Newsletter Signup
Stay up to date on all the latest news from Boston.com
Wu explains where she went wrong in failed plan to move O’Bryant school
Mayor Michelle Wu admitted mistakes in how her administration went about pursuing an ambitious plan to move the city's most diverse exam school.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu gave further context Monday about her decision to officially cancel a plan that would have moved the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science to West Roxbury. Wu admitted mistakes regarding how her administration announced the plan and attempted to move forward with it.
The mayor was asked if she “sequenced” the process incorrectly during an appearance on WBUR’s “Radio Boston” program.
“Yeah, I think that is definitely fair,” Wu responded.
Last Summer, Wu and Superintendent Mary Skipper announced plans to move the O’Bryant to a vacant education complex in West Roxbury. The O’Bryant currently shares a Roxbury campus with Madison Park Technical Vocational High School.
Advertisement:
Wu and Skipper touted the project as a win for both schools. The O’Bryant, Boston’s most diverse exam school, would get a state-of-the-art STEM campus of its own. Facilities at Madison Park, the city’s only vocational high school, would have been expanded and revitalized as well.
But pushback came swiftly and was sustained for months. Many took issue with the notion of moving the O’Bryant out of Boston’s Black cultural center in Roxbury to a mostly white neighborhood that isn’t easily accessible by public transit. Students, teachers, parents, and elected officials all voiced their opposition, claiming the city presented an overly ambitious timeline for the project and failed to adequately engage with those who would be affected.
Advertisement:
The Wu administration cited a “lack of consensus” in announcing the decision to pull the plug.
Wu said Monday that her goal last summer was to accelerate conversations about how to improve the two schools by putting out a proposal. But the West Roxbury site presented challenges that her administration had not gotten firm commitments about solving when they first announced the plan, she said. As an example, Wu said that the city had since come to an agreement with the MBTA about building a commuter rail stop at the West Roxbury campus.
“But because that wasn’t part of the initial proposal, I think it put us in a very different place,” Wu said on WBUR.
The mayor also acknowledged the larger transportation issues that would have faced students. Data compiled by her team showed that transportation times would not have increased on average for the student body across the city, but the changes would have definitely made commuting to school more difficult for students in some neighborhoods such as East Boston.
Wu stressed the larger context, saying that the “vast majority” of the city’s 119 school buildings are in dire need of renovations or complete rebuilds. She is still committed to the long-term “master plan” of improving school facilities across the city, which was announced in January. The O’Bryant, Madison Park, and the West Roxbury campus will be included in this plan.
Advertisement:
“It will not go as fast as I was hoping that it would go, but it doesn’t mean that we are slowing down or that we are easing off,” Wu said during her radio interview.
Although the O’Bryant is no longer moving, the district is still moving forward with the Madison Park planning process. Some of the resources that had been allocated for the O’Bryant move will now go to another school community where city officials can “find consensus faster,” she said.
Wu mentioned her own children, saying that watching them grow so quickly was a motivating factor in pursuing the ambitious plan.
“Every decision that is delayed another year is another class of students that will have no chance whatsoever to experience that brand-new, life changing experience of new facilities,” Wu said on WBUR. “So it is a tension and a balance between trying to make decisions in a way that moves us along so that we can actually experience them sooner than later, and having the community really feel that these are their decisions and not just something that is sort of dictated or laid out.”
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com