Musically I think they’re onto something special: Kate Bush and DEVO hanging out in Peewee’s Playhouse with a modular system they lifted from Tangerine Dream’s tour bus. Gotta check out this live set they put up recently if that tickles your craw. Feels like the sort of band we’ll be looking back on in a few years saying I cannot believe we saw them in a 300-cap venue.

Getting this out then hitting the road. Nothing too crazy this week but a few things that are pretty funny: the specialized stretch code drama especially, but other smaller dramas and odities, like the following report from the esteemed Standing Committee on Economic Development, put in the hands of Freshman Councilor Satya Mitra by Mayor Joseph M. Petty.

Yes, you read that right. The chairman of economic development is asking the city manager to print out the train schedule for him... Brother... the city manager is not a search engine. Here problem solved: Worcester Framingham Line Schedule.

Before we get any further, a major announcement for those of you who do not listen to the podcast or open the emails: we’re doing a live event on Friday May 8—one year to the day since the Eureka Street ICE raid that changed the city forever. It’ll be a “live podcast” with a really stellar roster of guests (full lineup to be announced ahead of the event). We’re doing it at Hunchback Gallery, Travis Duda’s wonderful warehouse hub for the dark arts of the Worcester Underground at the capital building of that micro-community (75 Webster Street). Check out this stellar flyer Katie drew up for us!

Since space is limited and we want to have the ability to deny assholes entry, we’re doing tickets. You can get them here . Think of it like a way to reserve your seat (figuratively, mind you, we don’t have, like, usher money) and also kick LUCE some money. All proceeds are going straight there once collected. And LUCE will be part of the event in one way or another! Hopefully two ways! Still working out a lot of details. Stay tuned I’ll be plenty annoying about it over the next week and a half.

The through-line of the night will be two general questions: what did we learn about power in this city from Eureka Street and the subsequent months of fallout? And what can we do with that knowledge to make our community stronger?

If you have thoughts on that, we’d love to hear from you, and they may make the show! I’ve set up a secure virtual phone number where you can leave a voicemail, and I’m going to stitch together some of the best ones to be played at the event.

The Outdoor Cats Secure Tip Line number is 508-205-9520 or you can send a voice memo to outdoorcats@sudomail.com. A written reflection is not as good but I will take it! Same email address. Can’t wait to hear from you!

Exciting!

The whole thing came out of a conversation I was having with Etel Haxhiaj and Kevin Ksen about something related a few weeks ago, and all of us going you know we really should do something to mark the occasion. And then I remembered that Chris and I publicly committed to doing a live show at some point so... here we are! Fun fun! Haven’t put on an event in a while I do enjoy it quite a bit.

And grab a ticket if you want to come! Right now!

Also this is a good time to quickly ask that you consider helping support this little outlet that could! Always free to read, never free to produce. Reader funding is 100 percent of our business model such as it is.

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Innovators in the do-nothing sector

In the newest Harpers, the lead column takes to task our country’s sick little billionaire fetish. “Billionaire Blues” by Thomas Frank. The following segment is worth reading in full.

There is an enormous body of literature considering the social arrangements a country needs to guarantee innovation and hence progress and prosperity. In-deed, the huge political changes of the Seventies and Eighties that made our current oligarchy possible were enacted in order to revive our entrepreneurial spirits. So of course some argue that we just haven’t gone far enough in our long campaign of “billionaire positivity,” to use Matthew Yglesias’s felicitous phrase. Our captains of industry, they say, should be accorded even more earthly power. In order to coax more creativity from them, there will need to be a complete cessation of antitrust enforcement, perhaps, or an allowance for private governance zones where our titans can innovate and exploit without interference from the bane of labor laws.

I am no innovation consultant, but to me that all seems completely and obviously backward. The branches of innovation at which modern-day, billionaire-positive America excels most remarkably are things like bailouts, monopo-lies, executive compensation, luxury-home design, and fraud. Especially fraud. From the president on down, the United States is home to the world’s greatest innovators in fraud, endlessly cranking out new models of stock market hype, toxic securities, bogus bond ratings, and fake inventions. We develop amazing new forms of insider trading; of make believe currencies; of junk fees and dynamic pricing. We dream up self-serving ideologies that everyone momentarily believes. Forms of populism that strengthen the ruling class and forms of antipopulism that strengthen it even more. These things have made America a kind of Renaissance Florence of fraud, a civilization in which everyone wants to become a billionaire by way of some creative new rip-off.

And it occurred to me this “innovation in all the wrong areas” theory finds purchase in our little municipal Petri dish. It’s present in the way the political class has seized onto the YIMBY idea of “just build more housing” as a way to mask its do-nothing response to the housing crisis, which, as I broke down in my last post, revolves around a willfully misportrayed document called the Housing Production Plan. The YIMBY philosophy is well-meaning but necessarily carries with it a neoliberal framework of cities in competition, a race to deregulate harder than the guy next door. It’s the tacit, if uncomfortable, underpinning of the Abundance message.

The innovation on display here is how to co-opt that rhetoric in service of an explicitly deregulatory agenda. The way to solve the housing crisis, our city and state officials say, is to bend as far backwards as we can for real estate speculators, offering maximum incentives and demanding minimal concessions, so as to inspire a supply-side solution to a simple market imbalance. Then, eventually—fingers crossed!—rents will come down. Kindergarten crayon portrait of supply and demand. Conveniently, this is the same approach they were taking before the crisis became something they had to acknowledge, when they were aiding and abetting it with full throat and open heart. Now, we’re made to swallow the idea that what brought on the speculative bubble will also pop it.

More innovative still, they’ve laundered this trickle down theory through something that sounds like a planning document but is a consultant-produced real estate industry brief (the housing plan) to wrap all the deregulatory posturing in the veneer of a plan. When they say “we need 12,000 more units of housing by 2030” or whatever, that’s what they’re doing. Deregulation presented as responsible planning, a compliance document invented for suburbs to wiggle out of affordable housing presented as the guiding light toward more of it.

That’s how Joe Petty goofily “clarified,” via a MassLive article the other day, how he told Progressive Massachusetts he was in favor of rent control to get their endorsement ahead of the election last year, then came out against it a few weeks ago as part of a mayor-based PR stunt put on by the real estate lobby and their rent control opposition campaign.

“I never said it was for rent control,” Petty said about his answer. “I did say that I want the state to bring people together from the business side and the community side to come up with a solution. Because it’s not lost on me that rent is very expensive.”

For the record, he wrote “yes” on a yes-or-no question about supporting rent control. But the fact he’s lying in the above quote isn’t what makes it interesting. It’s how he uses “bring people together” to mean nothing and everything at the same time, allowing the status quo to proceed unaltered. He knows it means “I will not support any alteration to the current arrangement,” at a frequency that only the speculator class can really hear, and to everyone else it’s either inaudible or unintelligible. Just words. That’s why he says it. Another innovation!

Later in the story, he’s quoted saying the people who need help are the developers, actually.

“I think the short-term one is making sure we get these developers there,” Petty said when asked about short-term relief. “We have 1,200 (housing units) that are ready to go and altogether, 2,500 on the books in different stages.”

And that does what exactly for my rent?

The real magic of this innovation is they never have to answer that question, punting by way of a passing reference to “supply and demand,” as if the conclusion is self evident and sufficient.

Hold onto this innovation in doing nothing idea as we move into a breakdown of the SNAFU over the “specialized stretch code” and Moe Bergman’s ongoing meltdown about it.

A quick timeline:

Two years ago, the council, including Moe Bergman, voted to adopt a “specialized stretch code” for new construction—a relatively dry and innocuous environmental regulation mandating new construction meets modern energy efficiency standards.

Last month, Bergman advocated, apropos nothing, for a “pause” in that specialized stretch code, claiming some developers found it onerous. Bergman is a real estate attorney, remember. All of a sudden the Chamber of Commerce set started going on the assault about the burdensome nature of this regulation no one else was talking about.

As if in keeping with a plan laid out privately (that would be crazy), the Chamber’s campaign was answered by the city manager. A few weeks ago City Manager Eric Batista recommended a pause, repeating the claims made by Bergman and the Chamber of Commerce set in a memo to city council.

At the city council meeting a few days later, the majority of councilors got behind the idea it was the stretch code that was to blame for the development slowdown. But Khrystian King held it to the next meeting, laying out a set of unanswered questions. Gary Rosen tried to bully him into taking the hold back. It didn’t work.

On Monday, a coalition of environmental and housing experts and advocates held a press conference about the need to keep the regulation. Then, on the same afternoon, City Manager Eric Batista issued a terse decree via Twitter that the stretch code is staying actually.

In an advance story on this surprise reversal as it headed to the council, the Telegram got Moe Bergman’s reaction.

Of the code, he said, “It’s unfair and unproductive to expect developers to spend considerable resources on getting products to comply and long wait times. It doesn’t help create new [housing] units.”

Ahhhh there it is again! Ding ding ding. Bergman employing Petty’s innovation on YIMBY rhetoric to position deregulation as benevolence. It’s particularly gross to see Bergman do this, as he’s long been the staunchest, most vocal, and most reactionary proponent of single family zoning, at a time when the one thing that would actually help create new housing units is zoning reform. The large swaths of the city walled off from increased density by single family zoning restrictions need to be pried open, and the perception that multi-family housing compromises the ‘character of the neighborhood’ needs to be challenged in the public discourse and ignored by city planners. Bergman will vote against anything that even sniffs of zoning reform. He will stoke the reactionary panic that single family zoning is under attack. He’s made that clear over the years.

You cannot claim to care about the housing crisis while also being a single family zoning absolutist. But here Bergman is, in the Telegram, talking about what will “help” create housing and what won’t. Kindergarten Republican, registered Massachusetts Democrat.

But anyway back to the timeline. At the meeting Tuesday, Bergman had a meltdown. In the middle of that meltdown, he articulated the whole game they’re playing rather bluntly.

Now we’re stuck with something for the next year and a half that none of us or I don’t believe I shouldn’t say none of us I don’t believe benefits anyone because if our goal is to develop more units that is going to be impeded by the specialized stretch code we have to put Worcester in a place Mr. Chairman where developers look at Worcester differently than other communities and say Worcester has something that other communities don’t have. Being one of 19 or so communities that have adopted the specialized stretch code my opinion not only isn’t going to get us the interest from the developers that the other 351 minus 19 communities are going to get without having the specialized stretch code.

There it is, the cities-in-competition framework. The race to the bottom it forces the municipality into entering. What I like most about Bergman’s blunt articulation of this logic is the “if” in front of “if our goal is to develop more housing units.” While in context it was just a turn of phrase Bergman employed for aesthetic purposes—to sound lawyerly, as Bergman often does, putting a bit too much mustard on the hot dog if you ask me—it happens to be the best question asked last night. Is our goal to develop more housing units? Is it really? If it is, there are hundreds of better discussions to be had than this one environmental regulation. So, Occam’s Razor, I’m inclined to believe this whole thing about the stretch code has nothing at all to do with housing. Bergman, all worked up and embarrassed by the state saying the city can’t do his little pause, came the closest to saying out loud that it isn’t. And toward the end of his second rant, he almost spilled all the beans.

“I’m going to be extra vigilant particularly when it comes to a couple departments, not every department in the city, when the information is presented to me by what I perceive is to be people that might be more activists than policy makers.”

Ah now we’re getting closer to telling the truth! That maybe just maybe this whole fracas over the stretch code is just the same old culture war bullshit the city council is always engaged in, looking for any little way they can to dick down on the left for the sake of it.

Maybe next time, Moe, you’ll find a way to do so that doesn’t end in your own public humiliation. Better luck next time, bud.

