language was disheartening.

Sé que como mi historia hay más padres con la misma historia. Por eso hoy elevo mi voz para que con su ayuda empujemos a lograr que haya más escuelas bilingües en la ciudad de Boston.

I know that just like my story there are many parents with the same story and that's why I'm raising my voice so that with my help we can push to make sure that there are more bilingual schools in the city of Boston.

Ayudemos a que los sueños de nuestros hijos no se limiten por un idioma. Muchas gracias.

We want to help our children's dreams to not be limited by the language. And with your help, we can achieve this.

Thank you.

Muy buenos dia. Mi nombre es Carolina Soto. Vivo en el vecindario de Dorchester. Tengo dos niños que asisten a la escuela, a la escuela Tore. Actualmente soy coordinadora de un grupo de padres mentores de la Escuela Atrores del programa San Steven. El año pasado tuve la oportunidad de ser madre mentora en un salón de clases por el programa Padre Mento de San Steven.

Hello, my name is Carolina Soto. I live in Dorchester and I have my child studies at the Trotter Elementary School. Program Coordinator for a group of parents at the Trotter Elementary School. And last year I was a parent mentor in the school and I was able to work in the classroom as a parent mentor.

Muchas gracias por su apoyo y su colaboración hacia nosotros. Thank you for your support and your collaboration with us. Hoy estoy aquí alzando mi voz para pedir que nos ayuden a impulsar en su presupuesto escolar, implementar más escuela bilingüe, más maestro bilingüe y más programa bilingüe.

So I'm here today to raise my voice to ask you that you help to push in the BPS school budget to implement more bilingual schools and more bilingual teachers and programs.

Actualmente, las opciones bilingües en nuestra comunidad son limitadas y muchos de los niños están en lista de espera y deben viajar a larga distancia para poder recibir una educación que responda a sus necesidades.

Currently there are limited bilingual options in our communities and many children may stay on the waiting list or they have to travel long distances to be able to receive

and education that is responsive to their needs. Por esta razón solicito responsablemente que se puedan implementar más escuelas, programas bilingües

We firmly believe that all students deserve access to high quality bilingual programs. It shouldn't matter what their zip code is or their socioeconomic status.

That's why I'm asking you respectfully if you can implement more bilingual schools and programs.

Investing in those programs is investing in academic success, emotional and professional success of our children.

Muchas gracias por escuchar nuestra voz y por tener el compromiso de trabajar para nuestra familia.

Thank you for listening to our voices and for being committed to working with our families.

Thank you. Nicole, followed by Allen.

Buenos días. Mi nombre es Nikki Oli Perez. Pertenezco al vecindario de Dorchester. Tengo una niña que estudia en la escuela Hurley.

Hello, my name is Nicole Perez.

I am from Dorchester and I have a child that studies at the Hurley School.

I'm a parent mentor at St. Stephen's program.

Quiero agradecerle por el apoyo al programa de padres mentores y les pido que sigan apoyándonos con sus aportes para que el programa continúe y al igual que yo, otros padres se puedan agregar a este valiosísimo programa.

I want to thank you for the support for the Parent Mentor Program and I ask you to continue supporting us with your appropriations so that the program can continue and just like me, other parents will have access to this valuable program.

Por último, les pido como madre y padre mentora que aquí en Boston haya más escuelas bilingües para que nuestros hijos, aparte de dominar dos idiomas, para un mejor futuro puedan tener una mejor alfabetización.

Finally, I want to ask you as a mom and a parent mentor that here in Boston that we have more bilingual schools so that our children, in addition to dominating two languages, can have a better future and can have better literacy.

En lo personal, cuando llegué a este país con mi hija, ella tenía un IP. Por el idioma y gracias a la escuela Hurley y su programa bilingüe, mi niña en tres meses aprendió a hablar, escribir y leer en inglés sin perder nuestra lengua nativa.

So in my case, when I arrived in this country with my daughter, she had an IEP because of the language. And thanks to the Hurley School and their bilingual program, in three months she learned to speak, read, and write in English without losing her native language.

Gracias.

Thank you.

Thank you. Allen, followed by Kaliga.

Hello, my name's Alan Iyer. I live by Boston English and Fields there. I think it's absolutely disgusting that the footballers are going to get kicked out of this facility, the future White Stadium. It's a, you know, it was built for them and now they've just, without any sort of real participation on the part of the community, This is occurring, and I'm the guy who gave this all to you. This is reality. There's 30 more pages of this reality, and it's not a good reality. It's a bad financial situation. Thank you. Thank you. I've FOIA'd a bunch of material, a lot of other people have FOIA'd material, and the city has lawlessly refused to get those materials to us. We're trying to get information on bonds, we're trying to get pro formas on it,

We're trying to get estimates of the cost, and it's all been embargoed. And that's, you know, I don't know what our recourse is. We don't know what to do. You know, this is, you know, we don't, you know, we're... We're here, we're almost like we're just being witnesses to this great injustice. And I just want to say, I saw a great movie just the other day. It's called Remove. Black Erasure in Boston by Salbrini, Salvati. And just this way that you roll these private equity folks and their pro soccer team into this stadium and you kick out the black and brown footballers and then you prattle on about all the programs you're gonna have when we know that thing's gonna be locked up. It's a $300 million facility with liquor and food and all sorts of stuff. and they're not going to have this open access like we have at our Boston English Field, which is fantastic. People come and go.

So we have, you know, there are alternatives to this. We are asking, the NAACP is asking that you stop this and that we get together and we look at how to address this problem of we need a new stadium, we need for the kids, they want an athletic facility, Thank you, Alan. and then they drag their temporary seating out onto this brand new track we built. It's just absolutely disgusting. Thank you.

Caliga, followed by Priscilla Flint.

