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Boston students walk out for budget protest, hearing at City Hall
By adamg on Tue, 05/17/2016 - 10:26pm
Students rally. Photo by Greg Cook (who has more details on the protest).
For the second time this year, BPS students walked out of class for a protest against program cuts.
Fewer people joined this protest, but there were more than enough people to fill the City Council chambers during a regularly scheduled hearing on the budget for BPS's new "social emotional learning and wellness" program. Students testified against cuts in programs in general and for special-needs students in particular. Students reserved particular ire for Mayor Walsh, saying he disrespected them by calling them puppets of adults in walking out when they were able to organize the protest by themselves.
The cuts "affect people's lives, their future and their stability," Angel Pena, a junior at the O'Bryant School from Roslindale, testified.
City Councilor Tito Jackson (Roxbury) joined in, saying special-needs students in particular deserve the same level of teaching and trained support as kids in neighboring suburban towns. City Councilor Michael Flaherty, who questioned whether Boston is doing enough to prepare its students for good jobs at local companies, said it was "unconscionable" that the average wait for transportation for new special-needs students is 7 to 10 days.
Around 4 p.m., as a contingent of students waited inside the fifth-floor council chambers to testify and watch the hearing, things briefly grew tense on the fifth floor, when other students, who had been protesting outside, marched into City Hall and up the stairs from the third-floor entrance up to the fifth floor.
They chanted "BPS!" and other slogans as they streamed toward what they thought was the council chambers - with police and City Hall workers managing to direct them to a small area near the elevator bank in front of the mayor's office. After a few minutes of chanting - amplified by the concrete walls of the building - small groups were slowly allowed into the council chambers, where they joined the students already there.
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Comments
Well...
...not intelligent enough to realize that 'walkout' didn't need to be capitalized on their sign. Sorry, make a sign like that, it has to be flawless.
Well, see
It's supposedly the parent who wrote the sign. Maybe the parent isn't smart enough to plan the walkout, or capitalize correctly, but the kid is?
Better headline would be
(As a BPS grad, Dever, MCCorrmick and Westie) BPS Teachers Union persuades young imperishable youth to protest on thier behalf.
I just graduated 7 years ago (under 30) and not much has changed besides the increase in pentions and perks.
If anyone knows of a program which is directly tied into BPS (outside of the exam schools) I would love the feed back. Particularly seeing that school is over and I can offer a highly (approx. $15-18/HR) paid internship in a international fortune 500 financial firm.
Someone helped me and looking to pay it forward!
Kids are that dumb?
No, I don't think so. They're able to think for themselves. Was that not the case when you were in BPS?
Dontcha mean..
'Impressionable' youth?
And where didya gradeeate from agin?
Check with Boston Private
Check with Boston Private Industry Council. they are supposed to help bps students develop career skills
Summer Jobs / Internships
Boston Private Industry Council (PIC) coordinates the summer jobs for BPS youth in the business community. They sent us several outstanding (non-exam school) student last summer for us to interview and then for us to chose the right right one. They're the program to call, they're in downtown Boston.
They must be learning so much
They must be learning so much by not attending class to protest. That life skill will surely excel them far in the wide world of reality.
Real-world experience, indeed!
Constitutional law (First Amendment right to assemble and petition government), civics (how laws are made), expository writing and debating, even math. The kids were getting quite an education.
Next stop for them after
Next stop for them after protesting their way through their HS is Havard Law. We are looking at a bunch of bright future attorney minds. Don't worry, their grammar errors will work its way out after more protesting practice.
Their "grammar" errors...
...will work "its" way out...
When will your grammar improve?
The second I decide to walk
The second I decide to walk out of my job and hold up a sign with words to protest. Which is never. For now you will just have to bare with the bad grammar of the BLS protestors and I.
Keep your shirt on
Thanks very much
* bear with
EOT
A great opportunity
This is a great opportunity for these students to write up an essay about their experiences around these protests; what precipitated them, the expected outcomes, and the actual outcomes. Social studies teachers, take note!
Free Offer
I will give a class on the school and municipal budget to any students interested. If any of the student protesters can organize a room and a time that I can make it - let me know.
My guess is that by the time the class is done - they will be madder at their teachers and administrators than they are at the mayor and the city council.
Lol! Tell me professor Stevil
Lol! Tell me professor Stevil, will such a course transfer into the BLS student's curriculum? Is this a letter grade based course? Are your students graded on how badly they disrupt the everyday function of the city or will there be actual assignments that are fact based?
I can do another class
Just for trolls that don't know the difference between BLS and BPS
I'm assuming there was a citywide policy decison....
on whether to carry these students AWOL or let them protest if they wanted to?
Yes, there was
And as a BPS parent (for roughly the next month), I got several of the missives:
Of course, by June 7, the decision on the budget will have been made (not sure, but it looks like the City Council might be voting on it today), so the whole petitioning-your-elected-officials thing would be moot.
As a candidiate for Mayor and Council education subcommittee
member Councilor Jackson owes it to these student taxpayers to explain where the additional funds come from. If he is to reduce funding for public safety he should just say so. If not then he needs to tell these student taxpayer/homeowners that they need to pay additional tax to give the BPS everything it wants in its billion plus budget.