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Toomey says chickens are inequitable

Mastermind that she is, Kate Toomey tried to argue her opposition to chickens was a stance rooted in drum roll equity. Only middle to upper class people have the “yardage” she said to keep chickens, whereas those in the “inner city” will, due to their cramped conditions, keep chickens unsafely, inviting disease into these inner city communities. That’s me being generous with the paraphrasing by the way. The real quote is much worse:

“For me the biggest issue is equity. The majority of people who have the yardage and, and the land, and the ability and to, to have the space and, uh, for these chickens... And most people who are living in the inner city do not have that.”

You can watch what she actually said via this little clip show I made. It gets spicy when Luis Ojeda rightly objects to Toomey’s assessment of who can and cannot keep a chicken coop.

And it ends in a shouting match when Toomey gets up to say she objects to being called racist, when neither King nor Ojeda said that, though they certainly could have and they would have been right in doing so.

This, by the way, is Toomey trying and failing where Petty succeeds, to innovate in the space of doing nothing besides what you were already doing and portraying it as responsible and/or benevolent.

“My heart breaks for people,” she said, padding her equity argument against chickens and you’re left to wonder who she meant.

For more on this, Giselle Rivera-Flores has a great breakdown of this moment in her Hispanic-ish newsletter: “When A Correction Becomes An Accusation”

The misuse of equity language can make exclusion sound reasonable. When someone says, “This is not an equity issue,” they are not automatically accusing anyone of racism. They may simply be correcting the use of a term that has a real meaning. They may be pointing out that equity cannot be used as a reason to deny a community access to something that responds to a real barrier, harm, or need. Equity is not a way to say, “If everyone cannot have it in the exact same way, then no one should have it at all.” Equity asks us to look honestly at who is impacted, what barriers exist, and what fairness would actually require.

Fund The DPW!!

My fellow Fund The DPW heads rise up! And read this line of a report on snow and ice removal filed by DPW Commissioner John Westerling.

In particular I’m looking at the line...

“These expectations have not been matched by corresponding increases in staffing levels, fleet capacity, or other operational resources.”

...and I’m thinking to myself hmmm what is the one notably over-resourced department. You know where I’m going with this, dear reader. But shhhh. That’s between us. We should know by now there’s no good can come from saying it directly. Anyone asks, you say “some light restructuring in other departments.” But the emphasis: Fund The DPW, baby. One day, when we’ve wrested the city from the greasy palms of the developer class we’ll have the best DPW in the nation—we’ll have the strike team from “The Shield” but for potholes, we’ll have parks to rival real cities, rewilding initiatives of the kind they have in Europe, real forward-thinking non-reactive infrastructure improvements all over the place. We’ll finally put a few cracks in Lurie’s Dome. And yeah there will be some reductions elsewhere, but they were made for sake of efficiency. Like good little neoliberal boys and girls, we targeted redundancies. We streamlined.

The present moment, in which every week the city council is essentially a five hour grievance-airing on the subject of minute flaws in public infrastructure, includes very little talk of how to give the DPW “what they need.” It is insane. The present reality is insane, in this way among others. We have crime at a historic low and—ohp. There I go. Breaking my own rule.

Odds and Ends

Thank you for reading! Please consider throwing us a couple bucks if you like what we do here, if you learned something, if you left knowing more about the city than when you arrived. It’s free to read but not free to produce, as rent has not yet been abolished.

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Anyone watching season two of “Beef” on Netflix? Kicks ass. The synth work in the score and the loser washed up musician jokes throughout the script are both tremendous, hitting extremely close to home.

We talked about it on the most recent podcast but I’ll add it again because it’s so good: the whippet squirrel at Big Y, courtesy Reddit user Cerimeadar…

Decades from now this image will be a prerequisite study for photography students across the world. Gahd damn.

One more plug to get your tickets for the Friday May 8 live Outdoor Cats event!! And hit the tip line with your Eureka Street thoughts and observations. The Outdoor Cats Secure Tip Line number is 508-205-9520 or you can send a voice memo to outdoorcats@sudomail.com. A written reflection is not as good but I will take it! Same email address.

Ok to Boston now!

Happy spring! Hope you had a restful April vacation. Before we start I wanted to give a quick plug for an unofficial middle school enrollment guide I put out earlier this month. This month’s WPS in Brief covers key topics from two school committee meetings and two subcommittee meetings.

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Let’s get to it:

Redistricting.

The district is now in its third month of a formal redistricting process aimed at better aligning school boundaries. Two community forums were held this month (April 15 and 27), and a few key takeaways stood out:

Worcester experienced 20% population growth from 2000–2020, and that growth was spread across the city rather than concentrated in one area. Looking ahead, most future growth is expected to be among older adults (50+). At the same time, school enrollment has been declining. Over the past decade, the district has seen a 2.7% overall drop in enrollment and a 10% decline in kindergarten. Schools in the Burncoat quadrant saw the steepest kindergarten decline at 20%, while schools in the Doherty quadrant saw the smallest decrease at 3%.

Above you can see a slide from the forum that shows the percentage of enrollment change over the last ten years, with Burncoat being the only quadrant seeing a decline and no growth. The area with the largest enrollment growth (in the middle of the map on the right) is also high poverty, with 83-94% of students designated as low income.

Currently, 20% of elementary students attend a school outside of their assigned zone (this is students under voluntary transfer, and does not include those in magnet or hub programs). That’s 23% of Burncoat elementary students and 24% of North quadrant elementary students, versus 16% of South and Doherty quadrant students. Complicating matters further, not all elementary schools feed into the same middle or high schools, and some elementary zones are not geographically contiguous. As an example, outlined in yellow is the zone for City View Elementary:

I highly recommend reviewing the FAQs, which address many of the questions raised at recent forums or through the survey. (If you haven’t already, please complete the WPS Realignment Initial Input Survey. It’s open through May 15.) I’ve been asked to serve on the working group as a parent representative, so definitely reach out if you have comments or concerns. There are also two upcoming virtual forums that will cover school capacity and utilization, school-level trends, and travel time:

• Tuesday, May 5, 2026 (5:30–6:30 PM): Community Forum #4 (virtual)

• Wednesday, May 13, 2026 (7:00–8:30 PM): Spanish-language Community Forum (virtual)

These will be the final meetings before initial redistricting scenarios are presented to the School Committee in June. Then there will be more community forums in August, September and October to learn about the scenarios and offer feedback, with a tentative final school committee vote taking place in November for implementation in the 2026-2027 school year.

New Elementary Math Curriculum Approved.

The school committee authorized the purchase of a six-year contract for a new elementary math curriculum, Reveal Math, not to exceed $3.2 million. The district says the new curriculum would provide more consistent instruction across schools, stronger support for multilingual learners, more opportunities for discourse and problem solving, and better alignment with grades 7–12, which have been using Reveal since last fall. District leaders feel that because teachers have been heavily supplementing the current curriculum, students are not receiving the same learning experience across classrooms. They have also pointed to the fact that Reveal is already being used in grades 7 through Algebra 2, saying a K–6 adoption would improve K–12 “vertical alignment.” (I was not able to find examples of other Massachusetts districts using the same math curriculum across K–12.) They also used this rationale to say it’s an “extension” of a current curriculum in use, rather than a new curriculum, which appears to be a way to get around following best practices for selecting a new curriculum. (For comparison, here’s an example of what another district did in its curriculum choosing process.)

The district also outlined a yearlong implementation plan intended to support the transition. Math Curriculum Specialist Heather Farrington said elementary curriculum maps would be updated by mid-May, followed by district onboarding in early June and several days of training for teachers. That training will take place during the school day, with teachers pulled from classrooms, meaning lost instructional time for students.

Questions remain about both the process and the timing of the change. Elementary teachers did not pilot the curriculum, and it was not clear how they were involved in the selection process. The teachers’ union was also not informed until the proposal appeared on the School Committee agenda. At the same time, district data reportedly shows that midyear math performance across grades 1–9 is currently the highest it has been since Worcester began using the Star assessment. Curriculum changes at this scale carry some risk. When teachers are learning a new program, instruction is less consistent at first, which is normal, but can impact students. The district is only in its third year of implementing a new ELA curriculum, and many teachers are finally becoming comfortable with it; adding another large-scale change raises legitimate concerns about capacity and implementation. A district needs teacher buy-in, family buy-in, and a clear plan to support the transition. Moving forward, Sue Mailman (at-large) requested a report for a more clear curriculum review cycle, which is a best practice standard in Massachusetts (see here, here, and here as examples). It’s surprising that Worcester doesn’t already do this.

Autism Program Updates.

One of this month’s Report of the Superintendent was on Autism program updates. The focus was on the SAIL program, which stands for Specialized Approaches to Individual Learning, and is in four hub schools in each quadrant. Reporter Jesse Collings covered it well in the Telegram, so it’s worth checking out there (Links: Telegram, Apple News, WPL).

¡Elementary Libraries!

If you’ve been reading me for a while you know that, as the child of a library para, school libraries are close to my heart. And as a member of the Worcester Elementary School Library Coalition, we have been working hard to advocate for libraries to be reinstated in elementary schools (for background on libraries in WPS read this) I’m excited to share that at a recent subcommittee meeting the district informed the committee that 7 elementary schools will now be using the 4th or 5th prep periods to provide elementary students with regular access to library services. The schools are:

• Belmont Street Community School

• Flagg Street School

• Gates Lane School

• Nelson Place School

• Norrback Avenue School

• Quinsigamond Elementary School

• Worcester Dual Language Magnet School

Right now a handful of elementary school libraries have been functioning mostly because of parent and community volunteers (who were recognized at the April 16 school committee meeting), and it takes a lot of commitment. This is an important step for making sure students have equitable access to books, literacy support, and spaces that foster a lifelong love of learning. Check out more about the Worcester Elementary School Library Coalition here.

Middle School Grading Policy Change.

There was a report on the progress of the high school grading change to “mastery based grading” and an update on the roll out for middle school which is planned for the 2026-2027 school year. The goal is for grading practices to reflect “understanding over task completion, encouraging deeper engagement and skill development” and to “ensure grades reflect learning, not external challenges.”The school committee originally approved the updated policy as a pilot at the high school level, and it’s not clear if this report was a formal approval of the policy for the middle school level.

Culture and climate program updates.

The second Report of the Superintendent this month was on the culture and climate wellness rooms. The rooms are in Worcester’s middle schools and high schools and are generally used as a space for students to take a break or get academic support. Again, Jesse Collings covered it well in the Telegram, so it’s worth checking out there (links: Telegram, WPL, Apple News).

Middle School Sports Grant.

The School Committee approved a $50,000 grant from the PlayBall Foundation to support middle school athletics, funding four spring sports–baseball, softball, and boys’ and girls’ soccer–across five schools. The money will cover uniforms, equipment, transportation, and coaching stipends. Jermaine Johnson (district F) asked whether the grant would expand offerings or simply offset existing costs; North Quadrant Executive Director Kareem Tatum said it will add teams, particularly in soccer, while baseball and softball may start as clinics due to lower student interest.

What’s Behind Alex Guardiola’s Energy Infrastructure Push?

Alex Guardiola (district D) published a bizarre op-ed in the Telegram arguing that investing in energy infrastructure is essential to improving student learning. He points to school closures during heat waves and the possibility of students spending nights in cold homes due to grid failures as evidence, ultimately concluding that “investing in modern infrastructure is not just an energy issue, it is an education imperative.” (links: Telegram, WPL, Apple News)

But that argument is quite the leap. In Worcester, if a student is in a cold home, it’s far more likely due to not being able to pay heating bills than a widespread grid failure. And when schools close during heat waves, it’s not because of energy infrastructure, it’s because most WPS school buildings lack air conditioning, period.

Reading the piece, it’s hard not to ask: who is Guardiola writing this for? He runs his own consulting and lobbying firm, yet he is not registered as a lobbyist with the state, has not publicly disclosed his clients, and he also has no conflicts of interest on file with the City of Worcester, aside from attending WooSox opening day. Transparency is something he often emphasizes on the School Committee floor, but this op-ed sure leaves you wondering.