Hi. First of all, I would ask you to look at the material that Alan put together. It's very good. I am a BPS parent. I have three in their 30s who all attended BPS schools. My daughter just graduated. I'm on my second round of kids at my age. and my son is at Tech Boston. He's a junior and he plays soccer. We're a soccer family. And I love Boston schools. But they're uneven. And good education for all of our children takes money. So I also will say it in a different way, but to put The money into White Stadium, which is part of the capital budget for BPS schools. I volunteer in the Boston schools. Guess where I volunteer the most? I'm a nurse. I've been a nurse for over 48 years in Boston. I was a city nurse but I also went back to school for health education. I did my student teaching. at Madison Park.

I volunteer at the O'Brien. Those facilities are shameful. That was what the mayor campaigned about. The first time she won was to fix that complex, right? No more talk of that. Those kids deserve better. If we fix White Stadium for what it was intended for and do the alternative plans, which is for BPS kids use, and for community use and not put a billionaire owned soccer team in there, we will have extra money, at least 30 million extra of our tax dollars to go to our schools So I am asking again that you support the alternative plans for White Stadium and put that money that was earmarked to subsidize a privatizing of a public park and Olmsted Public Park and to our children.

If you do the alternative plans, we will have tens of millions of extra dollars for our children's education because I'm outraged if that doesn't happen.

Thank you. Priscilla, and then followed by Beth.

Good morning. Morning. First of all, I agree with everything she said. My name is Priscilla Flint, and I am the founding executive director of the Marcus Anthony Hall Educational Institute. It is a youth group that from the ages of 14 and 24. We do advocacy, leadership, and organizing. We also do civic engagement around registration, mobilization and education around civic engagement. And I feel I am one of the Franklin Park Defenders member, but I'm not speaking on behalf of them. I'm speaking on behalf of Marcus Anthony Hall Educational Institute, where my young folks go to Boston Public Schools. I think it's a shame and a disgrace that that Fiasco, whatever's going on up there. I think it's horrible. It doesn't make any sense.

Why do we have to have all that going on? when easily it could be fix the stadium for the young folks, fix the stadium for the school children. If you really cared about the school children, you would fix the stadium up, not bring some rich folks up in here, and let them do what they want to do. And another thing, I'm upset because Michelle Wu didn't even get a challenger. So she comes in here and does what she wants to do. I think it's horrible. I think it's a disgrace. And there will be changes in four years. Trust me.

Thank you, Beth, and then we'll move on line.

Hi, my name is Beth Abelow. I'm a 20-plus year resident of Jamaica Plain. I'm a Franklin Park defender. And today we've heard from a lot of parents of BPS kids talking about You know, needs for more bilingual programs, continuation of mentor programs, money being diverted from Madison Park when they had spent time making plans. and giving that money and all of a sudden that money is no longer available and we're putting most of this school budget into a stadium for a professional soccer team which will and I just feel like everyone else, there is an alternative plan available. There's one that would save a lot of money. And putting money into Madison Park and our schools is something that's going to benefit a huger A much larger number of students and, as a result, our city for the future.

Their lives and their livelihoods in the future as compared to The sports program, which is important for kids, but we could do it for a whole lot less and have money to put into these other programs and into our kids, more of our kids, our whole public school system.

Thank you. Now we'll move to online testimony. I believe we have a Rodney Singleton.

Thank you, Chair, for taking my point. So I'm a graduate of John D. O'Brien. It was Boston Technical High School when I went to school there. And I remember the school as being always One of those resources in the neighborhood where kids could get an excellent education and really do well for themselves. Currently, my understanding is that the school has a student body of roughly nearly 70% of which the student body serves people of color. Black and Latino folk. So it's also in a neighborhood of color. So it's no question it's our school, if you will. And it's crumbling down around our ears. and we'll just call this what it is.

The idea that you could have a crumbling school in John D. O'Brien and in good conscience then subsidize a private team at White Stadium It's racism. Full stop. This reminds us, it should remind us of busing. Remember, in busing, the NAACP sued the city of Boston because school resources were not equitably... doled out, if you will. And so this idea that you could have a crumbling school that serves a very diverse population, where nearly 70% of the kids are Black and Latino, have that fall apart. subsidize a private organization that doesn't need it at White Stadium. This is racist. And we need to call it out as racist. It's no different than the fight that we had.

And I remember the fight because I was a kid in school over busing. The city of Boston needs to be sued because this is worse than incorrigible. This, you might as well say, you know, Make Boston what it used to be, which sounds very Trumpian, but, you know, that's what the mayor is doing. Thank you, Rodney.

I want to thank everyone who came and led their voice to public testimony. Now I'll be going back to my council colleagues in order of arrival for second round of questions, starting with Councilor Breadon. Councilor, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The long-term facilities plan We've been talking about the long-term facilities plan for years at this point. When might we expect to see it, the long-term facilities plan?

The long-term facilities plan for the Boston Public Schools. There was the document presented to the school committee last fall.

Yes, in terms of just the details of it and how the rollout, like a plan is a plan is a plan. So what priority is given to what? Projects and what money has been allocated to them and when we might expect to see them. It's a plan, it's just a document right now that doesn't have any execution dates for it.

Yeah, I mean, I would certainly need Dell to give you all the details, but I think the long-term facilities plan is a framework on which we make all of our decisions about what programs are Opening and closing and merging and what facilities are getting investment. I think conditions change so much year to year that you're not going to be able to make 10 years of decisions all at once so I think the idea of the long-term facilities plans presented last fall was to give the sort of here's where we're heading and here's what's going to be happening along the way because you know it's like

It's how we spend our money on our capital investments. I was at the Edison a couple of weeks ago, and it's a beautiful art deco building that was built in the 1930s. It's a wonderful building. The Auditorium for the student body to gather to have an event for parents to come. 87 of the seats in the auditorium are unfit to be used and they're cordoned off like a crime scene with yellow tape. So, you know, we need to sort of Look at the everyday needs of schools like lighting in the hallways at Brighton High School, the auditorium in Brighton High School, the auditorium at the Edison. I'm not saying things that aren't needed in other schools as well. So, you know, can we get We've been talking about auditoriums for at least five or six years at this stage.

