The Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics produced this video to support its proposals to rejigger school-assignment zones for elementary and middle-school students: If you totaled up all the miles students in the Bowdoin/Geneva area travel to school each morning, it would be the equivalent of a trip from Boston to Cheyenne, WY (the city has used Bowdoin/Geneva as its poster child for its proposals throughout the current evaluation process).
What the brief video doesn't mention, however, is that the city plans to turn one of the neighborhood's schools, the Marshall Elementary, into a privately run charter school, open to students from across the city, which means the city will have to bus many of its students, and which means one less local option for Bowdoin/Geneva parents.
Teresa Harvey, retiring Marshall principal, tears into school officials at a School Committee meeting over the conversion to a charter school:
Boston School Choice [2] - Background on proposals to change school-assignment zones.