Upcoming Dates.

All school committee meetings have virtual options with Spanish translation. See the school committee site for more information.

• May 5: School Boundary and Quadrant Alignment Forum, 5:30pm (virtual)

• May 6: 2026-2027 budget released

• May 7: School Committee Meeting, 5:30pm at City Hall

• May 13: School Boundary and Quadrant Alignment Forum in Spanish, 7pm (virtual)

• May 13: Burncoat Building Project Community Visioning Input Session, 6pm at Burncoat High

• May 18: Operations and Governance Meeting, 5pm at Durkin Administration Building

• May 20: Finance Meeting, 5:30 pm at Durkin Administration Building

• May 21: School Committee Meeting, 5:30pm at City hall

• May 28: Teaching, Learning and Student Supports Meeting, 5pm at at Durkin Administration Building

• May 28: Public Budget Hearing, 6pm at Durkin Administration Building

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Also.

You may have seen the news article in early April about an AI-generated photo of Auburn student prompts police investigation and the Globe story, “He made a fake nude of his middle school classmate. Nothing Happened.” Even elementary students in Worcester have access to AI image generation through Canva (and the district touted its use by kindergartners in a press release). As much as I hope the safeguards put on AI image generation keep our kids safe in school, it leaves me really uneasy. The Worcester Families for Safe Technology group is holding a community meeting on Wednesday, April 29 to have a conversation about AI and Technology in WPS. Hope to see you there!

Thanks for reading. I hope these briefs are helping you stay informed without feeling overwhelmed. If they are, please consider a paid subscription or a tip to support the dozens of hours of work it takes me to put these together. See you next month!

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Look at this awesome flyer the lovely Katie Nowicki whipped up for us!

As the title suggests we’ll be looking back on a year of fallout after the ICE raid on Eureka Street that opened a new chapter in local politics—one where the bad guys started being a little more honest, let’s say. But we’ll save all that for the event! There’s a stacked bill coming together as we speak. Do not sleep on getting tickets as I imagine this will fill out pretty fast. Ticket link one more time.

In today’s show we cover a wide range of topics in no particular order: Big day for the correspondents. ICE has been back. Joe Petty’s flim-flam on rent control. Look out for the whippit squirrel at Big Y

As always please consider supporting this outlet so we can keep doing all the cool stuff we do! It is not, unfortunately, free to make. It takes a lot of time and in the present circumstances time is money.

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Intro by Bill Shaner 4.26.26

Outro: “Early Morning” by Takumi Yoneyama off “Relaxation Music For Your Computer Life” (1997)

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Dear Shaun,

My brother puts Michael Jackson and R. Kelly on playlists for parties. He can separate the art from the artist but apparently I can’t. Please tell him that it is not okay to put those songs on. Should I stay on my high horse and go dance in the mud with him?

-Remix to Ignition

Dear Remix to Ignition,

Recently I was in Fort Myers, Florida for a wedding. There were a lot of intense “this is a different part of the country” things that happened. Right after we got there we went to the beach and within minutes of being there, the DJ at the outdoor bar and beach area stopped his Top 40 hits to just play the National Anthem. The entire beach within ear shot of these speakers stopped what they were doing and put their hands over their heart and stood still. It was this solemn and jarring happenstance. My friends and I did not know what to do. I don’t think I have respected the National Anthem playing since I was in middle school. We didn’t put our hands over our hearts, but we did stop still and practically play Patriotic Possum. When the song ended, the DJ went right back into The Eagles or whatever, the volleyball game continued and people continued drinking their frozen drinks. We all stayed still, unsure of how to proceed.

Eventually we ate some tacos, got a beer and put our feet into the Gulf of America (Mexico). I started to lean into the absurdity of the experience. I bought a “Gulf of America” shirt actually, which is full of typos and grammatical oddities. I also started saying “hell yeah, brother” to every man that walked by. No one found it ironic and no one kicked my ass. One of us wanted some more food and we sat down at a Margaritaville spin-off restaurant. Next door was an outdoor pool and DJ set-up. That DJ may have been playing your brother’s playlist. We heard Kanye, we heard R. Kelly, we heard Michael Jackson, we heard Chris Brown and if we stayed any longer we were convinced we were going to hear “Anthem of the German Republic” with a hip-hop beat. The vibes were immaculate in the pool, and absolutely sour at our table.

I really was envious of the people at the pool. I was envious of the DJ. I was envious of everyone enjoying themselves and not thinking beyond the base-level of happiness. As far as those folks sipping a daquiri while on a floaty flamingo, “Gold Digger” is just a song they loved to dance to in high school. They weren’t thinking about Kanye’s current behavior and antisemitism. They were thinking about their old crush and what they are up to now. That’s what music can do for us. They can bring back sensory memories and nostalgia. I was envious of their ignorance.

Let your brother play his music. He is ignorant. You know what, you should play it too. Let’s all stop having a conscience. Let’s ignore the brutalities of the world. Let’s reward those who don’t give a fuck. It seems to be working for a lot of folks. Why can’t we lean into it? These folks have victims and we shouldn’t care. We should just worry about having a good time, for us, right here right now. Let’s dance ‘til our feet bleed. Now, please remove your caps and stand for our National Anthem.

NEWS

Friday (tonight) I am on a show that is truly unique. The only way for me to really explain it is for you to just show up and watch. It is at The Hotel Vernon and it is called The Made Up Show. It is hosted by Nate Hanet and features a ton of Worcester-based talent. It is at 8PM.

Saturday we have Casey Crawford headlining at Hunchback Gallery. Casey has been seen on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and has a new album out, “Joke Writer.” If you love dumb one liners that are actually incredibly smart and self-deprecating you’re going to want to come to this show. Grab your tickets here!

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Today we’re talking housing.

As an amuse-bouche, let’s head up I-190 toward one of Worcester’s two beautiful step sisters, and read a real-life headline out of Leominster a few days ago: “Homeless man arrested for stealing beef jerky, chili, and Snickers from Leominster Walmart”

In painfully acute fashion (the Walmart loss prevention specialist’s first name appears, giving the character a Buckley-like quality), the arrest of a homeless man for shoplifting what was obviously the evening’s dinner is described in the sort of detail you’d only get from reading the raw arrest report, which the reporter in question apparently FOIA’d for, for some reason. It includes the man’s full name, which for a minor crime like shoplifting is in my opinion both shitty on a moral level and inexcusable journalistic malpractice. Also there’s a weird qualifier right after the lede…

(The account and quotations in this article were sourced from the printed Personnel Narrative of Officer Michael Dingman for the incident and do not reflect any political perspective or personal opinion of News Link Live, which is strictly a business entity.)

Uhhh… ok. ‘I have absolutely zero opinions about this thing I and I alone went out of my way, to the point of a legal public records request, to publish.’ Sure.

The story does paint a valuable portrait of just how hard the cop in question worked on behalf of Walmart, in public-private communion with Travis the Walmart loss prevention specialist, to solve this “crime.” He tracked down the man, opened his backpack, compared the wares inside to the security footage provided by Travis the loss prevention specialist. Put him in cuffs. Took him to the station. Did the paperwork for charges that will make the man’s life harder in perpetuity all but ensuring he shoplifts again—job security right there for Officer Dingman if you really think about it, as this is the task he apparently spends his time doing, which definitely makes the community safer. (Also, lmao re: “Officer Dingman.” Mike Judge would approve.)

Officer Dingman stated that he opened [NAME]’s bag at Walmart and found unopened food items belonging to the store, including two bags of beef jerky valued at $30.76, three cans of chili valued at $9.51, and three bags of Snickers valued at $23.64.

“The total of the stolen merchandise was $63.91,” Officer Dingman said. Later adding, “I gave those items back to Walmart…I radioed Officer Zylyftari that [NAME] was under arrest at this time.”

Two bags of Walmart beef jerky costs $30 and I am supposed to believe Walmart is the victim here?

The layers of spiritual rot informing this ~police action~ and the subsequent decision to assign it news value… it’s hard not to hate it here. I’ll leave it at that. On to the task at hand.

First, consider supporting an outlet that would never ever fucking write that story and has the full freedom to call out an outlet that does…

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Joe finally showed us who he is

The running criticism I’ve kept of Lifelong Mayor Joseph M. Petty has been at odds with the sentiment of the public at large. I know I’m not alone in that. In fact we ran a whole guest piece on the issue last August from the esteemed local writer Brett Iarabino: “How do we make the anti-Petty case to well-meaning liberals?”. In that piece Brett does a nice job capturing the weird disconnect between the national and the local informing the stock opinion of Mayor Petty.

As I thought about Eric Batista’s press release commending WPD’s presence and his outright lie that there was no collusion between the department and ICE, I began a chant at the Common. It was as much a warning to the chair of the council that handpicked Batista’s ascension to the City Manager role as it was an invitation for every Worcester resident repulsed by Eureka Street to turn their outrage into action. To my pleasant surprise, it picked up quite a bit of steam: “VOTE PETTY OUT! VOTE PETTY OUT! VOTE PETTY OUT!” It rippled through the crowd, briefly getting in the way of a speaker (sorry, 50501), and causing a white woman in her 60s or 70s standing right in front of me to shoot back some serious daggers.

I had a feeling my chant would ruffle feathers—anyone who’s served fourteen consecutive terms of governance in a small pond like ours would surely have a wide sphere of influence. And something told me that there was a Venn diagram between that circle and the crowds that frequently show up to rage against an abuse of power at the national level, one they believe is perpetrated exclusively by the far right. Sure enough, after the chant ran its course, this attendee staring at me set down her anti-ICE sign to inform me that she happens to know and like Mayor Petty. She said she finds him to be a great guy; she knows for a fact that he is “in fumes” over what the Trump Administration is up to, and he actually adopted children from China. (It’s not immediately clear what this had to do with the conversation, but she felt compelled to throw it in there, so why do her the disservice of a misquote?)

Most people, if they know a thing about him, know that he’s a nice guy. That he showed up for this one thing one time and shook everyone’s hand. That his heart is in the right place or something like that. That he’s a Democrat and thus one of the good guys. He can be, and largely is, all of those things. But he is at the end of the day attendant to a coalition of speculators who see the city not as a home or a community but rather an abstract sort of financial mine.

The interests of the regular Worcester people he shakes hands with and the speculators he truly serves come into particularly direct conflict on the matter of rents. The main engine of the speculation machine, but also one of the most widely felt pain points of his public-facing constituency. Questions of where he’d land were answered last week when he brazenly threw up the banner of the speculator class, appearing next to 11 other mayors opposing rent control in an April 15 press release disseminated by the deceptively named “Housing For Massachusetts” campaign—an entity created and thus far entirely funded by the real estate lobby to oppose the very same measure. The release, right in the lead, said these mayors have “joined” the anti-rent control campaign. As we’ll get to, Petty joined that campaign a long time ago. But signing on to this press release was, for Petty, an exceptionally brazen fuck you.

For those who do not know, there is a ballot question initiative on track to make it for November that would ask residents to pass the state’s first rent control measure since banning it back during the Clinton years. The year 1994, to be exact, same year they signed the North American Free Trade Agreement and in doing so killed Worcester’s manufacturing output for good. Since, the runaway train of free market fundamentalism that NAFTA rode in on kept picking up speed, kicking up new ways to financialize everything to the point where now we’re made to believe the only sort of housing projects that are at all feasible are bougey-branded wood frame all-in-one boxes put on one super block with an equally-sized parking garage on a second super block, financed by investors who expect a windfall return and the only way to provide that to them is exorbitant rents. The previously unprecedented rent prices encourage the landlords of other smaller and older wood frame boxes to try and get the same. And all of a sudden you’re looking at an artificial surge in the value of a crappy two bedroom apartment, with no consumer choice on offer to counteract it because unlike buying a different brand of soda you have to radically upend your life to exercise your consumer choice in where you live.

