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☀️Sun’s out, with highs in the 80s. Sunset is at 7:27 p.m.

Yesterday brought some news for Boston Public Schools, the largest K-12 school district in Massachusetts: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu appointed a new member to the school committee. Rachel Skerritt is the former head of Boston Latin School, where she was the first person of color to hold the top job. She now works as chief strategy officer at Attuned Education Partners, an education research consulting company. A graduate of Boston Public Schools, she also has a child entering fourth grade in the city’s system, GBH’s Saraya Wintersmith reports. 

Boston had an elected school committee until 1992, when then-Mayor Ray Flynn made the city the only place in the state where the school committee is appointed, not elected. In 2021 close to 80 percent of voters said they’d want to see the city switch back, but Wu vetoed a City Council plan to do so in 2023 saying she “cannot support legislative changes that would compromise our ability to stabilize and support the Boston Public Schools during this critical period.”

The next few years will hold some big decisions for Boston’s schools: the city plans to close or merge about 20 percent of its schools in the next five years because of low enrollments and funding gaps.

“Funding sources are increasingly unsure and precarious,” Skerritt told Wintersmith. “As we try to define what level of educational experience and the quality of educational experience that we want for every student in Boston, we really need to be thoughtful around where we direct our resources.”

Four Things to Know

1. The state’s biopharma industry group is warning of turbulence affecting the industry: federal funding cuts, FDA staffing shortages that can create delays, less private investment and increased competition from China.

“Uncertainty has replaced cautious optimism,” Kendalle Burlin O’Connell, MassBio’s CEO, said in a report about the state of the industry. “People are out of work, runways are shortening, and patients are still waiting.”

2. Doctors and public health officials in Massachusetts are expecting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to issue recommendations around COVID vaccines that are different from what we’ve seen in previous years, possibly recommending the shots only to older adults or people at high risk for severe cases.

“We cannot predict what the federal government may do and we cannot know how CDC will land in its recommendations,” Dr. Robbie Goldstein, the state’s commissioner of public health, told GBH News. “There are other places we can look to for evidence-based recommendations,” like the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is still suggesting COVID shots for kids older than 6 months. Health insurance companies will likely still cover the vaccines, he said.

3. More than 100 people got together in East Boston this weekend to pray for the release of Carlos Chang Barrios and Catalina “Xochitl” Santiago, two immigrants with Massachusetts ties in federal immigration detention. Barrios, a construction worker who lives in Lawrence, has been in federal immigration detention since July. He came to the US from Guatemala in 2008 and is undocumented.

“Carlos was going to his job. A border patrol trooper detained him. It was nearly three weeks that we couldn’t speak with him because he was denied calls and denied the ability to see his attorney,” said his cousin, Josias Orozco, who GBH is identifying by his middle and last name because he also fears deportation. “Carlos has always been a generous person, very collaborative with the community. In his church he’s always been a person of faith, who gets involved with things at the church.”

4. The legal back-and-forth over $800 million in National Institutes of Health research funding is still ongoing: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can pause the money from flowing to the universities and research institutions it was already allocated to as a lawsuit makes its way through the legal system.

“The broader picture is that the prospect for funding in the next couple of years ... looks like it may be so competitive that, really, most people won’t survive a funding environment of only the top 3% or 4% of submissions could be funded,” said Michael Paasche-Orlow, vice chair for research at the Tufts Medical Center’s Department of Medicine.

Halting wind project threatens power reliability, grid operator says

Revolution Wind, a 65-turbine offshore wind project near Rhode Island, came to a screeching halt on Friday when the Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management ordered it to stop under orders from the Trump administration.

The developer, a company called Ørsted, said 45 of the 65 turbines are installed and ready to go, and the wind farm was expected to go online and send power to grids in Connecticut and Rhode Island next year. The company told the State House News Service that it’s looking into options to get things moving again. 

But the pause has people who watch New England’s power grid concerned.

“Recent heatwaves in New England drove demand for electricity to very high levels and demonstrated that our region needs all generation resources with market obligations to be available to meet demand and maintain required reserves,” a spokesperson for the nonprofit transmission organization ISO New England said. “Beyond near-term impacts to reliability in the summer and winter peak periods, delays in the availability of new resources will adversely affect New England’s economy and industrial growth, including potential future data centers.”

Even if the project resumes without significant delays, this kind of work stoppage sends a message, Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association, said in a statement to the State House News Service.

“It is deeply troubling to see billions of dollars invested, with facilities nearly completed, now placed at risk of failure because of policy reversals,” Dolan wrote. “That undermines reliability, raises costs and damages the credibility of our energy markets. New England needs forward momentum, not abrupt stops that put both consumers and suppliers in a worse position.”

Read the full story here. 

Dig deeper: 

-Are 17 turbines really running at Vineyard Wind? Here’s what we saw by boat

-Nantucket reaches $10.5 million settlement with GE Vernova over shattered wind turbine blade

-States sue Trump administration for blocking the development of wind energy