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Stakeholders in Holyoke discuss more details of plans for exiting receivership

State and local officials, including Holyoke Public Schools Receiver/Superintendent Anthony Soto (center right, at podium) and various school committee members, formally announced the district's provisional exit from receivership Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024 - a day after the state announced its decision.
James Paleologopoulos
/
WAMC
State and local officials, including Holyoke Public Schools Receiver/Superintendent Anthony Soto (center right, at podium) and various school committee members, formally announced the district's provisional exit from receivership Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024 - a day after the state announced its decision.

With a provisional decision in hand, local leaders gathered in Holyoke to celebrate the local school district coming closer than ever to exiting receivership.

“… I stand here today, in front of you, with so much pride - to be here in our moment in history, here in the city, as well as the history here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Mayor Joshua Garcia said to a group of state and city officials Wednesday.

Garcia, along with Receiver/Superintendent Anthony Soto and acting state education commissioner Dr. Russell Johnston, were on the other side of the state Tuesday when the Healey administration and Department of Elementary and Secondary Education announced that, effective July 1, Holyoke Public Schools will be overseen again by the city and school committee after a decade under receivership.

The move needs to be finalized by Johnston and it's contingent on a few things happening beforehand.

“We had a lot of reconciliation across our district to understand the challenges that are impacting our youth, to understand how we make decisions as a government for our youth, and the impact that those decisions, or no decisions, has on our kids' ability to learn and progress within our school district,” Garcia added.

The formal announcement in Holyoke Wednesday was held at the William G. Morgan School: a pre-K-5 school that, according to Garcia, entered receivership before the entire district did in 2015 due to chronic underperformance.

Almost ten years later, school committee members were shaking poms-poms in celebration, while also acknowledging the development is not a done deal, with plenty of work left to do.

Saying she was overjoyed by the state's decision, School Committee Ward 7 Representative Ellie Wilson was one of several to note she and the rest of the committee must be trained to take back the reins.

 “I would say it's building our capacity, because we haven't had that local control,” Wilson told WAMC, referencing the capacity building plan passed in August with feedback from DESE. “We haven't been in the depths of working on budgeting. While we've been shared that information, we haven't been in the process of being able to say, ‘This is where we feel the money needs to be going towards. This is the efforts we want to focus on in this next year coming up,’ and so that, I think, is one of the largest pieces that we are learning about, and we are starting to work on.”

Ward 5 Representative John Whelihan, who was on the committee when Holyoke first went into receivership, says the move grants the city of over 38,000 a rare chance to start anew.

“I just want to try to just reaffirm that this is a new beginning - we still have work to do in terms of parental involvement, in terms of attendance from our students, so I think … this is like a reset,” he said.

Ward 3 Representative Dr. Yadilette Rivera Colon, who heads the subcommittee behind the capacity building plan, tells WAMC there are also the hurdles that will come as soon as they regain local control.

“I think that, one of the things that the community keeps asking about, and we were asked about today, is ‘what's going to happen next,’ right?” she said. “As soon as we're out of receivership, in the same exact minute, we need to have our next superintendent, and that's going to be one of the biggest hurdles moving forward - what the decisions are going to be towards that, when we're going to start the process and getting the capacity building to make sure that it's a fair and equitable process, and that we're doing it in a way that the people of Holyoke knows about it as well.”

The capacity building plan and the training that comes with it are slated to continue during the current school year.

The provisional decision also comes after years of turnaround efforts at HPS – leading to improved school infrastructure, rising graduation rates and more resources for the district’s large English learning student population.

In a letter to Garcia and Soto, Johnston says while the new systems, practices and programs have not yet “produced sustained academic gains in state assessment data,” local leaders have developed strategies for further improvement.

Johnston will also continue to keep tabs on the school committee and its progress, with more collaboration anticipated.

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