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🌤️Some clouds, some sun, and highs in the 70s. Sunset is 8:09 p.m.
Elissa Cadillic has been working for the Boston Public Library for more than three decades, and has acted as the head of the union that represents library assistants, clerks and mechanical personnel since 2005. Last week, library leadership put her on administrative leave because of an issue with paperwork she filed to access family and medical leave.
Cadillic said she has a permanent disability and submitted paperwork for leave in April and May. She said it was “ignored.” “And so, I am asking if it’s retaliation for my protected union activities? Is it an attack on an individual who falls under protected class status?” she said in a statement. The chief steward of another union representing library workers called it “union busting.”
A city spokesperson declined to comment on the case but said that city officials “respect employees’ rights under the FMLA [Family and Medical Leave Act] and to engage in protected union activity, and does not pursue termination on those grounds.” You can read GBH’s Esteban Bustillos’ full coverage of this story here.
Four Things to Know
1. People in the U.S. on work or student visas, as well as those with a host of other legal statuses, will have to leave the country if they want to apply for permanent residence under a new policy. Even then, federal officials said they will only approve such green card applications in rare circumstances. It’s a major change from prior policies, which allowed noncitizens to stay in the U.S. as they waited for their applications to be approved or denied.
Local immigration attorneys said the new policy could have huge implications. “It affects every person within the United States that is seeking adjustment of status. It affects students, it affects temporary protected status holders, it affects business visa holders,” said Boston immigration lawyer Annelise Araujo.
2. Mass. State Department of Transportation officials want to close the street in front of South Station to car traffic on the days of World Cup games, since they expect as many as 20,000 people will be going through the station to get to Foxborough. But the city of Boston is not on board with their plan, with a spokesperson calling it an “inappropriate use of eminent domain to bypass the permitting process for roadways under local jurisdiction.”
Under the state’s plan, Summer Street would be open only to pedestrians from South Station to the Fort Point Channel for 10 hours a day on June 13, 16, 19, 23, 26 and 29, and on July 9. City officials said they worry closing the street to cars would slow commuter traffic.
3. Genealogists working with Harvard released a database of the university’s ties to slavery, which includes 1,600 people whose enslavers worked for the university or who were enslaved on campus. It’s a much longer list than the 70 names of enslaved people Harvard released when it started exploring its ties to slavery in 2022.
“We find that people are intermarrying between families associated with Harvard. It’s a small place at the time,” said Lindsay Fulton, chief research officer at American Ancestors. “And that gives not just genealogists a better understanding of what the world looked like at the time, but this is gonna help other academic fields as well. And I think we’re gonna learn a whole lot [more] about the complexity of families and enslavement in New England than we’ve ever known before.” She told GBH’s All Things Considered more about how she and her colleagues conducted their research.
4. Quincy public schools students will have the day off for Lunar New Year celebrations starting in 2027 after a 6-0 vote from the school committee. Public schools in Lexington and Brookline get the day off too. About a quarter of Quincy residents identify as Asian.
School committee member Tom Leung said that when he was a Quincy Public Schools student, his family would usually have to make Lunar New Year celebrations shorter because he had to go to class. “To now be able to do this for families for arguably the most important holiday in many Asian cultures,” he said. “I’m just so happy for our families and for our students.”
Worcester vs. Worcester: Massachusetts and England’s forgotten soccer matches, 100 years ago
Picture it: It’s the late 1920s, and amateur soccer players from Worcester, Massachusetts (who were local factory workers) and Worcester, England are criss-crossing the Atlantic Ocean to play one another.
“When they’re driven to matches, they send a fleet of cars. They plaster [the areas] with posters saying, ‘Welcome to our visitors in Worcester County,’” British sports historian Dilwyn Porter, a resident of Worcester, England, told GBH’s Sam Turken. “They do play football, but I think the kind of public relations aspect of it is as important.”
The series of matches ended in the 1930s with the Great Depression. And it was almost lost to time: Vanessa Bumpus, director of exhibits at the Museum of Worcester, said she had no record of the games until Turken read Porter’s essay about the games and contacted the museum to ask about it.
“It’s proof that we don’t know everything, even as a museum,” Bumpus said. Do you have any family stories or artifacts from these games? The Museum of Worcester wants to hear from you. “We might be able to make this a bigger story and maybe an exhibit in the future,” Bumpus said. In the meantime, you can read Turken’s full story here.
Dig deeper:
-From the Archives: When Soccer Moms Take the Field and Change Their Lives Forever (2001)
-2026 World Cup in Boston: What to know and how to watch
-Scottish soccer fans aim to skirt World Cup train costs by hiring fleet of school buses
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