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SCHOOL DAZE
Done deal?
BY ADAM REILLY
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Ever since Boston’s student-assignment-plan review process began earlier this year, opponents of a shift toward neighborhood schools have charged that the fix was in (see "Bus Stop," News and Features, February 13). That’s what made an e-mail that began circulating last week so incendiary. The message said that the task force originally favored proposing two alternatives — moving to a six-zone plan, or keeping the current three-zone plan — at its September 22 meeting with the Boston School Committee. But after Mayor Tom Menino met with the task force and told its members that keeping the status quo wouldn’t work, that option fell by the wayside. Or so claimed the e-mail, which was written by Steve Fernandez, a teacher at the O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science who opposes changing the current assignment plan. If true, this would bolster claims that Menino — who has insisted that the task force was free to draw its own conclusions — knew what he wanted from the outset and was determined to get it. The allegation may well be baseless. Menino declined comment earlier this week. (Instead, his office provided a faxed copy of a letter Menino sent to the School Committee on September 28; in it, the mayor offered some assignment-related recommendations of his own, including maintaining sibling preference, grandfathering current students, revising the assignment formula, and adding more K–8 schools). But Ted Landsmark — who chaired the task force — says the charge is a load of bunk. "There was no pressure from the mayor or anyone else concerning the final report," Landsmark insists. "A small minority of the task-force members preferred that we make a recommendation to maintain the status quo. More than two-thirds of the task force disagreed with that, and the recommendation of the majority of the group is what has been put forward in the report, with an acknowledgement that some members of the task force preferred that there be no change." (The members Landsmark mentions have joined Work 4 Quality Schools, a group opposed to any change and led by District Seven city councilor Chuck Turner.) Fernandez did not respond to a request for comment by the Phoenix’s deadline. But even if the accusatory e-mail is groundless, it’s likely to feed frustration among critics when assignment-plan public forums begin later this month. Keep an eye on the October 12 forum at Madison Park Technical and Vocational High School, in Roxbury: many African-American Bostonians, whose children attend Boston schools in greater numbers than their white counterparts do, see the assignment-plan review process as an effort to appease white voters in neighborhoods such as West Roxbury. And with only four forums scheduled before the School Committee makes its final decision, opponents have every incentive to make their case as aggressively as possible.
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