Superintendent Casillas was very insistent that we should address our auditorium situation. because auditoriums where you bring your whole school body together and do performances and all of that, it's really important. So, you know, I think... In terms of our capital priorities, looking at what we need to build as new schools, and then how do we improve the schools that we already have that will be serving us? We should be sort of scheduling a new school every year, We're very constrained, but the schools that are functioning, that we do have on the roster, that we're not going to be closing in the near future, we need to make sure that they're actually functional and that the lights work and that they're safe. that have labs that work and that we have audio-visual equipment and internet access and auditoriums and gymnasiums that work as well.

You know, in terms of, you talk about our enrichment programs, sports, music, drama, all of those things, they may seem like sort of the icing on the cake and a sort of a, and so on. Work Together. It's really imperative that we actually put some of our capital monies into improving those schools that need it across the district. And that's more of a comment rather than a question. But I would love to see a plan. What's the plan? What are we going to do? And with changes, I think this is my... We've had...

Three mayors and a global pandemic and God knows what in our six years, Councillor Mejia is in the same boat as I am, and two full-time superintendents and an interim superintendent. and you know it's just like a merry-go-round and we never actually make any progress in a forward direction in terms of our facilities. It's wonderful that we have lovely new schools. But as you know, it takes 10 years to build a new school. So in the meantime, the students that are in our schools right now need to have improvements in the facilities that they use right now in these this moment and we cannot they can't they'll be gone they'll be left school and then we wonder why students families don't want to enroll in the city of Boston schools because

You know the walk around and there's buckets on the floor with water coming through the ceiling and very inadequate facilities and you know I'd love to see I know we're talking about operational expenses and costs today but The actual facilities need to be improved as well, notwithstanding the fact that Madison Park is a top priority. Let's see. The other question I had was for adult ESOL funding. We've done a few programs in some of our schools for parents can learn English skills. It's been really incredibly beneficial because we've lots of Testimony from those parents that Their kids are more interested in attending a good education when they see their parents. They're very proud of their parents learning English and all.

It's money well spent and it's actually very inexpensive. It's low hanging fruit in terms of expenses. We get a lot of bang for our buck. What sort of funding are we putting into adult education in this foreseeable year coming?

Yeah, so I don't think we have a huge amount of new investment on the table for that. I think right now we have our two main programs. The formal adult education program and then there's also parent university. I think both of those programs are Continuing, but I don't think at the moment we don't have a significant investment lined up.

Do we know how many parents are able to participate in those programs?

I'd have to get that number for you.

My time's up. Sorry. Thank you, Mr.

Chair. Thank you, Councillor. Just want to acknowledge that Councillor Coletta Zapata has joined us. I'll now go to Councillor Pepén. Councillor, the floor is now yours.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. In regards to The advocates from St. Stephen's here. I wanted to know, how is it that organizations like theirs get their funding? And I know that Each school gets to decide how they spend it but like how much money is it allocated in general for these type of programs in BPS?

Yeah, so Depends a little bit on what you would include as that sort of type of program, but sort of anywhere from about seven to about $10 million of funding every year that goes towards programs like this, but also enrichment, tutoring, and other sorts of partnerships with sort of nonprofit organizations across the state doing a variety of things. So I think those can range really significantly from Paramentoring and City Year to Making Music Matters and Boston Music Project and others.

Is there ever an opportunity since They're so involved in the schools and being a support to the teachers that there's an opportunity for a stronger partnership with them.

Yeah, I mean, I think there always is. So we're in year one of a multi-year contract. So one of the things we're trying to do is make sure more schools are aware of the opportunity, but also the full cost of the program. You know, you're getting a lot of resource, but it does also cost a lot of money. So both of those things together, just understanding the impact of that and making sure that schools have that information, and I think That's something we're working to improve for this upcoming budget cycle that schools really understand what they could get, the value of the program, as well as the cost information. I'd definitely love to chat about that with you and how we could do that.

We'll do that here. We don't have enough time. Happy to talk about it after the hearing. For the past two years and now this year, being able to learn all the work they're doing and visiting their organization over in the South End has been nothing but an amazing opportunity. and I also just share with them, I heard that there's a lot of Hurley school parents there involved. We, Council Fitzgerald and I, we actually just met with the Hurley school and they're, They're very close to getting a new playground for their students, so they got funding from the Community Preservation Committee, and just making sure there's enough funding elsewhere to get the new playground for the students. Wonderful. So hopefully you guys get that very soon. Okay, another set of students that I always keep at the very forefront of my mind is the homeless population of BPS. The percentage is always too high. I would want it to be zero, but I wanted to know,

What resources and what investments is BPS putting into an assistant, not just the students, but even just the parents as well? Because I know if we're going to do a, if our schools are going to have a model of like a catch-all type of community center providing after school programming and during school hours. Is there partnerships even with like the Office of Housing Stability inside the city or with BHA or with different housing? Organizations across the city that may help them find a more stable place to live.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple ways. I think there's a Hearn office that deals with homeless students, transportation, and connecting with families. You also have things like hub schools where you have coordinators who are really getting to know families and their needs and connecting them to City Resources in different ways and then you have nonprofits that we partner with like Higher Ground that also deals with homelessness and in different schools and Partnerships across the area so I think we could always grow that portfolio we need to take a look at it but there are there are many connection points I think that deal with homelessness it's a huge problem in the city obviously as you know as things become less and less affordable and More and more kids become homeless youth in our schools.

