The Decision
Tajiah Julien-Johnson had a bad day at school last December 20. Normally, students played music as they walked through the doorways at the start of school. This day was different for the junior.
“It was quiet,” she said. “Some teachers called out. It was a depressing day.”
The night before, the Boston School Committee had voted to close Tajiah’s school, West Roxbury Academy, and another school housed in the same building, Urban Science Academy.
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Filmed and edited by Emily Judem.
The closures are a controversial part of BuildBPS, Mayor Marty Walsh’s $1 billion facilities master plan. School committee members, who are appointed by the mayor, approved the school closures with five yes votes and one abstention.
The two schools live in the West Roxbury Education Complex, or WREC, a ‘70s-era building on the VFW Parkway, that the district plans to demolish once the halls and classrooms are empty.
The WREC is a large and imposing brick building, split nearly in half by a tall brown silo. It has two courtyards hidden inside, and skinny lockers the color of blue mouthwash where students store their books. The building looks out over a brand-new artificial turf field, built in 2015.
Boston’s Inspectional Services Department says that the building is crumbling and the structure is not viable past this June. The two schools have seen a collective enrollment decline of around 30 percent since 2015. And the district says the students do not perform well enough on the MCAS to justify preserving the two schools in another building.
“The timing was driven by the emergency of the building closure,” Interim Superintendent Laura Perille said. “But it’s also true that these two high schools in particular had longstanding enrollment declines, [and] also had struggled with very uneven academic performance, and in some cases, true low performance.”
In fact, 90 percent of Urban Science Academy’s students passed the English MCAS last year, compared with only 82 percent of the district. Sixty-two percent passed the math MCAS, slightly less than the 66 percent districtwide.
West Roxbury Academy’s performance in math and science is significantly below the district’s. But, it has improved the proportion of students passing the math MCAS over the last five years, a jump of 13 percentage points.
The two schools’ passing rates for science were significantly lower than the district’s, but Urban Science Academy has improved its science MCAS performance by 18 percentage points over the last five years.
During the 2014-2015 school year, West Roxbury Academy and Urban Science Academy had a total enrollment of 1,056 students. Each year since then has seen a precipitous drop, down to around 740 students this school year.
More than half of those students are economically disadvantaged, and nearly 90 percent are black or Hispanic. There are also about 120 students in the building with various disabilities and special needs, including autism, who are served by specialized programs. Sixty students at the WREC are already off-track to graduate, meaning they’re two or more years behind their peers, and a dozen students have already had to transfer at least once because of a school closure.
The district has become the villain in the eyes of many students, parents and staff. But the high school in West Roxbury has been troubled from the beginning.
Before it was the WREC, it was West Roxbury High School, fraught with controversy from the moment it popped into the public consciousness.
Residents of West Roxbury had been pushing for a high school for years by the time Boston Mayor Kevin White was elected to his second term in 1971. He announced plans for a new high school in the neighborhood — without consulting the school department or the elected school committee. He promised 75 percent of the seats to white residents of West Roxbury.
At various moments, the school looked like it would never open. It had to be wedged into the desegregation plans, and needed state approval and state aid to pay for the cost of construction. When the final desegregation plan emerged in 1975, West Roxbury residents found out they would not be getting their promised seats. They blocked the construction site for days.
"We are not a district of infinite space, nor are we a district of infinite enrollment. And so with those there are hard decisions that have to be made."Laura Perille, Interim Superintendent
The school was haunted by delays and money trouble. The school committee’s first cost estimate was $13 million, but by the first day of school, the price tag had swelled to $21 million.
The school was often caught in a tug of war — at times between the mayor and the elected school committee, and at others between Boston and the state board of education. It was used as leverage to expedite the completion of other projects and was fodder for the mayor in his campaign to put the school department under his control.
Once it was completed in 1976, West Roxbury High faced declining enrollment caused by white flight from the school system. Later, it was divided into four schools, then merged back into two.
Finally, last December, the high school was doomed to closure by the district that fought so hard over its construction.
“We are not a district of infinite resources. We are not a district of infinite space, nor are we a district of infinite enrollment. And so with those, there are hard decisions that have to be made,” said Perille. “I cannot underscore how profoundly aware we have been at every step of how difficult and painful this decision is.”
The Promise
Paul Palmariello remembers eavesdropping on his mother when he was a teenager. She’d talk in the kitchen, or sitting in a chair in the family’s den, and her son would listen to her on the phone with then-mayor Kevin White or members of the city council or the city’s elected school committee.