It’s a bubble like any other bubble but it can’t pop like the other ones because homes are fundamentally not a commodity. People are not rational market actors when they sign a lease because they’re not buying a thing among other things in a thing store. The concept of “home” cannot be priced and tracked like a carton of eggs. Rents, set on vibes in the first place, stay high. There is no countervailing force the consumer can exercise, short of a collective action to astroturf a market perception that a neighborhood is dangerous. (I am so down, by the way, and with shotspotter it’s never been easier). There is no incentive for developers to overbuild and every incentive for them to collude in controlling the supply-demand balance. And short of a state intervening in that practice there’s nothing to stop them from doing so. It’s their land, after all. So the rents only ever go up. This becomes a major problem when wages don’t keep up with rents in the going-up-forever department. Exactly the situation we are in right now, as the free market has proven very adept at depressing labor value at the same time as it juices land value.

So the need for a state intervention is obvious. The market left to its own devices has produced a housing crisis. People across the state are more cost burdened by rents than ever and the only new construction is on the luxury end, producing the trickle-down socioeconomic turnover outward from the central node (Boston, in our case) we call gentrification. It’s destroying communities first of all, the main thing, and second of all it’s bad for the industry these jokers claim to want: the labor pool leaves when working class people are priced out of a community. Cue the hospital on Nantucket that had to build its own worker housing just to keep the thing running.

A state functioning as a state would find its role in this moment obvious. It would build the housing needed directly, competing with the equity firms and other profiteers who drove us to this point. The state can, has, and should build housing. In other parts of the world, even some select parts of the United States, it does. But our state does not function as a state so much as a captured state—one that sees itself as an attendant facilitator of development rather than the entity that uhhhh governs development, mitigates its impact, generally presumes to have a handle on the shape of growth. In lieu of a strong state that can make developers compete for land parcels, the state competes with other states to “not lose” development by selling off the company store. This is a nice racket for the development community. It makes a lot of money for anonymous yacht owners and island-visitors and industry disruptors. For the state bureaucrats who prove themselves useful, there are a few cushy ‘jobs in the private sector’ waiting for them—a revolving door based on the cultivating and trading on loyalty. Hey Siri what’s the definition of a cartel?

Ed Augustus for instance was the lead author of the Polar Park deal on the city side, and now serves as CEO of Unibank, one of the three banks that put up the financing for the Madison Properties development package around Polar Park that, Augustus famously said at the time, would make the park pay for itself. Of course the park is no longer paying for itself, a fact well known when Augustus left his job as head of housing policy for the state to work at a bank vested in the deal he authored, and that gets paid back first on said investment no matter who’s paying. For the city Augustus was representing ostensibly when he authored the deal, the inverse is true. The services and jobs it provides city residents are the final bag holder in the whole deal, the largest and most vulnerable of course being the public schools. This is a good example of how to prove yourself useful to the not-a-cartel.

Those left in the public sector, from the governor on down to Mayor Joe Petty, are trying to make us swallow the line that deregulation = salvation. Like insecure lovers we’re told our sticking up for ourselves will cause the developers to leave, and then it’ll get worse. Abuser logic! And logic that our mayor, city manager, and actual mayor (Tim Murray) all trade in, unabashedly. The Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce is, of course, a member of the anti-rent control coalition. Batista, by nature of his debt to Petty as the man who unilaterally made the decision to hire him, is functionally a member as well.

The rent control measure on the way to the ballot would cap rent increases at 5 percent annual or the increase of the consumer price index, whichever number is smaller, and it exempts public housing authorities and small rental buildings like triple deckers (less than five units). It’s not radical in any way, it’s just an actual state intervention and we’ve been conditioned to believe that it’s impossible for the state to intervene.

Anyone surprised by Petty’s early public anti-rent control stance should consider it an entry point to understanding the true contours of Petty’s coalition, his politics, his worldview. He’s the nice-enough-shows-up-to-everything-remembers-your-name-how’s-your-mother guy and he’s hostile as a political entity to the interests of most working people in this city. Call it a product of his political nurturing: he’s going to side with the real estate lobby, the developers and the police at every turn that matters. That’s his coalition. Their interests are opposite to our interests. Their definition of the city is not our definition. Their claim to the right to said city comes necessarily at the forfeiture of ours. The old renter-rentier divide. Simple as that. The only thing interesting about Petty in this moment is he’s saying it out loud, whereas in the past he’d have tried harder to obfuscate it. That he’s no longer bothering is refreshing, I think. It would be nice if these people stopped lying to us so much. But, then again, the coalition he joined has the name Housing for Massachusetts, a cynical and condescending framing that fits nicely into a both-sides news story, that tees up a guy like Joe to say things like hey look we’re all after the same thing here. But we’re not—that’s the root lie.

Our ability to live comfortably in this city interferes with their fiduciary responsibility to extract from it. So long as that fiduciary responsibility animates power, the people who live here will always necessarily find their concerns to be, at best, secondary.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about, from Petty’s campaign contribution data, courtesy what looks like some sort of campaign event on July 9, 2025 of the “invite only” variety.

In which we see a run of attorneys, state bureaucrats (turned banking executives), lobbyists, developers, the financiers of lobbyists, the heads of public private development partnerships and their paid political consultants. This is a representative sample of Petty’s entire career. His bread, as they say, is buttered by the diffuse, blob-like consortium of “interested parties” we might call the “developer community.” The ML Strategies donation toward the top of the screenshot is a good point on which to extrapolate out, into the blob. The organization is a registered lobbyist in Massachusetts, and state records show it has done work on behalf of everyone’s favorite local company Charter Spectrum, as well as Trinity Financial (also in the above screenshot) and WinnCompanies, a large Boston area developer caught up in the Real Page rent fixing scandal that also just so happens—this is a crazy coincidence!—to employ former City Manager Mike O’Brien in its executive suite. The blob in action.

The blob stands to lose money if the state suddenly rediscovers its ability to intervene in the housing market on behalf of its struggling residents—something that hasn’t happened since before I was alive, or before someone who’s 10 years older than me was alive now that you mention it... The blob has done a very good job keeping its good friend the state hooked on a steady supply of free market fundamentalism. It is rightly worried that, should the state come down just once, and feel the clarity of sobriety, it might want to get clean. Another way to think of it is they’re acting like Wormtongue when Gandalf shows up.

Pick your metaphor, but expect the media market to be awash in this powerful “free enterprise” narcotic. It will appear as much in the allegedly objective news stories and nightly spots as it will in the paid advertisements. It will all be, to a word, utter bullshit.

So here’s what Petty actually said in the anti-rent control campaign’s release…

“In the housing plan we laid out in 2025, we found that Worcester needs to create 12,000 new homes by 2033 to keep up with demand. In other places with rent control policies, it has been found to discourage the production of new homes. Worcester cannot afford any additional barriers to housing creation.”

His choice of “afford” here is particularly cynical or stupid depending on the credit you’re willing to give the man.

What Worcester can afford apparently has no consideration of what Worcester residents can afford… because 52 percent of Worcester renters can’t afford what they’re currently paying. They’re (we’re) considered cost burdened, that is: we spend more than 30 percent of our income on rent. Of that 52 percent, half are “extremely cost burdened,” meaning they spend more than half of their income on rent. I myself am rapidly on the way from burdened to extremely burdened. I’m sure there’s a good percentage of the people reading this in the same boat.

So what does “afford,” the way Joe uses it, even mean? The cynical answer is “as close to nothing as possible.” And that just so happens to be the recommendations made by the firm that put together this “housing production plan” that Petty and Batista treat as gospel.

The firm’s name is RKG Associates and on their website they advertise a range of housing-related consultancy work for the public and private sector alike. One particularly honest pitch reads:

RKG has conducted hundreds of residential market studies for communities across the country helping our clients identify their market potential and how best to position land and building assets to capture additional demand for residential and mixed use development.

Housing Production Plans are a state compliance document, and since every town needs one, they’re a source of steady work for the RKGs of the world. They are not the future-looking gospel of benevolent city planning that Petty and Batista make them out to be. They are a concession offered by the state to communities that want more power to reject affordable housing proposals under the 40b statute. (The most nauseating classism I’ve ever seen was in my time covering Ashland and Holliston for the MetroWest Daily News, observing the way “40b” was cast in their localized discourse to a position of obvious villainy—that which will obviously destroy the town.) The housing production plan, if submitted and certified by the state, grants the municipality more power to say no to development proposals. That is the reason why the “housing production plan” exists. It’s like how developers don’t have to actually build affordable units if they just kick some money into the city’s housing trust fund. The plan has to show they’ve got 10 percent of their housing stock falling under the loose definition of “affordable” set by HUD, or else they have to prove they’re trying.

In a city like Worcester, where more than 10 percent of the stock already organically meets the criteria of affordable, the housing production plan is a redundant measure of bureaucratic compliance. So why do Petty and Batista elevate it so much in their rhetoric? Perhaps they do so on the bet that no one who’s not already in on the game will bother to look into what a housing production plan actually is, they just hear it and check out.

Perhaps they do that because they had the thing drafted by the real estate lobby for the real estate community. The firm advertises that their housing production plans go the extra mile: where the state is only looking for baseline information on affordable stock, they throw in a supply and demand analysis. Pay attention to the “as well as” clause in this next bit of advertising literature.

When Petty said Worcester “needs” to meet this goal and “cannot afford” not to, he is harkening back to this special add on—what amounts to a real estate industry brief slapped onto an otherwise dry compliance document that lawyerly types use to protect their gated communities in lawyerly fashion.

That the brief is then used by local officials as a cudgel against any attempt to intervene in the market on behalf of renters is, you have to imagine, part of the appeal. It takes an inherently Reaganist trickle down argument and wraps it in the veneer of responsible stewardship. It isn’t naked deregulation for the benefit of a rentier class, it’s following the plan. Because the consultant goes unmentioned, the presence of the rentier class is obscured in the public facing premise of the “housing production plan” city officials are offering. Instead, it’s implied the document is a product of local government in action—a strategy democratically arrived at that holds the citizens of the city as its prime concern. But it just isn’t. And these city officials, either already rentiers themselves or on their way there, (look at where Augustus and O’Brien landed), know that. At least they should know that. And so there’s Joe in the Globe, talking about the housing production plan and how Worcester can’t “afford” to get in the way of it, and he either knows that he’s lying or he’s regurgitating the lie he’s been told. Doesn’t much matter which one. The result is the same.

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For further reading, some good responses from the Worcester Affordable Housing Coalition, Councilor Khrystian King, past and hopefully future council candidate Keith Linhares.

Odds and ends

That’s all I had for ya today. Like I said up top, please consider supporting this outlet we need just a few people stepping up to contribute to keep me from freaking out.

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Good stuff from This Week In Worcester: “The Worcester City Council Circles the Drain; Pt. 1”

Good story on working at a tax center over at Flaming Hydra.

Kate Wagner on the defining architecture of the Trump Admin being warehouses converted to ICE detention is the best thing I’ve read in a while.

Gotta hand it to the Strokes too.

I did my taxes last week sorta (extension) and was trying to get to Direct File for a bit until I learned on deadline day that doesn’t exist anymore because of course. So I’m scrambling trying to figure out how to put in for an extension—I’ve got like maybe 15 minutes on the clock—and the IRS website is sending me through two different equally sketchy third party verification services, which I rushed through because of the time constraints and my brain’s inability to focus on bureaucratic form filling

So there I was punching in my information to two scam-like entities with absurd security protocols, keeping me stuck in a frustrating loop of captchas and two factor verification tab flipping—phone email webpage phone email—and it all felt so dumb and cruel and stupid and difficult.