Have we, has BPS dug into a little bit as to why there's such a high homelessness population in BPS or done any research as to how to tackle it?

I mean, I could connect with our Hearn partners within the school system. I would guess the same reason why folks are having trouble finding housing in general in Boston, the unaffordability, and seeing families get pushed out of the city.

I will say as a country and a commonwealth, we've done a better job of ensuring that our homeless youth are actually coming to school. So that's going to drive your numbers up to some degree, but it's important work to make sure If a family is temporarily living in a different city or town, making sure they have access to still come to school in Boston while they're temporarily, you know,

And I know over the years we've done a better, BP has done a better job of identifying homeless youth and making sure that folks kind of understand what homelessness means. Like if you're couch surfing, you're homeless, right? How to collect that data a bit better so that our numbers have increased both because I think homelessness has increased in the city, but also we do a better job of collecting that and tracking it.

That makes sense. Okay, that's always something I always like to make sure we talk about, and of course, that it's not getting sneaked away. Kind of related to that is food insecurity. Remember, at least during last year's budget conversation, I think there was an imminent threat from the federal government that we were going to lose some sort of federal budget cuts to food support. I wanted to know, is that something that has impacted us or are we okay with making sure that every one of our students are fed in Boston Public Schools?

That was a funding loss that we just had to eat. So we did lose. There's a fresh local foods federal grant that we lost. but we didn't stop using fresh local foods to be clear. We just had to find a way. We picked up the tab there. Now I think our team is doing really excellent work and they've identified sort of other efficiencies that we're able to save I think this year they're able to cover it inside their own budget because the vast majority of our food services spending is reimbursed by USDA under the school nutrition program and so actually the biggest focus now the Meal quality has improved so much that now the focus has been starting to shift to the number of students taking up meals and focus on doing things like breakfast in the classroom to ensure students are having a nutritious breakfast. because that also helps us with our reimbursement financially.

That's great. I know my time is up. Before I step out, I just want to say thank you to BPS, thank you to the community members for being here. I want to put in your ear as regards to food is composting opportunities in BPS. I'm going to have a hearing on composting in general, but this is a topic that I want to talk about in our school so that We can mitigate food waste in the future for all BPS facilities. For sure. I love my little green bin. Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor. The chair recognizes Councillor Webber. Councillor, you have the floor.

Central. Thank you, Karishma. Thank you, Chair. I know Councilor Pepén raised homelessness, and maybe I missed it. I know he and my colleagues are proud that we started an access to council program here. in City Hall to provide attorneys for people with kids in BPS who get an eviction notice. The family liaisons in schools are supposed to be flagging that for students. Do you have any sense of how that's working or how we can support that to make sure people know that this program exists and that we're there to support our BPS families?

I don't want to speak out of turn. We can connect back with our Hearn office to talk about how that's happening. I know it's happening, but to what extent and what data they have. I think we can produce that.

Okay, and then maybe for David in terms of, I think the numbers we had last year were about 5,000 kids a year experiencing homelessness and BPS, which is alarming out of 47,000 students. and that we spent approximately $17 million on busing from shelters outside the city to schools inside the city. Do you know what the updated, do you have numbers on that?

I'll look at the revised numbers on that. I think the homeless count I don't quite have yet for this fall. but we should get pretty soon and I can get you last year's expenditure on the transportation.

Okay. Well, and we're looking at a family shelter opening sometime in West Roxbury on 5 Redlands Road. I mean, do you expect that to help with that busing cost? I mean, I'm just, I'm assuming.

I mean, it should. It should help. I think keeping families closer to school is always helpful for us. So not having to bus to Framingham or somewhere else is always better.

Okay, and then, yeah, the kids, obviously, they can stay in their home school, which is great for the kids and maintain that connection with people and to have those shelters here in Boston. Anyway, this is not the time and place for that argument. In terms of busing, you know, we talk a lot about the cost. I think, you know, we're looking at like 100, it's 115, I don't know what the, you want to update me what the number is supposed to be for next year? I still don't know how much of that is for busing kids from where their home is to a school as opposed to busing kids who have special needs, who need to be bused. Regardless of the traditional Boston bus thing, Garrity ruling issue, do you have a breakdown on that?

Yeah, I can get you. I don't have the most recent breakdown for this year. I can certainly get that for you.

Do you know what it usually is in terms of percentage?

It's around something like and so on. And so those are kids, yeah, who just can't get the resources at their... Well, yeah, it's also just sort of when you have... Traditional transportation, right? You get a whole bunch of kids walking to the same corner and you pick up five or six kids in one place. With special education transportation, it's often written into IEPs as door-to-door. So you literally have to go and the bus has to stop in front of the kid's door, whether that's down a dead end street or... So the door transportation is just a lot more expensive. And so we are in the middle of a deep review to make sure we're only giving that to students who actually need it as we look at making sure we're giving the cost and

Then just so you know, our cost in transportation Our budget for this year for trans-dev is about $115 million. Okay, is that down?

I thought we were supposed to...

Well, that doesn't include the out-of-district and that doesn't include bus monitors. That's just the contracted.

Okay, because we pay to bus kids out-of-district when they and so forth.

So that's just the yellow bus cost. So the full department budget is The full department budget for this year was $187 million. Okay.

