Public Participation

Transcript (~12 min @ 11:00)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 10:53 Speaker 3: Our meeting this evening will be videotaped and will be rebroadcast on Melrose Cable Television.

▶ 11:00 Peter D. Mortimer: Motion to open the floor for public participation, Mr. President.

▶ 11:04 Speaker 3: all the water moves to open the floor for public participation motion is seconded by baldman's work Oh on the motion all those in favor all right motion passes this is the portion of our meeting where any member of the public can come forward identify themselves and speak on any order that is on our agenda for this evening sir could you identify yourself please my

▶ 11:28 Speaker 7: name is Jeremy Rose I live at 62 Mount Vernon Street thank you for allowing me to address you tonight I sent the alderman an email earlier it was probably maybe too late for some of you to see before the meeting but I wanted to get on the record some of the issues that I see about this modular classroom bond proposal now I expect I'm wasting my time tonight but I appealed to you to step back from the brink. Alternatives far superior to the modular classroom proposal weren't given due analysis, consideration, and hearing by administration prior to being brought to the board. True to form, the administration has already foreclosed all options for the Alderman to consider, but one. In short, I ask you to vote down the modular classroom bond and invest the money in creating central campus space which could bring together fifth grade students from around the city don't keep them isolated in elementary schools schools they've grown out of physically academically and emotionally don't sell them and their readiness short as the mayor apparently does instead I asked you to increase capacity at the middle school in the high school campus increasing capacity there to house fifth grade students would easily allow the existing elementary schools to accommodate the bubble of students passing through the lower elementary years today if you don't increase capacity at the middle school what's your plan when the same bubble reaches the middle school in a few years and there isn't enough room there right now we have excess capacity at the middle school that's not being used because we have a low numbers of students there and we're wasting that space if you don't provide more space at the middle school when this bubble goes forward you're going to hold the sixth grade students back in the elementary schools if in fact we have you know excess capacity there and not at the middle school you You know, will you at that time belatedly spend several million dollars at the central campus, possibly leaving at the same time some classrooms empty at the elementary level? Increasing capacity at the central campus provides flexibility for the future. Building inflexible capacity at the elementary schools leaves zero flexibility for the future. If you build capacity at the middle school, there's a nexus there between middle school and elementary. And if we need to, we can move people up. we don't need to we can keep them down we can move back and forth you can't you don't get any benefit if you make all the increased capacity elementary as they grow older there's no place for them to go without doing something else this proposal to spend six and a half million dollars and ultimately nine million about nine million to add five classrooms at the elementary level is misguided at best it commits money to the ineffective and inefficient divided resource model which isolates grade level students and teachers at at elementary schools around the city. In that model, students aren't drawn together with enough critical mass to service them well. Establishing additional isolated elementary classrooms with teachers separated from their grade level teaching peers across the city is ineffective for both professional development purposes and educationally for our children. Not increasing opportunity or capacity for fifth graders from around the city to learn together prevents them from growing to their potential. You hold them back, keeping them at the elementary schools. There is also a productive economy of scale, which is impossible to harvest when you waste, also, $9 million on five modular classrooms. That economy of scale comes from the fact that if you have a whole bunch of fifth graders together in one place, you can divide them amongst the number of teachers you need for them, instead of having holes in various schools around the city where we have the same numbers of teachers where we could have one fewer teacher for the grade than we might have when they're all spread around the city. I might have said that wrong, I apologize. The mayor wants you to believe that there was a valid public process to determine that spending so much of this money is the best solution to current space constraints. There wasn't. You can be sure that I attended school committee meetings, a couple school building committee meetings, and the meeting last spring at the Lincoln School. in none of those settings was their productive process and none of those meetings was the better option of investing money at the nexus between levels competently presented evaluated or even discussed the lincoln school meeting was worthless at harvesting ideas and sparking rational analysis it was a skewed presentation by administration marketed toward exploiting the natural but naive fears of parents of younger elementary children That was not public process, it was propaganda. Without surprise, parents of those young elementary students responded against any option but the modular classrooms, as they were led to by the mayor's process. The mayor appears again to be acting for short-term political expedience rather than supporting the success of present and future generations of Melrose students. He exploits the worries of parents of young elementary children that it would be somehow harmful for fifth graders to be welcomed into an increased capacity at the middle and high school levels. He allows them to believe their 10 and 11-year-olds would be harmed attending fifth grade in a middle school setting. They wouldn't be harmed. They would be far more likely to thrive there. Around the country, there are large numbers of fifth grade students attending middle schools, which effectively address their academic, social, and emotional needs. It's actually a better model of five to eight middle school, or even five to seven, and other things like that. Does the mayor have so little confidence in our 10 and 11 year old children, he believes somehow they won't thrive as thousands and thousands of other students around the state and around the country do. The mayor asserts that it would cost a million dollars and somehow that's a bad thing to create replacement office space for central office administrators if we were to increase capacity at the high school in the middle school. Well, you're spending $9 million to hold them down in the elementary level. The total cost of creating additional central campus space and for administration would be far less than what's being proposed here. It could create a wonderful space for 8th grade students, and I assert it would be far less than we're talking about today, with far better results, both socially, emotionally, and academically for our students. The mayor makes many declarations in his statements, and they rival some of those emanating from the White House these days. He doesn't exactly use the phrase, finely tuned machine, but claims instead, this project is a textbook example of how major decision-making should work at the local level. It may be a textbook example of how he wants to exploit a citizenry uninformed about the deeper issues, to foist his short-sighted will onto the community without complete evaluation of the harms it brings, nor the educational possibilities it forecloses upon. It may be from his parochial textbook, but not from any textbook that would benefit our students, and our students need that. Let me draw you a parallel. have learned to oppose policies which would subsidize natural gas pipelines. They learned that subsidized pipelines would make it economically less feasible to develop renewable resources due to the artificially low prices that such gas subsidies produce. Subsidizing such pipelines would stymie renewable resource development for decades to come. Similarly in Melrose, if you vote to double down on poor, inefficient, and ineffective student and teacher separation models in Melrose through building these modular classrooms, you will prevent Melrose from moving to a more effective and efficient educational model for at least a couple decades longer. Once you waste this $9 million, it won't be cost-effective to do the right thing. You won't invest in the better options later because you won't have the money and you've already done it, similar to the natural gas pipelines. How many more generations of Melrose students do you wish to condemn to be underserved in

