Education
DESE praised the progress of UP Academy Holland in Dorchester Dearborn STEM Academy in Roxbury and the Fonseca Elementary School in Fall River.
A previously underperforming Dorchester school will exit state receivership and two other schools will no longer be designated as “underperforming,” state education officials announced earlier this month.
UP Academy Holland in Dorchester, in state receivership for more than a decade, will return to local control, DESE Commissioner Pedro Martinez said during a Dec. 16 Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting.
Dearborn STEM Academy in Roxbury and the Mary L. Fonseca Elementary School in Fall River will also exit their state designation of “underperforming,” Martinez said.
Fonseca, which Martinez said saw “significant progress in improving academic outcomes for multilingual learners,” was designated as underperforming in 2014, the Fall River Herald News reported.
UP Academy Holland will exit state receivership at the end of the year, pending exit assurances, Martinez said, despite some pleas from parents. In an opinion article published by The Boston Globe, five parents of UP Academy Holland students asked Martinez to keep the school under state control.
“We implore state officials to keep a good thing going,” the parents wrote. “The performance of our students serves as living proof that improvement amid challenging circumstances can be real, that children from communities that have long been underserved can excel, and that families can trust public education when the structures around it are strong.”
Martinez said UP Academy Holland saw “significant improvements” in areas of concerns highlighted in the school’s original 2014 turnaround plan.
“There’s another lesson here that we got to take is that this is long term work,” Martinez said, “but through the perseverance and commitment of UP Academy Holland students, family, staff, leaders and partners, the school has strengthened its practices in academic, social and emotional supports for students.”
Unions representing educators at the schools — Boston Teachers Union and the American Federation of Teachers — both praised the announcement. AFT said the schools can serve as a model to return schools to local control, while the BTU criticized receivership more directly.
“Receivership is a concept that has shown itself to be ineffective, and we are pleased that these two schools will be fully managed by the Boston Public Schools,” BTU said in a statement.
Broadly, Massachusetts schools still have not rebounded academically from the pandemic’s start five years ago, as indicated by MCAS scores released this fall. Only 13 districts reached prepandemic levels of achievement, DESE said in September.
“There’s a lot of challenges in our Commonwealth,” Martinez said, “But I really believe there’s just so much hard work happening, and we always need to stop and just celebrate that hard work.”
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