And then, sorry, shifting gears to the inclusion model and the budget. I mean, how are we going to see that? Basically, in the budget that the inclusion model is being implemented in a way that, you know, my kids went to a school that the inclusion model was a complete failure, not complete, but They didn't work because they just didn't have the resources. What should we look at in the budget to make sure the kids are actually getting the services that they need?

and so on. I've lived through both worlds of the inclusion model and I would come to meetings like this and people would say, how come you're funding this school with an inclusion model that works and you're not funding this school with an inclusion model that doesn't? would sort of have to find a way to not just say those two schools get the exact same funding. It's actually about the support and details of the way they're putting their plan together and the coaching and training and support you're giving your educators. And so I think there are two things we're trying to look at here. The first is, are we building a structure that does work? Right, and so that we have made a significant update for from the previous model that puts more resources in schools and that change in funding level is rolling out to grades three, four, and 11 for FY27, so that is coming. It's basically the same process for increasing funding we went through last year.

It's going to just roll up to more grades. I think the service mapping concept in this other idea was about how are our more academic focused folks who know a lot more about the details of the actual instruction, supporting the schools and making sure they're building a program design that really works for the kids and that, you know, can be differentiated so that some places we need co-teaching, some places a teacher and a paraprofessional works best, some places it's a mix of both. And I think the places where we've seen it be most successful are the places that have had a really strong Community Engaged Design Process, where the whole community has come together to build a really strong program. And so we've seen a number of those work, and we're working to facilitate that now at the rest of our school.

Okay, just one quick follow-up, Chair. We heard public testimony about White City. One thing I don't like hearing is when we have public records requests Thank you.

Thank you. City Finance. That wouldn't have been one that would come to me.

Okay, so you don't know.

Yeah, that's not one I've seen. Because it sounds like it's almost entirely capital. The White Stadium part is almost entirely capital. That doesn't run through me.

Okay. And so who do we ask about that?

I mean, I would just run it. You can certainly run it through IGR, but yeah, I mean, it would probably come from PFD here.

Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair.

Give me extra time. Thank you. The chair recognizes Councilor Mejia.

Councilor, you have the floor.

Well, notice that he has arrived.

Thank you, Chair. So I'm going to ask a few more questions. I'm going to go with the easier ones first, just to warm you all up. Thank you. So just let's talk a little bit about performance. I am, you know, I've been hearing from a lot of recent arrivals, families who have graduating students right now who still aren't proficient in English and are graduating our BPS schools unprepared. And I'm just curious, what are we doing for, I understand the importance of bilingual education, multilingual, but I want to focus specifically on the cohort of young people who are graduating and now are going to have to spend hundreds of hundreds of dollars to get remuneral courses in English to be able to

You know, be successful in life. What are we doing to grapple with that?

I think that the general push towards more rigorous practices in classrooms, I think I know, and this is for me, it's cruel to send a student out into the world with a credential that they don't have the competency for. So I think that framing needs to be Thank you. Thank you very much. Instruction, culturally responsive practices, things that actually connect to students, look at where students are, and bring them to a level of proficiency. So this concept of targeted universalism that we have high standards for every student, but there might be different pathways for each student and each student group. I think we need to explore more.

and make sure that kids have the proficiency needed walking out of our doors to do whatever they want to do in life.

Yeah, thank you for that, Collin. Just because, and I... I have very little time left. But can you just in a very simple way, either Dave or you or someone, could just specifically, specifically is how you say it? Just give me something concrete. that we can measure and be able to go back and say, we said we were going to do this, and as a result of doing this, this is the outcome of it. I need something specific, something that is Like, a line item or something? What are we gonna do?

Yeah, I mean, I think part of the secondary strategy is mass core, making sure that students have coursework that actually align to being ready for college and career. So I think asking and looking at what is the package of courses and the pathways for students that connect to MassCore, which is what the state of Massachusetts say is a rigorous education, is one thing.

But as it relates to those young people who don't know how to speak English, how are we grappling with that piece? That's what I'm so confused by.

that don't know how to speak.

That can't speak English, but they're graduating from our Boston public schools and they're not prepared. That's the question.

Yeah, so I think in general, kids should have English proficiency to walk out of our schools.

But how are we gonna get there? How much money are we going to invest to make that happen? That's what I want to know.

Yeah. I think that's something that we need to continue to closely study, but I think pushing towards Mass Corps and making sure kids have the coursework and that that coursework is actually at the rigorous level that it's supposed to be is one and ensuring that all of those classrooms are doing that is important.

Thank you. And Mr. Bloom, I just want to know for the record that that's definitely something that I'm going to be looking to.

For sure.

I'm going to dive deeper in the future hearings that we have so would love to come back with some very specific numbers and outcomes and all that good stuff. So I'm going to shift gears to White Stadium. I understand there's going to be a beer garden in the facility where young people are going to, you know, there's just going to be a stadium that's going to be for entertainment purposes. And so I'm just curious, like, If you could help me understand so that I can better articulate to my constituents kind of like how we're reconciling with the fact that there is this desire to turn Franklin Park into Fenway Park. Can you help me understand the beer garden situation, how we're going to shut down all the beer gardens while the students are there? Logistically, what does that look like?

Yeah, so I'm not an expert on the new White Stadium proposal, but I can tell you that they're not going to be operating a beer garden when the students are there.

But there will be remnants of alcohol in that space at some point because That's what I've been hearing about these beer gardens. So I'm just curious.

I'm not sure.

I'm sorry. That's OK. Just because that would be a flag for me. It just would be something for me to So let's just talk a little bit about Madison Park, our favorite conversation. And both Mr. Rose and Mr. Bloom, you know that I have been in this work for Decades, and BPS has promised for decades that Madison Park was going to be renovated. And decades later, we're still hearing the same thing. And so at some point, just for restorative justice purposes, what gives? How can we go back to our constituency and say,

Next year, or maybe not so much so, maybe next 10 years from now, what's it going to take for BPS to actually make the investment in Madison Park?

I mean, I think, just to be real, the place we're at right now is, I think people will believe we're doing it when the shovels are in the ground, right? I see evidence of the project moving forward now that was not there in prior administrations. The steps are happening that move the work forward. but understanding the history of that project and the promises that were made, I understand it's gonna be hard to believe and feel until you can see it happening. And so I am hopeful that at some point in the very near future, we're gonna be in a place where We can see it. It's physically there.