A few days later I got legit hacked for the first time in my life and lost $200 dollars off someone who was able to get into my Amazon and my Paypal and order themselves a couple gift cards. And then to settle that, back I went into the frustrating loop of captchas and two factor verification tab flipping this time with the bank and the payment services—phone email webpage phone email—and it all felt so dumb and cruel and stupid and difficult. And I still don’t know if I’m getting any of that money back.

Rocko’s Modern Life, baby.

On the most recent Outdoor Cats we covered a wide range of recent news topics I didn’t hit on today so make sure you catch up on that before getting mad at me for missing something or other.

We’ll have some pretty major Outdoor Cats news but in a few days probably it’s not quite ready yet but stay tuned!

Lastly S.G. Goodman put out a Butthole Surfers cover and it freakin rocks.

Ok talk soon!

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Note from Chris: Wow holy goddamn our latency was really bad. You’re going to hear Bill and I step on each other extensively, and it’s not because we’re interrupter jerks, it’s actually because we were having a several second delay in hearing each other. We blame the government.

Porch session is nearly here and we’ll be recording in-person together more soon.

Note from Bill: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Some links…

Curtis Sliwa was here and we missed it.

Curtis Sliwa quotes from final mayoral debate

Fresolo Townie Direct Action Footage

Wages report

List of 500 highest-paid Worcester employees includes zero teachers. Why?

Eyes on public safety at Union Station: Police outline presence, stats

Cop bar to open at Dive Bar

Literal outdoor cat gives no fucks about borders

—Outro: Brooklyn Funk Essentials “Bust The Bust Stop”

—Intro by Bill Shaner 4.17.26

—This podcast is now available on all the major podcast players: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Pocket Casts (idk what that is) and you can add it to any other sort of player with this RSS link.

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Dear Shaun,

I have a coworker, who, when they describe any sort of food they’re about to eat, are eating, or have eaten in the past, they make a disgusting slurping noise. This person was hired post-pandemic and we have only recently started going back into the office a few days a week. They were seemingly fine and sane on all the Zoom calls I had with them, however now that we are in much closer quarters, I am having a hard time putting up with this bullshit. Do you have any advice at all on how to deal with it? Should I confront them? Should I quit? Should I leave an anonymous note? Please the slurping is driving me up the cubicle wall.

-Slurps Up

Dear Slurps Up,

We here at Worcester Sucks and I Love It do not condone violence. I want to encourage you to do everything and anything in your power to not smack this person upside the head. I am assuming this person is not 22 and is a fully-fledged adult who should definitely know better than to act like this. If that is the case it is clear as day to me that this person has never been beaten up in their life.

I know what you’re thinking, you’re assuming that I’m assuming this person is a male. You would be wrong. Some of the most intense fights I have ever witnessed were between two females. I was a high school teacher for nearly a decade and those were some of the most violent matchups I’ve ever watched. Hair pulling, scratching, principal’s hair being pulled, biting, just the whole gambit of attempts to end someone else’s momentum. And yes, I watched, I was not going to get into the middle of that shit—you read where I said a principal’s hair was pulled? I don’t have much on my head, they could have gone after my eyeballs!

Your co-worker has clearly never been tossed around by someone who can’t stand their slurping. They need to feel that rage. Unfortunately, while I do give bad advice, some would say the worst advice, I can’t in good conscience put that in writing. I say you befriend this co-worker. You go out to dinner with them, where the slurping must intensify. You invite them to birthday parties. You invite them to cookouts. You invite them to any gathering. You bring them into the fold of your social life. At this same time you are rekindling your friendship with that one friend who is little unhinged.

You know that friend who gambles too much and blames it on outside outcomes for their loss of their own money? The friend who has an on-and-off thing with someone who is so toxic the last time they dated, that person set their couch on fire? The friend who wouldn’t have an office job making slurping noises in their cubicle because they just got fired from a road crew because the foreman didn’t like when your friend said his wife had “Octomom Hips?” You need to bring that friend around a whole lot more too.

Two things could happen. One, the slurper may just start to be around your friends more often and may learn the proper way to act when they are about to eat a burger. Or this jobless, single friend who is broke from too much Keno and college lacrosse bets may finally snap when they hear that “slurp.” Now, again, I don’t mean that this person punches your co-worker. But they definitely will snap at them. And you can’t snap at work, they have a term for that—“going postal”—though now with all the mass shootings in America, would it just be called, “going high school student?”

You need to expose your co-worker to a world outside polite norms. This is like Scared Straight for white collar workers. You are helping better society. We thank you for your work.

NEWS

I am in New Orleans this week! If you so happen to be down there, or know someone who is you should tell them that it is the New Orleans Hotdog Safari. Bryan O’Donnell and I are doing our show Hot Dog! at the amazing comedy club Sports Drink on Saturday at 10PM. This weekend is going to be a blast and I can’t wait to report back on how well it went.

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Before we get to the agenda preview, I want to share two things:

Please come to the district realignment forum this Wednesday, April 15 at 5 p.m. at Doherty High. Also be sure to fill out the Initial Input Survey, which is open until May 15.

Last week I put out a Guide to WPS Middle School Enrollment, which is a very unofficial guide to navigating Worcester Public Schools’ middle school magnet programs and voluntary transfer policies. If you have kids in elementary school, check it out.

Ok here’s the preview:

April 16 School Committee Meeting
The next school committee meeting is scheduled for April 16. Executive session starts at 5 p.m. and the regular meeting is scheduled to start at 5:30 p.m. The actual start time depends on how long the executive session takes. See the agenda here. You can watch it via zoom or Youtube Live. Spanish translation is available on zoom.

Report of the Superintendent

This month’s Report of the Superintendent is on the culture and climate wellness rooms. The rooms are in Worcester’s middle schools and high schools. Also, I missed the rebrand, because up until this year the office was called climate and culture, but I guess it’s culture and climate now.

Farm to School Grant.
Massachusetts Farm to School was awarded $100,000 to lead a two-year project to facilitate local food collaboration for Boston, Worcester and Springfield. According to the grant the purpose is “to support alignment of menu items to increase local food purchasing and promotion. The districts will work together to establish ‘New England Harvest Menus’ that feature multiple items that utilize locally grown, raised, or caught foods.” Up for approval is $20,000 of the grant to come to Worcester.

Middle School Sports Grant.
Also up for approval is a grant for $50,000 to support middle school sports from the PlayBall Foundation. The grant will support “four Spring sports (baseball, softball, boys’/girls’ soccer) across five middle schools within the district. Funds will support the purchase of uniforms, equipment, transportation and coaches’ stipends.”

Reports From Administration On:

• Supports for unhoused students

• School nurse staffing levels

• Dropout prevention plan

  ---

Other Items.

• Sue Mailman (at-large) has an item requesting an update on the plan to move the transitions program out of the Fanning Building.

• Molly McCullough (district A) is requesting an update on the supports and services currently offered for students with dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities.

• Alex Guardiola (district D) is requesting a report on the custodial and grounds staffing at Foley Stadium, with a long list of what he’d like to specifically see included.

• Vanessa Alvarez (district B) has an item asking for data on enrollment and participation of Hispanic/Latinx students in advanced coursework.

• The administration is requesting a renewal of the McGraw-Hill Contract for five years for “History- grades 6,7,9, Psychology, Sociology, and Legal Aspects.

That’s it. Have a good week! If you have feedback you can always get in touch: aislinn.doyle@me.com

Straight to business, folks. No horsing around—they could push the button any minute now, after all. Can’t have that happen with a newsletter on the vine. Can’t go out on a great gust of nuclear wind without asking you all for $5 one last time.

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Stuff coming up:

The WRA has update on about the Denholm building at its Tuesday meeting. Could get a bit contentious. A recent Telegram article sets the stage for a showdown: “Delays over Denholm building razing, development frustrate City Hall.”

The members of the Worcester Redevelopment Authority are wondering the same thing, sharing their frustrations in recent meetings. The Menkiti Group, the would-be developer, has sought extensions for the project. The authority sees a wavering commitment amid the tweaking of plans. There was a recent proposal for the authority to cover the costs and carry out the building’s demolition.

Another meeting on the Vernon Street bridge redesign efforts on Thursday at the library, entitled “Sharing History, Changing the Future. 10 a.m. to noon in the Saxe Room. I heard a worrisome rumor from a source I trust that any federal money that was once attached to that project is long gone, making the whole thing a moot point. Hope that’s not true of course but I’m inclined, given who told me and the uhhhh state of things to believe it.

And of course the city council meeting Tuesday night.

The city council meeting on Tuesday has an impossibly stuffed agenda, ensuring several important things are short-shrifted in order to give equal weight and attention to dozens of unimportant things. Like this...

...which I’m sure he and others plan to spend their full 10 minutes talking about.

The resolution conveniently appears on the same agenda that the annual list of top earners also appears, a matter of actual importance. As is the case every single year, the top 100 earners are almost exclusively police officers. You’ll notice just by scanning the third column from the left that something is going on here.

Full report here

Doubtful Bergman or Toomey or anyone besides Khrystian King will have anything to say at all about that, our little police city-state hiding in plain sight. Punishment bureaucracy standing next to the spigot, guzzling from the hose, with a gun pointed at the social safety net lying on the ground screaming out for water. Later in the agenda our new district 5 councilor Jose Rivera asks the manager, via an order, to lean on the SMOC homeless shelter to tidy up the premises. It’s the only order on the agenda that addresses homelessness in any way. The cuts to Community Health Link we reported on via the podcast earlier this week—55 positions!—were apparently not of much concern to councilors, convinced as they are homelessness is the result of “the towns” trucking in their unwanted for us to “deal with.”

Speaking of, here’s a clip from the public safety subcommittee meeting on Wednesday showing Kate Toomey callously dismiss the idea that the $1 million plus we spend on Shotspotter every year would be better spent on social workers. Then Police Chief Paul Saucier vaguely suggests plans for more surveillance expenditures, such as... drumroll please... automatic drone deployments for Shotspotter activations!

Toomey:

So, you know, some of the things that we’ve heard before, some of the arguments about, you know, well, we’d be spending money elsewhere on social workers and things like that, but I, for me, what you’ve said here, it sounds like this money well spent because we’re saving lives, we’re being visible in the community, and it’s actually, uh faster responses.

She asks “so what are we looking at?” a question that sounds meaningless but considerably better than what she meant, which was “ok Chief now do a commercial for it.” Saucier, a veteran of these faux inquiries, doesn’t miss a beat:

They actually have the technology now where when a shot spotter alert goes off, you can have a drone respond within 30 seconds to where that gun was fired. And that’s out there now. This is actually available.

Oh goodie I love it when there’s a drone overhead within 30 seconds doing automated surveillance of anything it can fit in its camera sending that information to any number of databases we’re not privy to—gotta protect that intellectual property!—after a famously accurate and also completely automated gunshot detection software dispatches it. It’ll probably be able to detect anyone carrying a blanket, and may even be able to yell at said person for existing where they happen to be at that moment.

In David Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism”—a good book for fans of moral clarity slicing through weaponized ambiguity like the knife on an episode of “Is It Cake?” when it’s in fact cake... you can borrow it from my personal library if you’d like— he writes of the “brutal withdrawal of the state from all social obligations (except surveillance and policing).”

In keeping with the theme, the city council will also consider two proposals from the city manager’s office to weaken the city’s climate resiliency.

In one report, he asks for a “pause” on what are colloquially known around City Hall as “stretch code,” a set of requirements for clean energy infrastructure in new construction.

Due to the recency of the Specialized Stretch Code in Massachusetts, it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions relative to the cost- benefit analysis between the Stretch Code and the Specialized Stretch Code because aggregate data are still limited. The best available information shows an average of 2- 4% additional upfront costs.