“I’d be there and, you know, just listen to her on the phone talking to them,” he said. “I can remember answering the phone on several occasions from different people ... and they would always ask for her by her first name.”
Paul’s mother was Janet Palmariello, who would become a vocal opponent of the desegregation plan that bused city children across neighborhoods to meet the requirements of a federal court order.
But before the desegregation order, Janet Palmariello was just a well-connected West Roxbury resident trying to get a high school built in the neighborhood.
In 1970, West Roxbury was 99.2 percent white, and most West Roxbury residents attended nearby Roslindale High School. But the neighborhood wanted its own high school.
“It was a matter of dollar allocation and finding a suitable place where they could actually build a facility that would work,” said Paul Palmariello.
White’s second inauguration in 1972 was quiet and businesslike, lasting exactly 38 minutes. The only applause came after he was sworn in by the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court at 10:12 a.m.
It was at that ceremony that the mayor first publicly promised the residents of the southwest part of the city a new high school.
More than a year later, without consulting the school committee or other leaders of the school department, White announced at a 1973 public meeting the preliminary plans for the new school.
The school committee members were blindsided.
Environmentalists also voiced concerns, as the proposed site was 14 acres on a plot that was partly wetlands. In response, a staff member in the public facilities department said one major at the high school would be “ecology.”
On top of these criticisms, the announcement came during federal court hearings about a plan to desegregate the city’s schools.
Black And White
By the early 1970s, black families in Boston had been trying to desegregate the system for almost a decade. For years, black city residents and the local NAACP had organized boycotts and demonstrations, but the school committee repeatedly denied that the city’s schools were segregated by race.
Then, in 1965, the Massachusetts Board of Education released a report that said the racial disparities in the commonwealth’s schools were harmful. Still, the school committee didn’t budge.
The state legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act later that year, which made it illegal for Massachusetts schools to be segregated by race. The state demanded Boston begin busing students around the district to desegregate the schools, but the committee members did not comply.
Finally, in 1972, 15 black Boston parents and the NAACP filed a federal lawsuit against the school committee, charging members had segregated city schools in violation of the Constitution.
Two years later, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of the U.S. District Court in Boston ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. He wrote that the school committee “knowingly carried out a systematic program of segregation affecting all of the city’s students, teachers, and school facilities.”
Garrity first ruled that the city had to implement a busing plan created by the state’s board of education. Later on, for “Phase II” of the city’s desegregation efforts, a group of district staffers from the Education Planning Center was responsible for generating a plan that was to be approved by the school committee and submitted to Judge Garrity.
The first phase of the desegregation plan, handed down by the state board of education, included information about which schools would draw residents from which neighborhoods.
Part of the plan would make English High School, then in the Longwood area, a district school, drawing students from Roxbury, West Roxbury, Roslindale and Jamaica Plain.
According to school leaders at English, opening a high school in West Roxbury would destroy the racial balance there within two years, since the new high school would also pull white students from West Roxbury. The proposed West Roxbury High School was slated to have 1,200 seats, and Mayor White had promised 900 of those for white students and 300 for students of color.
By the time White was suggesting construction of the new school, the state desegregation plan had already gone through hearings throughout the spring. It included analysis of enrollment and capacity, districting patterns by race, bus travel and grade configuration.
An April 1973 version of the racial imbalance plan from the state makes no mention of West Roxbury High School, and in fact, explicitly says that “no district high schools exist for Roxbury or West Roxbury.”
In early August, the mayor began a game of Tetris, trying to fit the new school into the state’s desegregation plan. White’s insertion of West Roxbury High School into the plan was, at the very least, inconvenient, and at the most, a serious threat to not only state funding for West Roxbury High, but also the $1.9 million in federal desegregation aid.
He enlisted the help of the city’s public facilities director, Robert Vey, who asked for changes to the state’s plan for English High, so it wouldn’t pull white students from West Roxbury.
If the new West Roxbury school stood in conflict with the desegregation order, it would be ineligible for aid from the state to help pay for construction. And if the changes to the state desegregation plan weren’t made in time, the high school, according to the mayor’s education advisor, was “dead.”
The mayor also faced pushback from the elected school committee, which now had to navigate a difficult political decision.