I'm hoping that is the case, at least while I'm still in this chamber. My last question is, In 2022, during Mayor Wu's first full year as mayor, DESE and Boston agreed to a revised oversight memo but with the goals less explicitly aligned with academic outcomes and then in March of 2025 at the end point of the three-year systemic improvement plan state officials acknowledged quote-unquote mixed results while accrediting Boston with moderate quote-unquote progress and a real concerted effort. And I'm just curious, can you just talk to us and put it on the record? What can you say about the revised and what specific educational outcomes a revised agreement will support. Can you talk to us about that? I'd like to hear some dollar amounts as it relates to making investments.

Yeah, so I think one of the biggest single items to come out of that revised MOU was Mayor Wu's five-year and $50 million commitment to inclusive education, inclusive practices, which has been a really game-changing investment. and that we've been able to count on year in year out for the last few years as we've built this program out. The other tangible number is I think we're $15 million in. I'll double check my number on that. to investments in new multilingual programming, ensuring the expansion of truly bilingual programs that have bilingual staff and that are investing in dual literacy as a core model. Those are the big ones.

High quality instructional materials has been a thing the last several years. I think as you pointed out, we've got to make sure that's actually being unlocked by our teachers and our pedagogy in the classrooms.

Unfortunately, my time is up, so I can't ask any more follow-ups, but I do have, if there's a, if I'm allowed a third round, I do have more questions.

Thank you. Thank you, Councilor. And then just piggybacking off of what I wanted Councilman Mejia's questions around, Bilingual Programs. I believe the district stood up 16 last year. Not sure. I think it got us to 16. Got us to 16? I don't think it was 16. It wasn't 16, not less. Oh, it got us to 16. OK. And that was an increase?

So two new programs started. Well, sorry. Two new dual language programs started, which were the programs at the Sarah Roberts and the Blackstone. but there were also newcomer programs at a couple of high schools. I'd have to pull up the full list there.

Okay, and then do we know the scale of need? There's 27% of the student population as English language learners. Do we know what that translates in terms of, like, programs, bilingual programs?

Yeah, need. I would even say it's, I mean, over half the students speak a different language at home. So I think it's... It's a complicated issue because you need the space, the teaching staff, the models that are proven that work, et cetera. But as a strategy, I think it's something that we really want to be able to grow and be aggressive around. I mean, need is partly on what does the community want? What does the community want to see as educational models? And I don't think... Everything is a dual language program, but we can also have supports for native language, even if it's not in a full dual language school.

And my last question, I'll go to my next counselor. My colleague, do we know like the total investments that go towards English language learners in FY26? And then do you know how much that increased year over year? And I could come back to it. Just kind of want to just monitor that. The chair recognizes Councilor Coletta Zapata. The floor is now yours.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you all so much for being here. I apologize I was late. And thank you for your partnership over the last couple of years. There's been some beautiful things happening in District 1 that we're very proud of. The O'Donnell School Playground, one of my proudest moments as Councillor, has been the opening of BADA East Boston, which is the Adult Technical Academy. That was one of the first things that, sitting down with Superintendent Skipper, we had identified that there was a real need for multilingual learner pathways in East Boston, especially for the 19 through 22 Young adults, a lot of these folks come from immigrant backgrounds and it really has been just a game changer for our district and so we're very proud of that. So thank you for your help with that. My understanding is that the enrollment goal there was for 50 kids in its first year, and then the next year the enrollment was 150. And I apologize I was late, but my understanding is that you had already talked about declining enrollment. and how that is affecting our

We spent a lot of work trying to get Bada East open. And is the declining enrollment in that particular school, not declining enrollment, but a lack of enrollment in that school or interest, is that going to harm? The progress that we've made there.

We are definitely still supporting Bada East. We're not trying to cause harm I think to the program at all. I think what we are looking at across our schools and across the district is How much capacity do we have and how much capacity do we need? And what Bada East is doing, and Bada, not East, I'm not gonna say West, I'm not gonna say West, because it's not that much further. West, but is providing a somewhat unique type of capacity and service that we don't just see district wide. And so I think there's a definitely more specialized conversation we need to have with the team there. about what the right plan is for next year. We're still in early stages. The teams just got the first draft of their enrollment to review, and we're starting to have some early conversations about it.

I'm happy to follow up more as we get a little deeper into the process, but no, we support the whole Barraza community.

Okay, thank you. I just, we need to protect what we did there wrapping bubble wrap and just try to keep it Thank you. And we had worked together to try to get the line item, which is a drop in the bucket. We really need $3 million for legal aid and immigrant aid or immigrant legal aid for folks. It was made even more heartbreaking when we were trying to find pro bono lawyers. And we had found out that even a consultation fee with a lawyer was going to be one month's rent. And so we worked hard to get that specifically for parents. Understanding that the school community was a good way to try to funnel and we had information we can move quickly. And luckily, BPS mobilized and had their lawyers there. They had the social emotional supports there.

They had leadership there. But we had designated that specifically for If they were going through this terrible situation. What's the status of that? Has that been exhausted, that line item? What does that look like?

Yeah. Do folks know about it? Unfortunately, that line item isn't on my side of the budget. So I'm not sure of the current status of it, but I do know Our teams have been working really collaboratively across many agencies in the city to make sure that we're providing these supports that are critically needed.

Okay, thank you, and I'll check in on that, but it was supposed to be a partnership with Moya and BPS, and I'm not sure if there's been any coordination on that.

Yeah, I know there's a lot of coordinating happening, but just the actual line-up itself I don't think sits with me.

Okay. And one of my questions was going to be about the inclusion model.