This whopping two to four percent increase is hitting the developers of “high rise apartment buildings” the hardest, per the report. A famously needy set, the developers of high rise apartment buildings. Some of them are paying up to $1 million to comply. Can you believe it? Of course, one such high rise is also paying $1.6 million to get out of building any affordable units (payment in lieu option of the inclusionary zoning ordinance). So maybe it’s not really all that burdensome for these hedge funds that build these things? “Available incentives to offset those costs are modest, and under threat,” Batista writes. Oh well in that case...

Here’s the stretch code report. I went spelunking for it on the city’s insane website so you don’t have to. It will pass with at least eight votes if they bother to vote on it.

In another report, he’ll ask the council to go along with his thinking that we shouldn’t allow people to have chickens, after some three (?) years of considering the idea, at the behest of a group of community members who doggedly organized to get it this far... making them say no out loud...

From the report:

While raising chickens has its benefits, from providing fresh eggs and fertilizer for gardens to acting as engaging pets, the commissioner found that unfortunately they are outweighed by the negative impacts.

For example: the majority of properties in the city do not have the necessary amount of space to follow best practices for healthy coop size; there are legitimate nuisance

concerns related to odor, waste, noise, pests and rodents; chickens carry communicable diseases that spread to humans; and it would be difficult to equitably enforce provisions for chicken keeping across the city.

Pests and rodents? In a city!?

Here’s the chicken report.

That will also pass with at least eight votes if and when.

Oh and right at the end where it’s easy to miss: a $25 million loan order so we can satisfy the $35 million we owe Holden per court order in poop disposal fee recoupment.

Pretty grim! I will be doing something else while the council spends five hours working through this cruel document. Whatever it ends up being, it’ll be time better spent.

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A Byzantine Hall Of Mirrors

Spent all of Wednesday in the hallowed halls of the Massachusetts State House, mostly mumbling to myself about how it was a byzantine hall of mirrors and as such a visual metaphor. But in between doing that I had a few great conversations with a few of our state delegates. I was one of about 15 or so local journalists doing so, under the direction and guidance of Free Press Action, a great group of media activists and watchdogs who’ve accomplished impressive things around the country. In particular, their “New Jersey Model,” a civic media consortium they got signed into law by the New Jersey State Legislature a few years ago. The consortium works sort of the way public broadcasting does. The state funds an umbrella organization of sorts which then disperses the money via direct grants to the grassroots local media organizations that need it.

We were there to “plant the seeds” for a similar piece of legislation we hope to have introduced and, insh’allah, passed, in the next year or two. Of all the loose talking points I came up with throughout the day, the one that seemed to resonate most widely went a little like this: With local journalism diminished to its current sorry state, the primary source of local news for most people has become whatever “townie facebook group” their community has—and they all have at least one—and those groups are breeding grounds for reactionary panic, bad information, inscrutable dramas over nothing, and tired culture war bullshit. A sort of fascist scobie, if you’ll allow an extended metaphor, fermenting at record speed as its microbes feed on the potent sociological mix found in these groups: incoherent politics of a few different strains, social relations developed in high school, and a polity not so large as to render users completely anonymous but not so small as to rule out complete strangers. It’s as if everyone in the same grocery store at a given time were encouraged to shout what they were thinking, scoring points for how amusing others find their rants or retorts. Crazy making. Real relationship destroying. A cancer on the civic life of a community.

I didn’t say all that out loud of course, but I could see every person’s face light up with the image of it as soon as I said “townie facebook group.” Everyone knew exactly what I meant by it.

It was bad enough when Facebook and Google figured out how to hoover up all but the table scraps of the digital advertising game (the figure hovers around 80 percent of all digital advertising revenue, by some measures), making the transition from print to digital sisyphean for local dailies—always and to this day the largest employers of local journalists—thus priming them for hostile takeover by vulture capital firms. But to then drop a bit of poison into every community’s well? Criminal! And in a way no one knows or particularly cares about, except for the people bound by the traditions of “objectivity” to never make the case out loud. So it goes!

Direct reader support has worked well for me so far, as I approach the six year anniversary of this newsletter (wild!). I’m pulling $50,000 a year, which is cause for insane gratitude and an accomplishment of course, but at the end of the day is just on the low end of a ‘decent’ salary for one employee. While I’d like to think I could eventually get into the “two salaries” range, the pace of growth keeps that ambition a long term one. That there aren’t many people who could “pull off” what I have does not bode well for the future. Something has to change, and that change won’t be found in the free market. To look at it on a long arc, the freer the market has gotten, the more effective it has become in dismantling the institution of journalism. If a democratic state hopes to survive it would do well to fund the institution that brought it to life.

How could we possibly still care about the dangers of state funded media when we’ve seen what the opposite does to it?

Anyway, please subscribe! Haha. I’ll keep this ship running as long as I can possibly manage. That’s a promise.

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Up next is the best reason to do so I can think of. Here we have a well articulated community perspective and call to action hitting an audience it likely wouldn’t without this platform.

Worcester Queers Must Organize

By Asa Reyes

(Standalone version of this piece here)

“The people who are trying to do something for all of us and not men and women that belong to a white, middle-class, white club” — Sylvia Rivera

On Trans Day Of Visibility, the IOF, continuing its genocidal campaign, killed six more Palestinians in Gaza, including a father and son. It was March 31. The same night in so-called Worcester Massachusetts, a city which failed to pass even a symbolic ceasefire resolution in 2024, the City Council continued its facade of LGBT* allyship by highlighting the same white trans women already approved by the white club. One of whom held an event earlier in the year to end the “trans military ban” with Seth Moulton (just in time for the draft!). Moulton is a senatorial candidate who after Kamala lost her presidential bid made headlines blaming the loss on democrats’ support of trans people, not their support of the genocide.

“The queer liberation struggle cannot be disentangled from the anti-imperialist struggle. They are fundamentally connected.” — Sa’ed Atshan

Early last year the city blocked an investigation into transphobia in the administration, quietly shelved the DOJ report detailing racist brutality and rape in the WPD, and voted against a ceasefire resolution for Gaza. The Mayor does what he usually does in giving away keys to the city to chosen “leaders” of a group and hoping it all blows over. And since 2025 (and much, much longer), it has. He and the council got away with it because we are not organized. Taking a step back, many queer people are part of projects doing good work like WooFridges, Solidarity Outreach Survival, Food Not Bombs, LUCE and others. This shouldn’t change: trans and queerphobia can’t be eradicated until we first combat the hate against “addicts,” “prostitutes,” and “criminals.” As queer and trans people many of us are struggling with addiction, homelessness and doing sex work to survive. Many of us know in larger leftist organizations, trans people are an afterthought, especially trans people of color and transfeminine people. We are supporting other movements as we should, and leading ones we are also members of, but only we can lead our own liberation. We don’t need protection but the political and material capability to do so ourselves.

“’It’s not my pride, it’s their pride. It’s your pride, not mine. You haven’t given me mine yet.’ I have nothing to be proud of except that I’ve helped liberate gays around the world. I have so many children and I’m still sitting on the back of the bus, still struggling to get kids into proper housing, and to get them education, to get them off drugs” — Sylvia Rivera

Seemingly the only ones organized among us are careerists who are going for positions for themselves, more interested in their personal branding or consulting company than building that capability.

In September 2025 after the city fumbled in even its symbolic performance of allyship, including raising the wrong flag, the local Pride coalition chose to step away from the city’s usual flag raising ceremony. This followed the Juneteenth Festival Committee decision earlier in the year after the city previously took the flag down before the 19th. Instead of solidarity with other queer, trans and Black organizers among us, some of the same opportunists we see again and again became the LGBT symbol for the city administration. Holding a separate Pride flag raising with the same city council that refused accountability, refused to support police victims or take even a symbolic stand against the genocide. The same queer leader who ran for mayor in ‘23 by joining the centrist “white, middle-class, white club” establishment including the very councilor who was dehumanizing trans people last year (and surely before), requiring the investigation in the first place.

In early 2025 back to the calls for the investigation we saw more of this queer “leadership.” After a Vietnamese non binary councilor revealed they were called “it” by another councilor, not in the cool nonbinary way, the city scrambled to respond. Mayor Petty, doing the only thing he knows, gave a key to the city to the same white trans woman, again. She would then go on to make a public statement with her consultant company letterhead calling out the only local online queer exchange group for being “unwilling to allow different opinions” while queers organized around transphobic attacks. One wonders how these same queer “leaders” would have responded to Sylvia Rivera at Liberation Day 1973 where she fought for her right to speak against a heavily white, cis and upper class audience.

On the night of the vote the same white woman called in as the only trans person in opposition to the investigation and the sanctuary resolution, proclaiming Joe Petty as “one of the good ones”, someone who has always shown up for our community (for photo shoots sure). During this Joe Petty deadnamed and misgendered her in his thanks for her comment. After weeks of meetings packed with hundreds of queers, the city council led by Joe Petty fawned their support for the LGBT but refused the substantive investigation into their own behavior, opting instead to only pass the symbolic resolution.

Where did that energy go? There aren’t more organized queers to come out of it. After another electoral cycle of queer people and allies devoting their time to democrat campaigns we still got a more conservative council, and the same school committee. Campaign messaging sells the idea that if they just replace their opponent they can make things right. Too much focus is put on the player who said a slur, instead of the system that allows dehumanization across the board. Later on when the DOJ report broke detailing abuse and rape of sex workers from the WPD, where were the same queers? Black and brown trans people especially are pushed into sex work, yet this does not impact all queer people the same; solidarity with sex workers is not a priority in our movement. What’s more, some of our feminist movements harbor sex worker exclusionary sentiments, which inevitably harms trans and gender non conforming people as our movements are inextricably linked.

“I’ve been trying to get up here all day, for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail! They’re writing me every motherfuckin’ week and ask for your help, and you all don’t do a god damn thing for them.” — Sylvia Rivera

Backlash through co-optation to the countercultural Black, queer and feminist liberation movements became obvious in the 1980’s. By the 2000’s the non-profit industrial complex and its lawyers were able to frame marriage as the goal, instead of a target. Marriage became something queers aspired to, instead of seeing it as an avenue for colonial control. Institutional monogamy found another way to quell the threat we are to the capitalist patriarchy. Assimilation became the foundation of the LGBT rights movement.

“We can no longer let people like the Empire State Pride Agenda, the HRC in Washington, speak for us” — Sylvia Rivera

From our origins of Black drag kings and queens, Black transsexual sex workers throwing bricks at pigs, our movement has been co-opted. Identity politics, Rainbow Capitalism, Bioessentialism, Pinkwashing, white respectability and disposability politics, and the non profit industrial complex have disarmed us. Many even in close affinity still can’t deal with their own white supremacy and transmisogyny, Black and brown transsexual women are pushed out of the very movements we helped create.

These idealized communities require disposability to maintain the illusion—violence and ostracism against the black/brown/trans/trash bodies that serve as safety valves for the inevitable anxiety and disillusionment of those who wish “total identification”. —Porpentine, Hot Allostatic Load

The state of our movement is in shambles. Queers are wrapped up in non profits, candidates that don’t care about them, or organizations more interested in using us as political tools to win their campaigns or increase membership. “Protect the dolls” has become a catchy phrase for social media bios or t-shirts while queer, especially Black and brown, trans youth are still struggling with high rates of homelessness, addiction and HIV. With little options, many of us pushed into sex work to live. While HIV research is being cut, trans people are being forced to detransition in prison, trans women are being v-coded, trans people are being attacked in every state in the country, and in most countries across the world.

“The degree to which any movement is progressive or revolutionary is measured by its independence from the rulers of the society it seeks to change” — Leslie Feinberg

We don’t claim to have all the answers, but we know this isn’t working. Queers can not simply attend more city council meetings, vote more or get trans faces in high places. Queer people, especially trans people of color, need to organize together, look at and address our movement problems, and seriously work on developing a revolutionary strategy. “Just do something” has not been enough and won’t be. When our so-called leaders don’t depend on the strategy working, it doesn’t have to. If metrics for funding are the goal and not revolution, and our humanity is used for campaigning, we will always be struggling for basic rights through piecemeal reforms, and struggling to survive.