▶ 19:28 Speaker 7: our schools you will click you will you will rely on the fact that somehow the school committee and the superintendent all explored these options and you know vetted them thoroughly and you know determine they weren't they weren't good I didn't see that anywhere in the process in paying attention to the processes of the schools for a lot of years I frankly wasn't surprised you

▶ 19:54 Speaker 7: You know, I appeal to you to please look at this more carefully. Please consider it. Please don't just rubber stamp the administration's railroad track proposal again. The $9 million of spending you're likely to approve tonight will perpetuate the harms done to this generation of students and several more to come. Neighborhood schools may seem a lovely notion to cling to, but educationally it's anachronistic and harmful. It's harmful to students because there aren't critical masses of students and teachers to accomplish effective differentiation for students' varying needs. It's harmful to students because as we will isolate teachers from their teaching peers, they have less opportunity for collaboration, learning from each other, and sharing talent and best practices that various teachers can offer.

▶ 20:41 Speaker 7: If the best interests of our students were in mind through this process, the citizens in this Board of Aldermen could have learned that our students are harmed by the prospect of wasting this $9 million building what really are temporary classrooms at the elementary schools. The mayor made a claim in his statement to you that this option allows us to maintain our neighborhood school concept, a true middle school in a traditional 9 to 12 high school without quote shoehorning students that might not be socially, emotionally, or educationally ready for a jump from fourth grade to the middle school and from seventh grade to the high school. Across the country, there are students who transition to a middle school beginning in fifth grade. The mayor's use of language to kind of not say that fifth graders are going to middle school, but fourth graders are going to middle school, the mayor's idea to say that eighth graders are going to high school, or seventh graders are going to high school now based on doing something different, it's hyperbole, right? The language and hyperbole the mayor used betrays his lack of rational arguments to support the concept of modular classrooms here. He wouldn't resort to making such characterizations as he did in his statement if his position was supported by something other than his alternative facts. It will be difficult for you to stop this train wreck now, but do you really want to watch the consequences of not doing so undermine the interests of our children in our schools for decades and decades to come? I urge you, please, it won't be easy to say no to this and to make accommodations for the fall, but what is being done here is basically a knee-jerk reaction to do something that

▶ 22:18 Speaker 7: is gonna handcuff us from doing better things that need to be done for our kids in the future thank you for your consideration of my comments tonight I hope to hear some vigorous discussions about this I'm glad to come back here if you wish to support any of the statements I've made and to show you why what I said here has some foundation to it and why I could ease I could very easily rebut some of the assertions that was made to the process by the mayor and

▶ 22:46 Peter D. Mortimer: and other people that came here thank you thank you sir motion to close public participation mr

▶ 22:49 Speaker 3: president yeah it doesn't appear that anybody else is in the chamber with us this evening alderman mortimer moves to conclude public participation motion is seconded by alderman forbes on the motion all those in favor aye aye anyone opposed motion passes public participation

▶ 23:08 Speaker 3: is hereby concluded for this evening if we could move to uh communications from his honor the mayor

▶ 23:13 Speaker 8: please order number 2017-98 appointment of charles harak 14 country club road to the melrose housing authority to fill the unexpired term of frank gizzo said term to expire on the