Yes, of course.

Any shifts that you anticipate given that? I had the privilege of talking to all of my and many more. We had a lot of questions about the principles before the budget, and they had said, look, we're going to try to use the money that we have, although we are not sure, given the money that an inclusion specialist or one inclusion paraprofessional that's supposed to run around to five different classrooms is going to be effective for us. And so are you all having conversations directly with teachers inside the classroom and principals to understand it's not just an equation model, but what are the needs for the school that we can make sure that the inclusion model is being utilized to its maximum efficiency.

We're definitely having those individualized conversations and I think It's definitely hard when resources are tight to not be able to do everything that people think is the best possible version of it. But we are ensuring with school-specific I want to talk about central office.

Please. There was a decline of 17%, I think, in spending from last FY budget to this year. Correct me if I'm wrong. Has there been any move to make sure that that money, because what we have been told is that there was a deputy and everybody's contributions are so valuable. So I just want to say that. However, there was some redundancy in some of the positions in central office where there was a deputy for a deputy for a deputy and that money was not being funneled out to the classrooms in the most effective way. Has there been any change to reform some of the workflow or organizational charts to decrease some of the spending on salaries?

We're in the middle of a pretty significant review of central office and central office spending from everything from positions as you're describing to contracts and other supports like that. The sort of it's coming from two angles. One is that sort of bubbling up feedback from schools and school years about things they see that they're like maybe you don't need to be doing that anymore. And then the second is The work that Colin's doing with sort of tying all of our work to those two key strategy and our do we have initiatives in central office that we're

you know from a previous administration we don't think are tied to our strategy anymore we can really reduce yeah or positions that aren't hitting the ground right and really do having effect in the classroom which is where the unit of change is right so

Yeah, the superintendent keeps saying, can you explain how this directly impacts students? That's the message that's been happening in all of our central office meetings as we're getting ready for this budget season. It's like, can you explain how this directly impacts students?

Thank you. So it sounds like we're shifting to make sure that more of our BPS budget is shifted to the school-based budget versus centrally budgeted. Do we know the percentage now? Yep, I got that right here.

So, of our budget, We split our budget into four main categories. So there's direct school expenses, for the school budgets themselves, the extended learning time costs, and then the benefits associated with their positions because technically the health insurance for the entire district hits the finance division, which makes us look like we spend a ton of money, but it's all just benefits. So we try and sort of split that out. So we spend, of our most recent budget, $960 million was direct school expenses. It's about 61%. The next category would be things we call school services budgeted centrally. So the entirety of the transportation office, special education, facilities management, and a few other things like that. So that is

about 28% of our spending. The third category is spending on students who don't attend BPS schools. These are kids who go to out-of-district special education placements, but also some of our Some students in foster care who are homeless who go to other schools. We also have a small number of kids in vocational ed placements outside the district. That's about 4% of the budget. So that leaves about 7% of spending as sort of central office spending. So that's sort of the rough breakout.

Thank you. The chair recognizes Councilor Flynn. Councilor, you have the floor. Thank you, Mr.

Chair. Thank you to the BPS team that is here. One question I want to ask, and I have met with the superintendent about this issue, but what is the status, David, of supporting A new gymnasium or at least fixing up the gymnasium at Josiah Quincy School. That's been a major challenge for students to enjoy

I know the team is currently putting together the next round of capital proposals. I have not seen the submission yet. We should have more information very soon for you.

Okay, I know the students have been waiting patiently, but it is impacting their physical fitness and their ability to and so on.

If you're talking to the superintendent about it, I imagine it must be. I'm not very familiar with the list right now.

Okay. The other issue I'm concerned with is the building at Blackstone School. It's one of the oldest schools in the city, poorly designed, and it's not efficient for learning and teaching. We can't even use the swimming pool there as well. Kids in the South End, kids in Roxbury. There's probably not a more diverse group of students that go to a BPS school than the kids at the Blackstone. But what is the status of the school? My goal is to have a brand new Blackstone school. But what is the BPS team thinking?

I know it's on the list of things being reviewed, but I don't know where it is in the priority list.

I mean, I need a better answer than that, David. This is something I've been advocating for a long period of time. I want to make sure my constituents, the Blackstone School sits between the Ruth Barclay, which is the Cathedral of Public Housing Development, as you know, and Across the street is the Villa Victoria. Down the road is just a short walk is Roxbury. And up the road a little bit is Chinatown. We also have a lot of students that come from all over the city for sure. But why isn't there an urgency for the Blackstone? It's an urgency for me. But why is it there an urgency for PPS?

I mean, I know it's an important project that's under consideration, but as you know, we have a large number of those that we are reviewing.

I don't think one is as in difficult physical shape than the Blackstone School. You know, you walk up into the main lobby and it's... That's where you check in, but the library is right there. And it's very difficult to even read a book with the loud noises coming from there. But just the way the building is designed, it's almost impossible to walk from the main lobby down to the swimming pool. There's a lot of students with disabilities that are in wheelchairs. It's challenging. So there's nothing else you can tell me about the Blackstone? Not at the moment, no. Sir, are you able to tell me anything about the Blackstone?

No. Checking with Capital Planning.

Okay. The four students with disabilities that use a wheelchair, how are we transporting them safely, effectively from their homes to their school on the bus, is there a bus monitor for every student that has, for a student with disabilities that's in a wheelchair?

Not being super familiar with the data, I wouldn't be 100% sure, but I would have to imagine it would be written into their IEP that they would get a one-to-one monitor, and then that would be provided along with a wheelchair bus.

Okay, is this a priority going forward that Students with disabilities that are in a wheelchair have that type of assistance so that they can safely navigate from their home to their school and back. But I guess my question is, I think the school does make that commitment, but does it actually happen? That's my question. Yes, we make that commitment that all students will have a bus monitor, But 100% of the time, do we have bus monitors on those buses for those students? I know it's a priority for the team.