If the school committee agreed with the mayor, it would be accused of sabotaging the racial balance plan. If it declined to make the changes White sought, the committee would be attacked by the residents of West Roxbury for blocking their long-desired high school.
Plus, four out of the five committee members were running for reelection, and White had already begun a campaign to give the mayor control over the city’s schools.
In mid-August of 1973, the school committee members and the mayor had a private meeting. They struck a deal — in exchange for the school committee supporting White’s plan for West Roxbury High School, White promised to look into $5 million to cover pay raises for the members of the committee, according to news reports at the time.
The committee agreed on a $13 million budget and planned to build the school on the wetlands site on Veteran of Foreign Wars Parkway in West Roxbury.
West Roxbury High was baked into the city’s plan and became central to the viability of Boston’s trembling school system — and crucial to its compliance with a federal desegregation order.
More Money, More Problems
From 1973 to 1974, the price estimate for West Roxbury High School’s construction had jumped to $14.9 million. Then, when the city finally bid the 1,200-seat school, the lowest bid was $17.3 million.
The school needed additional state approval to award the contract at a higher cost.
West Roxbury High and two other high schools were a package deal to win the necessary state aid for construction. The plan wouldn’t work without all three, and the state demanded that all the schools be completed by September of 1975 — even though Boston had previously announced in a progress report that West Roxbury High School wouldn’t be ready before January 1976.
The city and state began to ready other options. The school committee told reporters students might attend classes in places like the Bayside Mall shopping center in Columbia Point and UMass Boston if the schools were not completed.
By December 18, 1974, the cost estimate for West Roxbury High School had ballooned to $21 million, plus $9 million in interest. Finally, Gregory Anrig, the state education commissioner, and Mayor White decided to meet to discuss the West Roxbury project.
White wanted state approval of the cost increase, and Anrig wanted assurances that the West Roxbury construction wouldn’t jeopardize the construction of another high school, Madison Park, which had been on the city’s planning board for 15 years.
Then, a few months later, school desegregation experts appointed by Judge Garrity broke some bad news to Mayor White: He would not be allowed to reserve 900 seats for white students, as promised to the West Roxbury residents. Instead, as few as 230 out of 1,250 seats would be allocated to white children.
Not only would more West Roxbury High School seats go to residents of color, but Garrity’s changes to the plan would cost an additional $6 to $7 million in busing expenses. For White, this added a new challenge to the West Roxbury project: protests and demonstrations.
The Dissent
On a Monday in late April 1975, Jaqueline Petrillo checked into Faulkner Hospital in Jamaica Plain after being struck by a construction vehicle.
Petrillo claimed she had been injured by a worker’s car while blocking the entrance to the West Roxbury High construction site. But one of the six police officers at the site disputed her account, saying she “fell down in front” of the vehicle.
It was partly-cloudy and 50 degrees, but that hadn’t stopped around 30 demonstrators, including Petrillo, from showing up for the third day in a row at the site. The demonstrators were from ROAR, “Restore Our Alienated Rights,” and their spokeswoman was Janet Palmariello, who died in 2014.
“We’ll be out there every day until the mayor comes out to the site,” Palmariello vowed before the crowd. “The mayor came out in April of 1973 to sell us the school, and we bought it on his promise that 900 of our children would be allowed to attend.”
Her son, Paul, remembers those days.
“That was a very difficult time for a lot of people, I think,” he said. “She didn’t want her kids to travel ... you know, ‘Why am I sending my child halfway across the city of Boston when there’s a school that’s less than a mile away from my home?’”
In late April, a woman was arrested for disorderly conduct during one of the construction site protests.
“I think most people just don’t like to be told, ‘This is what you have to do,’” he said. “I think that it just stirred up a lot of feelings and emotions that got out of hand.”
Those feelings and emotions sowed seeds that would grow roots around the high school, thickening and tightening each year.
In 1979, three years after West Roxbury High opened, the city published a report that said the high school was looking at an enrollment decline of 40 percent over the next five years.
"I think that it just stirred up a lot of feelings and emotions that got out of hand."Paul Palmariello, son of demonstrator Janet Palmariello
“As in other areas of the city, the high parochial and private school attendance of the past has contributed to the rapid decline in projected school enrollment,” the report stated.
Forty percent of white students district wide were shunning their neighborhood schools in favor of whiter citywide public schools. West Roxbury High School was struggling as a result.
The upside: The building itself was in good repair and didn’t need capital improvements, according to the report.