“You can’t build a revolution with no education” — Fred Hampton

The urgency put on us is what requires us to seriously reflect, study, and strategize. The situation is not too urgent to study, the situation is too urgent for us to continue wasting our time making the same mistakes that our movement has made over and over again. Mistakes that we can avoid if we learn from the revolutionaries before us. Studying past movements needs to be seen as a serious way to develop strategy and win, not a distraction or chore.

Without education, people will accept anything. Without education, what you’ll have is neo-colonialism instead of colonialism like you have now. Without education, people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, you know what I mean? You might get people caught up in an emotionalist movement, might get them because they’re poor and they want something and then if they’re not educated, they’ll want more and before you know it, they’ll be capitalists and we’ll have Negro imperialism. — Fred Hampton

If any of this speaks to you and you are interested in organizing for protection and power of queer people in Worcester, join us, a collection of angry queers that want to destroy the club, not join it.

To get involved, reach out us at WooTRAN@protonmail.com. Ally looking to support? Here’s two incarcerated trans women you can support now: https://catracha.noblogs.org/jaia-and-gia/

Asa Reyes is a Worcester based anti-zionist and transfeminist organizer, currently a hotline operator for LUCE, leading Zero Fare WRTA and organizing trans prisoner support. Last year managed multiple city council and school committee campaigns, and part of organizing the trans sanctuary city resolution. She is the founder of the transfeminist blog Catracha.

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Pulled from a bad first draft of “Full Metal Jacket”

In case you missed it I had a piece run in Welcome To Hell World a few days ago about the Worcester Superior Court arraignments of state police officers charged in the brutal killing of Enrique Delgado Garcia.

The circumstances of Enrique Delgado Garcia’s death read as though they were ripped from a rough draft of Full Metal Jacket. I don’t mean to make a joke here. I’m more serious than I’ve been in some time. An idea Kubrick would have found too loud for his most on-the-nose polemic on American militarism is now, some 50 years later, a non-fiction story in American policing.

That story draft never makes the evening news. No one is reliably informing the American people that “we live under a regime many magnitudes more repressive than it was the last time it was seriously tested, some 80 years ago.” No one is reporting on how the cops’ union said out loud on Wednesday that they plan to use this story to pin the administration into submission. Did you catch it up there earlier? In that line I quoted about how “our association looks forward to the department issuing a public statement in support of these members”? It was as if to say you will be punished should you stand in the way of the escalation of our barbarism.

Read the rest over on Welcome To Hell World Dot Com.

My piece appeared in an edition alongside a great one from Nathan Munn, “There is no end of history: A myopic arrogance destined to age poorly.” Munn is a writer I became aware of and also came to admire from his earlier work in Hell World and the equally cool and related outlet Flaming Hydra.

Someone recently remarked that using generative AI is functionally similar to gambling: you spend a token, pull the lever, hope you get the desired result, then do it again. This sick process is a microexpression of the AI economy writ large. It’s also analogous to the American/Israeli non-strategic brutality in Iran and, at the highest level, represents the gaping void at the heart of our late-stage militarized gamified capitalist reality, where AI and war, enthusiastic oppression, out-of-control gambling, and the death of thinking all overlap and blur into a hellscape of pain and confusion. Observers have pointed out that there are so many ways for it all to go wrong that it eventually will have to go wrong.

Hell World consistently puts out some of the best writing on the internet, from a diverse and talented roster of writers I’m honored to be a part of. It’s been a must read of mine for years, if you can’t tell by the way I have and continue to rip it off. Definitely worth a subscribe and throwing Luke some money if you can!

Odds and ends

One more request for support before I go!

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David Webb posted a video he acquired somehow of District 3 Councilor John Fresolo walking up to some people working on a car in their driveway and yelling at them for doing so. I watched about three seconds of it and said “no way jose” on allowing Fresolo any more of my mental energy. But still… Yikes. Not what the mayor likes to call “decorum.”

A funny thread on the Worcester subreddit that asks whether Pat’s Towing’s longstanding obvious scam is a scam or not. Jury’s out! Is Pats towing running scams in Worcester? : r/WorcesterMA

Re surveillance tech in the hands of municipal police officers: How exactly does remotely spying on kids practicing gymnastics make them safer? - YouTube

Incredible photo of our very own Shaun Connolly in the Boston Globe writeup of Matt Shearer’s Wilbur show. ‘A new frontier’: With his first live show, WBZ NewsRadio’s Matt Shearer brings viral TikToks to The Wilbur stage - The Boston Globe

RIP to Grace Carmark, a longtime housing advocate in Worcester who died recently. I didn’t know her but know a few very smart and effective housing advocates she had a hand in coaching. RIP.

Lastly, “who left their venison roast on a hiking trail?”

aaaaand the coolest live set I’ve ever seen?! Bet your ass I’m catching them in Boston in a few weeks. Coolest band in the game right now.

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Worcester Queers Must Organize

By Asa Reyes

“The people who are trying to do something for all of us and not men and women that belong to a white, middle-class, white club” — Sylvia Rivera

On Trans Day Of Visibility, the IOF, continuing its genocidal campaign, killed six more Palestinians in Gaza, including a father and son. It was March 31. The same night in so-called Worcester Massachusetts, a city which failed to pass even a symbolic ceasefire resolution in 2024, the City Council continued its facade of LGBT* allyship by highlighting the same white trans women already approved by the white club. One of whom held an event earlier in the year to end the “trans military ban” with Seth Moulton (just in time for the draft!). Moulton is a senatorial candidate who after Kamala lost her presidential bid made headlines blaming the loss on democrats’ support of trans people, not their support of the genocide.

“The queer liberation struggle cannot be disentangled from the anti-imperialist struggle. They are fundamentally connected.” — Sa’ed Atshan

Early last year the city blocked an investigation into transphobia in the administration, quietly shelved the DOJ report detailing racist brutality and rape in the WPD, and voted against a ceasefire resolution for Gaza. The Mayor does what he usually does in giving away keys to the city to chosen “leaders” of a group and hoping it all blows over. And since 2025 (and much, much longer), it has. He and the council got away with it because we are not organized. Taking a step back, many queer people are part of projects doing good work like WooFridges, Solidarity Outreach Survival, Food Not Bombs, LUCE and others. This shouldn’t change: trans and queerphobia can’t be eradicated until we first combat the hate against “addicts,” “prostitutes,” and “criminals.” As queer and trans people many of us are struggling with addiction, homelessness and doing sex work to survive. Many of us know in larger leftist organizations, trans people are an afterthought, especially trans people of color and transfeminine people. We are supporting other movements as we should, and leading ones we are also members of, but only we can lead our own liberation. We don’t need protection but the political and material capability to do so ourselves.

“’It’s not my pride, it’s their pride. It’s your pride, not mine. You haven’t given me mine yet.’ I have nothing to be proud of except that I’ve helped liberate gays around the world. I have so many children and I’m still sitting on the back of the bus, still struggling to get kids into proper housing, and to get them education, to get them off drugs” — Sylvia Rivera

Seemingly the only ones organized among us are careerists who are going for positions for themselves, more interested in their personal branding or consulting company than building that capability.

In September 2025 after the city fumbled in even its symbolic performance of allyship, including raising the wrong flag, the local Pride coalition chose to step away from the city’s usual flag raising ceremony. This followed the Juneteenth Festival Committee decision earlier in the year after the city previously took the flag down before the 19th. Instead of solidarity with other queer, trans and Black organizers among us, some of the same opportunists we see again and again became the LGBT symbol for the city administration. Holding a separate Pride flag raising with the same city council that refused accountability, refused to support police victims or take even a symbolic stand against the genocide. The same queer leader who ran for mayor in ‘23 by joining the centrist “white, middle-class, white club” establishment including the very councilor who was dehumanizing trans people last year (and surely before), requiring the investigation in the first place.

In early 2025 back to the calls for the investigation we saw more of this queer “leadership.” After a Vietnamese non binary councilor revealed they were called “it” by another councilor, not in the cool nonbinary way, the city scrambled to respond. Mayor Petty, doing the only thing he knows, gave a key to the city to the same white trans woman, again. She would then go on to make a public statement with her consultant company letterhead calling out the only local online queer exchange group for being “unwilling to allow different opinions” while queers organized around transphobic attacks. One wonders how these same queer “leaders” would have responded to Sylvia Rivera at Liberation Day 1973 where she fought for her right to speak against a heavily white, cis and upper class audience.

On the night of the vote the same white woman called in as the only trans person in opposition to the investigation and the sanctuary resolution, proclaiming Joe Petty as “one of the good ones”, someone who has always shown up for our community (for photo shoots sure). During this Joe Petty deadnamed and misgendered her in his thanks for her comment. After weeks of meetings packed with hundreds of queers, the city council led by Joe Petty fawned their support for the LGBT but refused the substantive investigation into their own behavior, opting instead to only pass the symbolic resolution.

Where did that energy go? There aren’t more organized queers to come out of it. After another electoral cycle of queer people and allies devoting their time to democrat campaigns we still got a more conservative council, and the same school committee. Campaign messaging sells the idea that if they just replace their opponent they can make things right. Too much focus is put on the player who said a slur, instead of the system that allows dehumanization across the board. Later on when the DOJ report broke detailing abuse and rape of sex workers from the WPD, where were the same queers? Black and brown trans people especially are pushed into sex work, yet this does not impact all queer people the same; solidarity with sex workers is not a priority in our movement. What’s more, some of our feminist movements harbor sex worker exclusionary sentiments, which inevitably harms trans and gender non conforming people as our movements are inextricably linked.

“I’ve been trying to get up here all day, for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail! They’re writing me every motherfuckin’ week and ask for your help, and you all don’t do a god damn thing for them.” — Sylvia Rivera

Backlash through co-optation to the countercultural Black, queer and feminist liberation movements became obvious in the 1980’s. By the 2000’s the non-profit industrial complex and its lawyers were able to frame marriage as the goal, instead of a target. Marriage became something queers aspired to, instead of seeing it as an avenue for colonial control. Institutional monogamy found another way to quell the threat we are to the capitalist patriarchy. Assimilation became the foundation of the LGBT rights movement.

“We can no longer let people like the Empire State Pride Agenda, the HRC in Washington, speak for us” — Sylvia Rivera

From our origins of Black drag kings and queens, Black transsexual sex workers throwing bricks at pigs, our movement has been co-opted. Identity politics, Rainbow Capitalism, Bioessentialism, Pinkwashing, white respectability and disposability politics, and the non profit industrial complex have disarmed us. Many even in close affinity still can’t deal with their own white supremacy and transmisogyny, Black and brown transsexual women are pushed out of the very movements we helped create.

These idealized communities require disposability to maintain the illusion—violence and ostracism against the black/brown/trans/trash bodies that serve as safety valves for the inevitable anxiety and disillusionment of those who wish “total identification”. —Porpentine, Hot Allostatic Load

The state of our movement is in shambles. Queers are wrapped up in non profits, candidates that don’t care about them, or organizations more interested in using us as political tools to win their campaigns or increase membership. “Protect the dolls” has become a catchy phrase for social media bios or t-shirts while queer, especially Black and brown, trans youth are still struggling with high rates of homelessness, addiction and HIV. With little options, many of us pushed into sex work to live. While HIV research is being cut, trans people are being forced to detransition in prison, trans women are being v-coded, trans people are being attacked in every state in the country, and in most countries across the world.