No, I know.

I know that. Can you tell me 100% of the time we have bus monitors that assist students that are in wheelchairs? Sitting here today, I couldn't tell you 100% of the time it happens. That's an important question. That's an important issue for me, though. If that's what we're saying and we all support, that's great, but in reality, does it happen? That's my question. You know, I asked a lot of questions and I like you and respect you, but I didn't get any answers. Are you able to provide those answers to me? I can certainly get them for you, yes. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

I will start with first my questions around are students who we are not able to serve within the district. CFO Bloom pointed to that making up 4% of our budget. Are there any investments to make sure that we can educate and provide support to those students in district?

Oh, 100%. The number one I'll point to is the beautiful new Carter building. which we worked really diligently with the team last year to build in a phase-in plan for staffing. because we weren't sure how many kids would be enrolled and I was very happy to have to pay the bill for full staffing there because they were able to get fully enrolled to their target. One of the big things there, talking to the principal last year in one of our planning meetings, he says because they do a lot of the early identification work for families before they've even enrolled in school. and he had a family of a three-year-old who went out of district because we didn't have a seat but said to him, we're really looking forward to coming back when your new building opens. So I haven't actually double-checked with him that they actually did come back.

I'm really hopeful they did and I think that's the sort of thing that we'll be able to do by investing in these programs and in our schools. Awesome. So we should see year over year hopefully that number Yeah, I mean I think so the number one thing about these students with disabilities being served in schools outside of BPS is for a lot of these students stability is really important and so it can be very hard for kids to come back Once they've arrived at a school that they're making progress at, that's out of the district. So the number one thing for us is how do we keep them here? and then the numbers will just slowly go down not because kids are leaving and coming back necessarily but because we're able to build the placements and so one of the big things we're reviewing is sort of why do kids leave right what are the reasons we think you know inclusive ed has been a really big part of it that you are now able to choose a school.

You're not given a restricted list by the department unless you have a very specialized need, right? And so, you know, Thinking about with Councilor Breadon last year, you know, the students at the Winship who are three and four, who the school really wanted to keep, but They weren't allowed to because before the inclusion ed plan, the kids had to go to a program at another school. Well, now all those kids at the Winship can just stay at the Winship. All of those, reducing those transitions and making more options available for families is gonna help us keep the kids.

Yeah, no, thank you for that. And I guess this is why also I'm like a big advocate for a multi-year BPS plan so we could see like the whole strategic and then also see those numbers shifting throughout year one, two, three, four, five. That way there's more of a clear understanding for community members and elected officials on How these numbers all work. And speaking of a multi-year budget, are we going to get a budget book this year? Oh, yeah. Yeah? Oh, yeah. When can we expect the budget book?

August? No, just kidding.

Okay.

I think the timing is probably going to be similar. I think we've worked out some of the Do it the first time is always harder, so I'm hopeful. I'm not going to commit to getting it earlier than that. Before school committee passes it? Yes. So we're going to do a similar process to what we did last year, which is we gave a draft to you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The preliminary draft should be basically good enough. And so the goal is to have that to you before our working session in March so that you're able to really engage in the budget deeply.

Got it. And is it going to be a book or it's going to be similar to? This spreadsheet and the PDF that we received.

We will have, I think, the preliminary one. I mean, it's going to be a PDF, but if you want to, I can get you a valid one. All right. I can get you a book for sure. All right. Awesome. We can print them. Awesome.

Perfect.

Master Park can print them at the very least if we need to.

I think for me that is all of, let me just double check my notes. Oh, lastly, big advocate for college credits, our high school students getting college credits, also a big advocate for Votek being expanded not only across grades but across schools. Junior, I think it's achievement. or I might be getting the name wrong, but Philadelphia I believe it was, they started introducing or they created a curriculum for I believe fifth and sixth graders to start learning trades, yes. Can you speak to me like, Is there any increase investment around the college credit programs or even expanding to trades across schools?

Or even expanding it to different grades? Yeah, so we've had investments in the current year budget that were investments in expanding dual enrollment and early college coursework for course credit. I know there are conversations around Madison Park, around seventh and eighth grade access to the programming there. And then the other thing is we have a number of our schools that have voc tech programming, even if it's not the formal Chapter 74 programming. And now that so many of our schools are 7 to 12, many more seventh and eighth graders are getting access to that sort of programming.

Yeah, that's a big push from the state too around creating pathways for students all the way into elementary school. So they're reaching back. We're piloting some of that programming at the district.

That's awesome. And then lastly, I just want to... Well, I know that the school committee passed the exam. Policy reform and simulations have shown that black and Latino students could see a decline in enrollment in our exam schools. And I'm just thinking about those students who aspire or tested to be inside of one of those exam schools and just making sure that we have or create an open enrollment school that has the same academic rigor and excellence across our schools, you know also just kind of keeping that in mind that there are students who have taken that test who because of policy is an additional barrier now for them to get in and you know we saw that

NYC, New York, created a HBCU-themed prep College Course High School. And I think that will be something that will be very beneficial for those students who, because of policy, might have a harder time getting into our exam schools, right? academic rigor, with that investment, with that culture to develop their God-given talent is really centered and focused. So I just want to just push that out there and invite BPS into those conversations knowing that, yo, There could be some students, again, black and Latino students who are not getting in now because of the policy reform.

I agree with you. I think there shouldn't be one model for excellence in this city. Everything should be around excellence. Absolutely.

I am told there's no more, no one else has signed up for public testimony. I want to thank BPS for being here. I want to thank my council colleagues, central staff, and my team for all their work in this to put together this hearing. And this hearing on document number 1669 is adjourned.

and many more.