Brick And Mortar
In December of 2018, Boston Public Schools declared that the West Roxbury Education Complex had “so deteriorated that it is not a viable option for a school building beyond this year.”
In particular, department officials have cited the condition of the roof, masonry and windows as causes for concern. Inspectional Services says that before emergency repairs were completed last summer, the masonry capstone on the top of the building was in danger of collapse, and water damage may have compromised the electrical systems.
The district cites deferred maintenance, and the city’s Inspectional Services Department claims there are issues with many of the ’70s-era buildings in the district.
“The most concerning issues with the building stem from the condition of the roof, which vastly and quickly deteriorated over the last couple of years,” said John Hanlon, chief of operations for the district. “The building has been struggling with windows that are beyond repair at this point, along with some masonry challenges. And it was the totality of all that, again led by the condition of the roof, which caused the unfortunate recommendation to close the facility after this school year.”
For Constance Glaser Kantar, the impending demolition has a special significance. Her father was Samuel Glaser, the architect who designed West Roxbury High.
Her father also designed the Star Market over the Massachusetts Turnpike in Newtonville, the John F. Kennedy Federal Building and the Government Center Garage. Kantar said he understood the importance of the building amid the city’s desegregation efforts.
“He, as a Jewish person, was definitely in the minority in his community in Newton at that time,” she said. “There were many restrictions on Jewish boys and girls… You knew that you were a minority.”
Kantar said the building was meant to incorporate the natural environment, the controversial swamp on which it was built. The windows that plague the building today were an intentional element of Glaser’s design.
“My dad was very interested in bringing the outside ... in, and that meant a visual opportunity to be able to look outside and to see the green trees and flowers and grass, and the snow in the winter and all of that,” she said. “But it may be the feeling is that it’s just easier to knock it down and start again.”
The First Day
In 1976, on the first day of school at the brand-new West Roxbury High School, U.S. marshals, police officers, parents, transitional aides, workers from the Department of Youth Activities, TV camera operators, reporters and 1,053 out of the 1,476 assigned students showed up to school.
The new school, including a lighted football field, a tennis court and an Olympic-sized swimming pool, was plopped on 50 acres sandwiched between St. Joseph’s Cemetery and the VFW Parkway drive-in.
There were 600 freshmen, and almost the entirety of the rest of the students were comprised of the previous year’s ninth-, tenth- and eleventh-graders from Roslindale High, which was slated for closure.
The new headmaster was Don Burgess, the former head of Roslindale High School.
“Look around you,” he told the students before sending them off to their first class. “You see what you have. Take care of it, please, okay?”
LaWanda Woumnm was supposed to go to Roslindale High for her senior year, but some of her friends had been assigned to West Roxbury. So, in 1976, she got on the bus headed there on the first day of school and “never looked back.”
“I was so happy,” she said. “It was all brand new... It had more than two floors, and we could look out and we could see far, and we felt accepted. We felt wanted. That’s what I felt. And I could finally sit and get an education and I could actually learn something.”
"You see what you have. Take care of it, please, okay?"Don Burgess, former head of Roslindale High School
Woumnm is a black woman who grew up in Mattapan. She says the first year of busing as a part of the desegregation plan was “the scariest” and “most horrible” year of her schooling.
“We dealt with the people looking at us, and being prepared, standing out on the porch. We were a sight to behold for them, I guess,” she said. “That was also the year where we were exposed to having Molotov cocktails thrown at us at the bus. We were being called all kinds of names. We were being taunted. We were being made to feel like we weren’t wanted.”
By the time Woumnm entered her senior year at West Roxbury High School, things had calmed down.
“We had field trips, so we were able to go out and explore the city and do different things. It was fun to be able to have time set aside where we could actually go in and speak with the dean... We didn’t have that in the past,” she said. “It made us feel like they wanted to talk to us or they wanted to let us know what we could do with our lives.”
Despite the earlier trauma, Woumnm said she feels positively about the city’s desegregation efforts and spoke fondly of her time at West Roxbury High.
“When I drive through say Mission Hill or Roxbury, South End, Lower Mills, Dorchester and even Mattapan, I see a mixed group of people,” she said. “A couple of decades ago you would not have seen that.”
Diane Palombi, a white woman, was president of the senior class that included Woumnm. She remembers the same excitement on the first day of school.
