A troubled Massachusetts high school where parents and community members called on the National Guard to help restore order was rated “exemplary” in a Harvard University study just 15 years ago, but now families are are evacuating in droves.
Parents are choosing to educate their children at home or moving to another school district rather than having their children face rampant violence on campus.
Brockton High School, a school 40 miles south of Boston, was the subject of a 2009 study that looked at how teachers used their free time to come together to reorganize curriculum and turn things around. was featured in “How to set an example.”
Over the course of nearly a decade, all educators, including physical education teachers, art teachers, and career guidance counselors, developed a system for incorporating reading, writing, conversational skills, and reasoning into their classes and sessions.
By the end of the process, Brockton had grown from a school whose unofficial motto was “Students have the right to fail if they want to” to one of the highest-performing public schools in the country. According to a 2010 New York Times profile.
“People used to come from all over the world to see how we ran large schools and achieved educational outcomes,” said Brockton School of Mathematics. Teacher Cliff Canavan, 22, says: he told the Post. “The world has changed.”
The school’s superintendent said the pandemic has hit Brockton families hard, but blamed the breakdown in discipline on a Massachusetts law that prohibits administrators from suspending students. .
Conditions at Brockton High School, home to 3,600 researchers, were already deteriorating four years ago, when Kyanna Washington’s daughter Kalani was preparing to attend the school.
So rather than bring her daughter into the fray, she pulled her daughter out of public school and educated herself.
“I don’t want my daughter to go there,” Kaina said. “I watched a couple of videos. I didn’t know who was fighting who. And I said to her daughter, ‘You’re not going to this school.'”
“She knows the kids that go there. She sends her best friends there. And the kids get scared. She just wants to get out of school every day,” she added. .
The Washington family is one of them. Brockton has lost nearly 500 students since 2020, and enrollment has declined by about 12%, according to data from the Massachusetts Department of Education.
Public school enrollment across the commonwealth is much smaller than the 3.5% decline.
The number of black students at the school has declined by 15%, while the number of white students has declined by nearly a third. Meanwhile, the number of Hispanic students has increased by 20%.
Canavan, who broke his arm while breaking up a violent fight between two students, has seen the wear and tear unfold in real time.
“I’ve coached girls cross country for 20 years, and the cross country team typically has the most academically capable students. For the past three seasons in a row, half of the varsity athletes have lost because parents transferred their kids. have been lost to other districts.”
Kalani, now 18, echoes her mother’s decision to stay home and not attend Brockton High School.
“The kids were always hostile. That would be the right word, very hostile,” she said.
“It’s hard to be in school and want to study and see your friends. There’s so much drama, so much violence, so much negativity, and besides the violence, there’s also things like drugs.”
Although Kalani does not attend Brockton High School, he said hearing his friends who attend there talk about what they saw in the halls is “nerve-wracking and very anxiety-provoking.”
She said “planned fights” with plans to inflict violence on students on social media had resulted in organized “fighting clubs” where students brawled on and off campus.
Last year, a student was stabbed outside the school, Kalani said. And his friends say blood leftover from fights can sit drying on the hallway floor for weeks.
“People are concerned about the safety of people bringing weapons into schools,” she says.
Brockton Schools Superintendent Mike Thomas, who is on leave this school year due to medical issues, said the current situation is a combination of factors exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on Brockton’s low-income families. I think it was caused by.
“Brockton has been hit hard by the pandemic. Many students’ parents have lost their jobs, which has had a tremendous impact on their children,” he told the Post. “I think a big part of that is that we have students who have a lot of mental health issues, and that’s what causes a lot of the cheating.”
Approximately 70% come from low-income households.
“As we returned to in-person gatherings across the country, I don’t think anyone understood the toll the pandemic took, especially on children,” he said.
“I think that has a direct correlation to what’s going on.”
But Thomas, who was present throughout the rehabilitation process covered in the 2009 study, said the origins of today’s behavioral problems began before the pandemic, with the passage of the Massachusetts Chapter 222 Student Discipline Act in 2012. thinking.
Although the law was intended to make suspension the last resort for disciplining students, it left teachers unable to enforce discipline and provided additional funding to deal with offending students. He complains that there wasn’t one.
“The state enacted this law, but it was never funded,” Thomas said.
He said Chapter 222 only makes sense if it involves funding alternative academic programs for offending students and “gets to the root of why they’re behaving the way they are.” It is possible,” he added.
“I don’t think pulling kids out of school will solve the problem, but there will definitely be consequences,” Thomas said.
“People need to be held accountable, and we need programs…but again, it costs money.”
Discipline issues at Brockton schools received national attention in February when the Brockton School Board asked Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey to deploy the National Guard to increase security and supplement personnel.
Ms Healey’s office rejected the request and instead ordered a state-funded “safety audit” to investigate the school’s problems.
Parents, students and local residents said they were being mobbed and trampled during the scuffles as students rushed to film and post the fights on social media. There are reports of people being injured.
There have also been reports of illegal drug use among students, sex in empty staircases and classrooms, and scuffles outside the school grounds to decide points.
“The challenges facing Brockton High School are nuanced and complex, and the school is making strides every day toward improving its culture,” Brockton Public Schools said in a statement. “What is essential to achieving our goals – there is no true ‘finish line’ but a continuous and eternal effort – is having stable leadership.”
Brockton, Thomas, Canavan and others repeatedly praised the efforts of the majority of students and the dedication of school staff despite the challenges they faced.
In early March, Brockton students beat out national competitors to take first and second place at the World Economic Symposium held at Northeastern University. The school’s drama club will compete against finalists from among 100 schools at the state Educational Drama Guild High School Cultural Festival later this month. Eleven students were recently recognized with Scholastic Art Awards.
Still, these accomplishments don’t change the minds of Washington families. Kalani has a younger sister who is about to enter middle school, and their mother and many of her friends with children the same age are already considering alternatives to Brockton High School.
“The neighbors don’t want their kids to go there,” Kyanna said. “They don’t want their kids to be interested in high school.”