Don't think there's any way Tito runs for mayor
Unless he does some serious fund-raising and stops spending like a drunken sailor (a $400/mo cell phone bill, $300/mo in Chinese food). His campaign fund was virtually broke at year-end, and last I checked was up to $7-8k. Compare that to Walsh's $1.2million.
It's a shame BPS parents are
It's a shame BPS parents are letting their kids do what they should be doing as responsible adults who care about their kids' education. This is a good lesson for children about public school funding and taxes and the fact that there isn't a bottomless pit of money to fund everything. I went through severe cuts when I was in public school... the librarian was let go, no new books, no art supplies, sports were cut and teachers were let go. Parents were expected to supply paper, pens, pencils and other school supplies beyond the usual expectations. Students held bake sales, car washes and yardwork services in order to raise money to help offset the cuts. While I'm sure in some ways our education suffered, at least we tried to earn money through hard work and not just skip classes to protest. It was a good life lesson: life's not always fair and you can either complain about it or you can actually do something about it.
oh please
When you live in a community with a very high rate of poverty, it's a little harder to raise money with a car wash or bake sale than it is in say, Needham. In fact, a lot of the challenges BPS faces ca be linked to the fact that it is expected to act a core piece of the social safety net as much as an educational institution. Maybe if we could provide better social services, there'd be a little less strain on BPS.
BPS has many financial issues which need to be examined and resolved, but asking the kids of poor families to pay more isn't ever going to be a solution.
Also, protesting isn't 'doing something about it'? It might not be effective but it's certainly action.
Feel free to post your rebuttal about how your working class or poor upbringing was just like these kids while ignoring the fact that there used to be a lot more, better blue collar work in greater Boston.
I grew up in a lower middle
I grew up in a lower middle class / blue collar town... not Needham. I was raised not to expect to have things handed to me, but to work for them. We didn't have a choice... the town didn't have money and my parents didn't have a lot of money. I'm not saying that we paid a librarian's salary from car washes and bake sales, but we were able to raise money to keep some extra-curricular activities going and help pay for kids to have class materials who had parent(s) who were too poor to pay for school supplies. You think this is a bad thing and that speaks volume for your character. If we had skipped school and protested instead of helping fellow classmates and ourselves, then NOTHING would have been accomplished.
Advocacy and action take many forms
First, Boston is NOT a poor town, not with all the millions of additional dollars pouring into its coffers thanks to new construction.
In any case, these kids ARE doing something for their fellow students - they are risking penalties to fight for the sort of resources they need to do well. We're not talking toilet paper here; we're talking about teachers for special-needs students.
And, please, enough with the condescending crap about how Boston parents never help out their schools. They do, which any BPS parent could tell you.
Oh please, MK II
I don't think it's a bad thing for students to raise money but I think you're blithely ignoring the economic reality of a huge number of BPS kids. I can't pretend to speak for them as I'm comfortably middle class, but the data shows that there are many kids in BPS in Section 8 housing, on food stamps, getting the free breakfasts, etc... These families need tons of public support to survive but they're supposed to have a bake sale? That's just making someone put on a show of penitence for being poor or something...
BTW, in most BPS schools there are lots of fund raisers and everyone who can pitches in. However if you think a shortfall of millions of dollars is getting covered by $100 in snickerdoodle money, I don't know what to tell you. Also the oft vilified BTU members* generally spend a good amount of personal money on supplies and the like. That's also not going to move the needle in terms of budget shortfalls.
* disclosure, I've made anti-BTU comments in the past. That's not relevant to this issue.
It takes a special kind of
It takes a special kind of person to sit at their keyboard and mock young people for actually getting involved in politics.
Equally special people exploit these young people
in mocking taxpayers.
What am I missing here?
Let me get this straight...there are cuts looming over BPS for some programs, potentially affecting students' quality of academics received. To voice displeasure over it, they're not attending class to protest.
Isn't missing class worse than attending under potential abbreviated resources? (i.e. some type of educational day is better than none)
If I pulled that stuff under the same circumstances when I was younger, I'd have my a** dragged right back into the school building by my mother (rightly so). I don't understand how a parent would allow their child(ren) to sacrifice a day/potentially be punished for feeling that protesting during class is acceptable.
Don't schools release students for the day by 2:30p/3p? Why not protest once the school day is done? I'm not saying the kids don't have a right to protest...I just don't understand how anyone, parents or otherwise, justify them doing so at the expense of the same thing they're fighting for.
Because it's that important
Also, the protest was keyed to a City Council budget hearing scheduled to begin at 2 p.m. The council doesn't always schedule their hearings for the convenience of people who might really be concerned by the issues raised at them.
It indeed is...
I have no argument over the importance of the BPS budget, nor over your point of the inconvenient times the council always schedules these things. Very well put on aspects.
I just feel like students should generally worry about receiving their daily education first, and worry about participating in civil affairs second, even if it involves their first priority. Parents & teachers should be at the forefront of this argument, not the students.
Did anyone actually attend or listen to the Hearing videostream?
The amount of money budget for homeless students (7% of the BPS population) is *really* low.