This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.
☀️Spring is springing: sunny with highs in the 70s. Sunset will be at 6:44 p.m.
A record share of Boston’s high school seniors graduated last year: 81.3%, according to state data. That’s below the statewide average of 89.3%, but a significant improvement from a decade ago, when it was 70%. The dropout rate last school year was around 9%.
Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper said she thinks the improvement is partly the result of school officials working harder to talk to students who are at risk of dropping out.
“They either had... issues that they couldn’t keep coming [to school], they had to work, or they’re taking care of a parent; lots of different reasons,” Skipper said. “But that means knocking on doors. It also means going into schools that have the highest dropout rates and sitting with students and having those real conversations.” You can read more of Saraya Wintersmith’s reporting on this story here.
Four Things to Know
1. Gov. Maura Healey wants to take a little more gaming tax revenue (tax money from the state’s big casinos, MGM Springfield and Encore Boston Harbor) and use it to promote tourism in Massachusetts. Right now, the Massachusetts Tourism Trust Fund gets about $10 million a year from lodging taxes, plus a share of casino money, and distributes it to various regional tourism councils to use on advertising, business supports and more.
Increasing the share of gaming revenue that goes to tourism from 1% to 2% would mean another $2.5 million for those regional tourism councils. Compare that to the amount of revenue Massachusetts gets from roughly 50 million annual visitors, who spend more than $24 billion on lodging, meals, shopping, entertainment and more. “For a $24 billion industry to be supported with $10 or $12 and a half million, when it produces billions of dollars in tax revenue, we’re wildly underfunded,” said Economic Development Secretary Eric Paley.
2. Developers want to build nine new buildings on a 1.7-million-square-foot piece of land in Boston’s Seaport — 900 apartments and lab space between Summer Street, West First Street, E Street and Pappas Way. They’ve even proposed extending F Street by half a mile to Summer Street, which would allow the MBTA to extend the Silver Line into the area.
But a spokesperson for the MBTA said developers have not actually talked to the transit agency about that idea and said there are no current plans to extend the Silver Line. “The MBTA is always open to collaborating with our municipal partners and stakeholders while exploring ideas to improve service,” a spokesperson said. A storage yard on the land that would be needed to extend F Street has a lease through 2034, so any changes will likely have to wait until then.
3. What’s behind the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s decision to part ways with Music Director Andris Nelsons? It’s not totally clear, Boston Globe music critic A.Z. Madonna told GBH’s Morning Edition. “The reason being given is quite vague: that they’re not aligned on future vision,” Madonna said. “Effectively he’s being fired. They are ending his term as soon as it feasibly could be ended, without the upcoming season, which is already planned, needing to be scrapped.”
Two possible explanations: financial concerns or a desire for someone who will take on a larger public role in Boston. “But none of it seems to be worth throwing out 13 years worth of rapport for musicians on such short notice,” Madonna said. A note for the sake of transparency: CRB Classical 99.5, which is part of GBH, is the radio broadcast partner of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. No one from CRB or the BSO reviewed this coverage prior to publication.
4. The Old North Church (from the Revolutionary War-era “one lantern if by land, two if by sea” story) is preparing to mark 250 years of American independence from British rule with education and storytelling. “It is the story of Paul Revere and the signal lanterns that made the place famous, but we really try to tell the story of the ordinary people who have been there at the church,” said Emily Spence, director of education at Old North Illuminated.
Spence described the church in the 1770s as “united in their faith, but divided in their politics.” About a third of members believed Massachusetts should remain under British rule, a third were in favor of American independence and the rest fell somewhere in the middle. “We imagine that probably made for a pretty tense church service for people, especially in those months leading up to the battles at Lexington and Concord. We’re thinking about that this year, too — what that might have been like for neighbors sitting in church next to one another, next to people who felt very different from them.”
A year after USAID cuts, local groups say impact on humanitarian work has been devastating
In the 365 days after the Trump administration decided to freeze international aid funding through USAID last January, Boston University global health Prof. Brooke Nichols and her colleagues estimate that about 262,915 adults and 518,428 children have died because they did not have access to medical care, vaccines, food and other kinds of support that USAID’s work previously made possible.
“Probably about once a week, I look at those numbers and feel what they mean, and I cry,” Nichols told GBH’s Craig LeMoult. “None of this had to happen. And we made this choice … I’m so surprised that people aren’t more angry, more upset, more outraged.”
And other countries have not stepped in to fund these services, said Fatema Sumar, executive director of the Harvard Center for International Development.
“There were some assumptions last year as we saw what was happening in Washington that if the U.S. were to step back, then others would step up to the plate to partially compensate,” Sumar told LeMoult. “What we now know in 2026 is that is not happening ... What we’re seeing happen is a fundamental reshift and a broader shift of aid now being judged much more by near-term domestic politics and a very transactional foreign policy.”
Dr. Joia Mukherjee, senior clinical and academic advisor for Partners in Health, said it’s about more than death tolls. USAID used to fund testing and treatment kits for malaria. Now that it doesn’t, people come into hospitals in places like Sierra Leone with much more advanced, difficult-to-treat cases of malaria: because medical clinics didn’t have malaria tests and couldn’t confirm their diagnoses, they could not start treatments.
“I saw one child who became blind from very severe malaria, and the child could have been treated easily with no disability at all had they been treated earlier,” Mukherjee told LeMoult. “People can take action … we believe that contacting your representatives does make a difference because they do still care on both sides what their constituents think.”
Find more stories from aid workers LeMoult spoke with here.
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