Starting this fall, admissions to technical and vocational schools with waitlists in Massachusetts will turn into a lottery.
The state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted 8-2 to push forward the new admissions rules Tuesday. But the new lottery system could still be altered or abandoned depending on negotiations playing out among lawmakers on Beacon Hill.
Patrick Tutwiler, who leads the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, urged board members to approve the change.
“We want a future where every student has a chance to discover their strengths, follow their interests, and build a meaningful path forward,” said Tutwiler. “[We] are committed to all students having equitable access to career technical education.”
Most vocational schools currently consider a student’s grades, attendance, behavior and interest in the program.
The lottery system would toss those factors aside and give the school district discretion to use a non-weighted lottery or a weighted lottery using a variation of four criteria: student awareness, interest, attendance and discipline.
The plan changes come after years of growth at the state’s 28 regional vocational and technical schools, which educate about 30,000 students. Last year, about 42% of the roughly 20,000 applicants were denied admission because of lack of space, according to the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Backers told the board the changes will improve access for marginalized students who were overlooked under the old admissions system that focused on academic performance.
“This is a crucial step toward ensuring equity and dismantling long-standing exclusionary practices,” said Jacqueline Monterroso, the Massachusetts director of policy and advocacy at the nonprofit Latinos for Education. “Selective admissions based on grades, attendance and disciplinary records have disproportionately excluded low-income students, students of color, disabled students and English learners, leading to unjustified and ongoing disparities in vocational school admissions.”
Board member Martin West voted to approve the change.
“I think that we have arrived at a compromise that does some important things,” West said. “It continues to send a signal that attendance and positive behavior matter. It ensures students know what they are choosing when they’re applying to a CTE [career and technical education] school. It enables them to enhance their probability of admission by demonstrating interest.”
Michael Moriarty is one of two board members who voted against the change. He argued that, instead of overhauling the admissions system, districts that fail to equitably admit students should be singled out and punished by state entities like the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
“I would prefer to see the Legislature take this up, or to see DESE reorganize itself so that it could more effectively find specific districts that are acting egregiously and address that with the full force of the state agency on hand,” Moriarty said.
Some educators aren’t happy with the switch. Scott Keeler, an instructor at Nashoba Valley Technical High School in Westford, is worried about the message it sends if grades won’t matter in admissions.
“Eliminating grades tells students they do not need to try, and as a teacher and a parent, this is deeply concerning,” Keeler said. “Admissions policies for vocational schools currently in place are rooted in common sense and directly support the unique mission of vocational education.”
Those changes could be paused, though, if the Legislature decides to act. The House added language into its budget that would prevent DESE from making changes to vocational schools’ admissions policies for the 2025-2026 school year and 2026-2027 admissions cycle. During that pause, a new state task force would study and make recommendations on vocational school admissions, with a report due by Sept. 15, 2026.
The Senate dropped similar language from its version of the budget, but a handful of Republican-backed amendments would add at least portions of it back in. Meanwhile, Leominster Democrat Sen. John Cronin filed an amendment that would have the Senate stake out a different stance — his proposal would prohibit the state education department from awarding certain grant funding “to vocational school districts that discriminate against protected classes of applicants and economically disadvantaged applicants, by using selective admissions criteria to rank order applicants.”
Closed-door negotiations between the House and the Senate would ultimately determine if the final spending bill addresses vocational school admissions at all.
