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John D. O'Bryant School

By adamg - 2/28/24 - 1:37 pm

WBUR reports Mayor Wu and Boston Public Schools have "indefinitely" put on hold plans to rebuild the crumbling former West Roxbury High School into a new state-of-the-art home for the John D. O'Bryant School, after parents, students and teachers raised objections to a school on the side of a swamp about as far away from the rest of the city as one could get.

By adamg - 1/6/24 - 4:08 pm

Madison Park High School and the O'Bryant School, which are next to each other on Malcolm X Boulevard in Roxbury, went into "safe" mode Friday afternoon because of what school officials say was a swatting: Somebody called Boston Police to report somebody was on the grounds of one of the schools with a gun, only when police arrived, they determined it was a hoax. Read more.

By adamg - 12/20/23 - 3:15 pm

A federal appeals court yesterday rejected, again, a bid to block Boston Public Schools from changing its previous grades-and-test-score criteria for admissions to Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy and the O'Bryant School. Read more.

By adamg - 12/6/23 - 4:12 pm

The Boston City Council voted 10-2-1 today to formally oppose BPS's plans to move the O'Bryant School from its current location on Malcolm X Boulevard in Roxbury to a rebuilt West Roxbury Education Complex on VFW Parkway, saying that location, almost in Dedham, is just too far way for many students and that BPS has failed to really take into account the concerns of O'Bryant students, parents and teachers, let alone possible alternatives. Read more.

By adamg - 6/21/23 - 11:04 pm

Parents, teachers and alumni at the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science tonight urged the School Committee to keep the school in Roxbury rather than moving it to distant West Roxbury, while people affiliated with Boston Latin Academy mostly urged the committee to find a new head of school who won't belittle and ignore teachers and students - although some praised and supported current Head of School Gavin Smith. Read more.

By adamg - 6/18/23 - 12:37 pm

Schoolyard News posts an essay by Aparna Lakshmi, an O'Bryant history teacher and Robert Comeau, an O'Bryant English teacher on how the drawbacks of moving their school to a site about as close to the middle of nowhere in Boston as you can get will outweigh the potential benefits of expanded, state-of-the-art classrooms and labs. Read more.

By adamg - 6/17/23 - 10:21 am

Boston Police report arresting a 39-year-old man they say had a fanny pack with a gun loaded with 14 bullets as he prepared to engage in a fistfight in the employee parking lot of the John D. O'Bryant School on Malcolm X Boulevard in Roxbury yesterday afternoon. Read more.

By adamg - 6/6/23 - 12:36 pm

Mayor Wu and School Superintendent today announced a series of high-school moves they say will dramatically increase educational and career opportunities for students at the O'Bryant and Madison Park school and other high schools. Read more.

By adamg - 6/5/23 - 10:56 pm

City Councilor Julia Mejia (at large), said today BPS appears poised to announce it's moving the John D. O'Bryant School of Math and Science from Malcolm X Boulevard in Roxbury to the former West Roxbury Education Complex, next to a swamp on the edge of the city in a building that BPS officials ordered shut in 2019 because, they said at the time, it was filling with mold due to a roof that could not be replaced, atop a structure that looked ready to plunge to the ground. Read more.

By adamg - 6/1/23 - 9:53 am

Boston Police report officers responding to a Shotspotter alert of gunfire outside the O'Bryant School, 55 Malcolm X. Blvd. around 12:45 a.m. on Monday arrested a 14-year-old with a loaded gun - after he allegedly reached for it in his waistband. Read more.

By adamg - 4/11/23 - 9:33 pm

In e-mail tonight, BPS told parents of prospective exam-school students that neither BPS nor an outside auditor initially caught the error at first in the way seventh-grade eligibility is calculated, but that they still expect to send out actual invitations in early May - still on schedule for BPS, but later than other area schools with selection policies. Read more.

By adamg - 1/13/22 - 12:45 pm

The Patriot-Bridge in Charlestown, home to Charlestown High School, which Eliot School parents want to remake as an innovation school reports that parents are now upset because of a BPS plan to penalize their kids 10 points on their GPAs to try to level exam-school admissions across the entire BPS district. Read more.

By adamg - 10/1/21 - 11:57 pm

Yes, three Boston School Committee members got all racist. And, yes, city attorneys screwed up in trying to withhold evidence of racially-tinged texts by two of them from a parents group suing over the way kids got invited to the exam schools this year. But no, the plan used to invite students without exams was not racist, a federal judge ruled today - again. Read more.

By adamg - 7/14/21 - 10:07 pm
School Committee members

School Committee members discussing the new plan.

The Boston School Committee today unanimously approved a new policy for admissions to the city's three exam schools that relies less on a test and more on grades - and on socioeconomic data that will benefit students in public housing, are homeless or attend schools with a high number of poor families. Read more.

By adamg - 7/6/21 - 10:43 pm

A School Committee lawyer argued today that leaving out the "Westie whites" exchange from text messages handed over to the Globe and a woman who turned out to be a secret member of the parents group suing over exam-school admissions was an innocent mistake, not part of some nefarious scheme to hide racial hatred by School Committee members. Read more.

By adamg - 6/23/21 - 10:15 am

The group representing mainly West Roxbury parents that sought to put the exam back in exam schools for the coming school year is asking a federal judge to reopen its case because of "clear racial motivation and anti-White racism" on the part of two School Committee members in text messages exchanged over the course of a nine-hour meeting on what to do about the Covid-19-forced cancellation of exams. Read more.

By adamg - 4/28/21 - 1:59 pm

A federal appeals court today upheld a judge's decision to let Boston Public Schools use a combination of pre-Covid GPAs and Zip codes to determine who is offered admission to the city's three exam schools for the coming school year, saying the plan is fair and the parents who sued waited so long that a ruling in their favor would have caused "chaos" that would disrupt the lives of thousands of Boston families. Read more.

By adamg - 4/16/21 - 9:58 am

A group of White and Asian-American parents are appealing a judge's decision that the Boston School Committee did nothing wrong in the way it came up with a non-exam way to admit students to Boston's three exam schools for the coming school year. Read more.

By adamg - 4/15/21 - 6:51 pm

A federal judge ruled today that the Boston School Committee can proceed with selecting students for the city's three exam schools via a formula based on grade point average and Zip codes, rather than using GPAs and the traditional entrance exams. Read more.

By adamg - 3/3/21 - 11:07 am

A federal judge today held off any action on a bid by a group of White and Asian-American parents to block the way the Boston school system plans to enroll students in the three exam schools until at least March 16 to give the two sides - and lawyers for groups representing Black, Latino and other Asian-American parents - time to try to agree on the basic facts of the case. Read more.

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