“We went into an air-conditioned building. There was an escalator, a pool, a football field, all things that Roslindale High lacked,” she said. “I remember how many of us were just going up and down the escalator, which is silly in today’s world, but what a novelty that was.”
Palombi’s memories of her senior year at West Roxbury are bittersweet. She says planning events was difficult because of the racial tension in the city.
“Trying to find a place where prom would be safe and acceptable was difficult. There were certain towns that you couldn’t have prom in, that the African-Americans wouldn’t feel safe to go to, and tensions were still high enough in the city that you wouldn’t want to do that,” she said. “Everything I think just took a lot longer, and you had to have much more respect for what everything meant to all people in the school.”
Palombi has already said her goodbyes to the old West Roxbury High School. Since she graduated, the school has been chopped up and put back together, like a mosaic of broken pottery.
In the fall of 2004, then-Superintendent Thomas Payzant came up with a plan to break up the city’s large high schools into smaller, autonomous schools. The school committee approved the plan, cushioned by $22 million in grants, mainly from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The project became known as the “small schools” initiative and aimed to shrink class sizes in the city’s high schools from around 30 students to 20.
West Roxbury High School was renamed the West Roxbury Education Complex and sliced into four schools each with its own theme: Urban Science Academy, Parkway Academy of Technology and Health, Media Communications Technology High School, and Brook Farm Business and Service Career Academy.
“When it went to the [four] schools in one... part of it was already gone,” Palombi said. “It wasn’t the school that I knew, so it’s been a gradual change and loss.”
From the first moment, the small schools initiative was riddled with issues, like administrators forgetting to file the paperwork required to compete in postseason athletic tournaments.
Most importantly, the district had paid to hire additional headmasters for the small schools, and the Gates Foundation money did not last forever.
"It wasn't the school that I knew, so it's been a gradual change and loss."Diane Palombi, senior class president of West Roxbury High School’s first graduating class
Allison Doherty, a teacher at Urban Science Academy, has been in the building since 1989, when she started as a paraprofessional. Since then, she’s created a diploma program at the school for students on the autism spectrum and has taught special education.
“I couldn’t even keep track of the schools anymore,” she said. “It ended up costing more, because you went from one headmaster to four headmasters [and] eight assistant headmasters... It was a very bad decision. And we knew it wasn’t sustainable.”
By 2010, the district was anticipating a $63 million shortfall. In December of that year, the school committee voted unanimously to close or merge 18 schools. One of the mergers would affect West Roxbury Education Complex, which would morph to become two schools, Urban Science Academy and West Roxbury Academy.
That 2010 school committee meeting for the vote lasted four hours, and the crowd booed and heckled then-Superintendent Carol Johnson as she tried to justify the closures and mergers. School bus drivers came to the meeting to try to save their jobs.
The downsizing was an effort to cut the costs for 5,600 empty classroom seats across the city, reducing excess capacity by about 25 percent and saving $10 million.
Public commenters asked the same question again and again: Where was Mayor Thomas M. Menino to defend the closures and mergers to his constituents?
A similar question echoed during this winter’s school committee meetings, when the West Roxbury Education Complex suited up for its last public fight. Students and teachers packed the Bolling Municipal Building in protest, many of them in tears, many of them asking for Mayor Marty Walsh.
Walsh declined to be interviewed for this story, but wrote in a statement that “the decision to close a school will never be an easy or a favorable one....It is our intention to honor the calls for more investments in our school system by investing in new learning facilities that will better serve our students in the long-term.”
Boston School Committee Chair Michael Loconto and the two headmasters at the WREC also declined to be interviewed. Regina Robinson, the lone abstention on the school committee, did not respond to an interview request.
This will be the second time Tajiah is transferring because of a school closure. She says her experiences have stamped out her faith in the system.
“I will not be sending my kids to a Boston public school when I get older, because I just feel like [students] get treated like the lowest of the low,” she said. “I just want everything to be over with, you know? The best thing ever would be my diploma in my hands and me walking across the stage.”
Last winter, the Boston School Committee listened as speaker after speaker testified about the community feel, support and special programs at the WREC. The one abstaining vote, Regina Robinson, was not reappointed to the committee by Mayor Walsh. And West Roxbury Education Complex steeled itself against the wrecking ball, one last battle fought and lost.
Lisa Williams and Kaitlyn Locke contributed reporting to this story.
Our coverage of K-12 education is made possible with support from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. More from WGBH’s Learning Curve Team.