“The degree to which any movement is progressive or revolutionary is measured by its independence from the rulers of the society it seeks to change” — Leslie Feinberg

We don’t claim to have all the answers, but we know this isn’t working. Queers can not simply attend more city council meetings, vote more or get trans faces in high places. Queer people, especially trans people of color, need to organize together, look at and address our movement problems, and seriously work on developing a revolutionary strategy. “Just do something” has not been enough and won’t be. When our so-called leaders don’t depend on the strategy working, it doesn’t have to. If metrics for funding are the goal and not revolution, and our humanity is used for campaigning, we will always be struggling for basic rights through piecemeal reforms, and struggling to survive.

“You can’t build a revolution with no education” — Fred Hampton

The urgency put on us is what requires us to seriously reflect, study, and strategize. The situation is not too urgent to study, the situation is too urgent for us to continue wasting our time making the same mistakes that our movement has made over and over again. Mistakes that we can avoid if we learn from the revolutionaries before us. Studying past movements needs to be seen as a serious way to develop strategy and win, not a distraction or chore.

Without education, people will accept anything. Without education, what you’ll have is neo-colonialism instead of colonialism like you have now. Without education, people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, you know what I mean? You might get people caught up in an emotionalist movement, might get them because they’re poor and they want something and then if they’re not educated, they’ll want more and before you know it, they’ll be capitalists and we’ll have Negro imperialism. — Fred Hampton

If any of this speaks to you and you are interested in organizing for protection and power of queer people in Worcester, join us, a collection of angry queers that want to destroy the club, not join it.

To get involved, reach out us at WooTRAN@protonmail.com. Ally looking to support? Here’s two incarcerated trans women you can support now: https://catracha.noblogs.org/jaia-and-gia/

Asa Reyes is a Worcester based anti-zionist and transfeminist organizer, currently a hotline operator for LUCE, leading Zero Fare WRTA and organizing trans prisoner support. Last year managed multiple city council and school committee campaigns, and part of organizing the trans sanctuary city resolution. She is the founder of the transfeminist blog Catracha.

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Dear Shaun,

Should I start a podcast? Me and my buddy have pretty funny conversations. Sometimes at parties other friends say the words, “you two should have a podcast.” I have been kind of averse to it, because it feels like there are already too many, and the medium may have jumped the shark. My buddy is insisting we actually do, but I am hesitant. What do you think?

-Podcast Curious

Dear Podcast Curious,

We here at Bad Advice completely endorse you starting a new podcast. The world needs more ideas, opinions, and thoughts. The world needs more content! In a culture of Intellectual Property, I embrace the original thought factories that are podcasts. You’ll be part of the movement of bringing blue collar creative jobs back to the folks who helped get this industry off the ground. If modern podcasting is solar energy, original podcasting is coal mining.

Sure, there is a din of voices traversing into the ether. But we need yours! I bet whatever bullshit you and your buddy spout out in your garage is brilliant. And it is a shame that only your partner or dog get to hear. More people need your guffaws and giggles as you sip your IPAs. Of course I want to hear your puns on football wide receivers. Of course I want to hear your takes on the trans community. Of course I want to hear how the ships can get through the Strait of Hormuz. Truthfully these takes and jokes are snowflakes and need to be experienced by any who so choose.

I have had podcasts in the past and I had a lot of fun producing them. They were interview based, but I still got my yuks off as well. There is something magical about putting together a piece of content that I was passionate about. When I do stand up it is an immediate reaction: good, bad or indifferent. I used to think that was the only way I wanted to receive feedback. I mean, it definitely is my preferred way. If I told a joke out loud and then got a snarky review two months later I would be not only devastated, I would be hung up in anticipation for said review. But podcasts don’t need instant feedback, in fact they don’t really need feedback at all. They can be consumed or not consumed. They can be ignored or engaged with. If all this podcast is for is to record you and your buddies musings and bits, then have at it!

However, if this is a scheme to make money and enter the manosphere… I say double have at it! There is clearly money to be made in this field and plenty saps willing to spend their money to listen and invest in them. You can be one of those influencers, you can shape the culture, you can help decide who is going to press the button for the atomic bomb! You can have a hand in wiping out an entire civilization, maybe.

The pen is mightier than the sword, it was once said. But the microphone? Well, that is a gun. And why the hell would you ever want to bring a pen to a gun fight? To write an ode to your own death?

My ink filled cylinder wrapped tightly in my grip.

Your steel resting peacefully on your hip.

As I begin to write

You aim just right

And I’m shot into my quivering lip.

NEWS

Friday night is Hot Dog night. Come on out and see the most bonkers comedy show this city has to offer. Plus it is the best damn hotdogs in the city and it is all for FREE. Poster below.

Saturday I will be at Hideout Comedy at The White Bull Tavern. It is an incredible lineup, you should come hang. Tickets can be found here.

Also a quick note. I got to be a part of something real special on Thursday night. WBZ’s Matt Shearer (Reporter Matt) put on a show at the Wilbur Theater. It was the Muppet Show but with Boston characters and I was Scooter backstage wrangling all of these maniacs and making sure they all made it onstage. From the Lieutenant Governor talking with a man who couldn’t stop swearing, to Love is Blind participants nerding out about the MBTA the whole experience was lovely with out being cringey. It was an incredible experience and I believe it was recorded and may be released for viewing soon.

Worcester Sucks is the only outlet to report on this pretty sure so we can call this podcast episode “breaking news” officially, which is cool I guess.

The other topic we were planning to cover, but nixed, was the recent “day in court” for the state police officers charged in connection with the boxing ring death of Enrique Delgado Garcia. It ended up working out that Welcome To Hell World ran a piece of mine on the matter today: “The Presumption of Innocence.” So while we don’t cover it here, I do over there. You should go read it I think it’s good. Here’s a quick taste (more follow up on it in my next written post.)

Among the recruits, there was one especially experienced fighter. Enrique Delgado Garcia was not an especially experienced fighter. Ahead of “boxing day,” each of the recruits were matched roughly on size and ability. A large and physically fit guy was paired with the experienced fighter. On Thursday, Sept. 12, the day of the match, this large and physically fit guy wimped out.

Instead of saying, “OK, no one is equipped to fight this guy, sorry bud you are too scary” the training staff instead asked for volunteers. Enrique Delgado Garcia was apparently the only recruit to step forward. So he entered the ring with concussion-like symptoms to face a fighter so scary the second scariest guy had said no thanks.

Once in the ring Delgado Garcia was under the supervision of a referee who was not trained nor certified to be a referee, but was rather a micro celebrity in the SPAM community: one Charlie Murray, president of the State Police boxing team.

Also tomorrow I’ll be on Beacon Hill all day advocating alongside local journalists from around the state for a proposed local journalism legislative package put together by Free Press, a great advocacy organization for the sort of local news we do here (not the nazi site The Free Press). We’re pushing for something like the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium that Free Press started down there recently. It’s pretty neat. So come say hi if you’re going to be “on the hill” tomorrow.

And as always you can start or continue to support real deal alternative local journalism in your community right here and right now with a paid subscription or tip!

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This podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Pocket Casts others via this RSS link.

Some links from the discussion today…

Iran Lego AI Propaganda

E sports at the Aud hype article

Poop ship update

Live feed of the Artemis II mission

“We’re goin’ back to the fuckin’ moon, that’s why”

Gregg clip

French documentary on moon landing - Operation Lune

Intro: Riff on “Pink Moon” by Bill Shaner 4.7.26

Outro: “Contact” by Daft Punk

This week, the district shared with families at Worcester Dual Language Magnet School that the school will be expanding into a pre-K through 8 model. Since then, I’ve been part of a lot of conversations with fellow elementary parents about Worcester middle schools — and wowwww, there is so much confusion and misunderstanding out there. That’s what motivated me to put together this guide to middle school enrollment.

For this guide I’ve pulled all the scattered info into one place and will break down the biggest sources of confusion: how magnet programs work, how voluntary transfers are handled, and the practical details like transportation, school hours, and extracurriculars.

If you know other parents with older elementary kids who are confused about middle school, please share this guide with them! Here is a PDF version as well.

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I’m just a parent sharing what I’ve pieced together from five years of watching school committee meetings and talking with other parents. To the best of my knowledge, this is as accurate as possible, but my own family hasn’t gone through this process yet. I highly recommend checking out the district’s specialized programs page and enrollment videos, and definitely contact the district directly if you have specific questions. I’d also really appreciate any clarifications or insights from families who have been through it. And one final thing I’ve learned over the years: policy and what actually happens in practice are not always the same thing…

Let’s start with the basics.
A student’s official middle school assignment is determined by the district’s street list, which assigns every address to a middle school. *Update that the district has released a new tool that allows you to search by your address which is way more user friendly than the street list. It also includes distance from school which is helpful to know whether your address qualifies for a bus or not (for the secondary, elementary school transportation is not so clear cut.) Here are some examples of the results:

There are five middle schools a student can be assigned to: Burncoat Middle, Claremont Academy, Forest Grove Middle, Sullivan Middle and Worcester East Middle. There is also a line in the student handbook that states: “Spanish Bilingual, Structured English and Special Education Programs are offered in certain schools. Any student requiring these services will be enrolled in the school that will meet their assessed needs.”

But, as I wrote about in my district realignment piece, ”the pathways students take through the system don’t always line up neatly. Chandler Elementary, for example, feeds into three different middle schools, while several others — including City View, Belmont, May Street, Norrback, Quinsigamond, and Vernon Hill — feed into two.” It’s always good to double check the street list and never make assumptions of where your student is assigned!

There’s also a bunch of middle school options that are citywide magnets or programs that require applications. They are: Goddard Scholars Academy, Hanover Insurance Academy of the Arts, Visual and Performing Arts Magnet at Burncoat Middle School, Worcester Dual Language Magnet School, and University Park Campus School. We’ll take a look at each of them, but let’s start with the first middle school opportunity for students.

Goddard Scholars Academy.
While middle school in Worcester starts in seventh grade for the vast majority of students, 50 students each year start in 6th grade at Sullivan Middle School as part of the Goddard Scholars Academy. According to the website, “Goddard Scholars Academy (GSA) provides a rigorous and accelerated academic program in a safe, nurturing, and personalized atmosphere. The student body is a select group of Worcester Public Schools’ students, grades 6-8, who have demonstrated academic proficiency.” That academic proficiency is determined by Star scores. Star is a private standardized testing company that the district contracts with, and students take Star tests in September, December, and May each year starting in first grade.

Each March, about 300 to 350 fifth grade students are invited to “apply” for the program if they have Star scores in reading and math above the 75th percentile (some students take Star tests in Spanish, but those scores do not count towards GSA eligibility). I put apply in quotes, because it’s not really an application in the way most of us think of one —students simply check a box saying whether they want to be considered. Students are ranked based on their highest Star score from May of fourth grade, or September or December of fifth grade, and offers are made in that order. What’s not clear is exactly how that ranking is calculated, and families also aren’t told where their child falls on the list, so a student could be near the top or way down at #275 and the family would have no idea. I’ve heard this is a major frustration for families, especially given how many invitation letters go out for so few spots.

If accepted, students have to maintain at least an 80 average in all subjects and should expect one to two hours of homework each night. GSA students are guaranteed a spot in the high school Goddard Scholars program that continues at South High.

Hanover Insurance Academy of the Arts.
Hanover Insurance Academy of the Arts is a second honors program, established in 2017, that is available at Burncoat Middle School, and continues on to Burncoat High School. (It is different from the Burncoat Middle School Arts Magnet program, which I’ll get into next.) Like Goddard, there are 50 spots and acceptance is based on Star scores. But unlike Goddard, it doesn’t begin until 7th grade, so eligibility is based on scores from spring of 5th grade and fall and winter of 6th grade. Hanover, as the program is often shortened to, also differs from Goddard because students take honors academics, but can also participate in the Performing, Visual, and Media Arts Magnet Classes at Burncoat High. If you want to understand the history and some of the questions around how this program was created, I highly recommend reading former School Committee member Tracy Novick’s blog. She has written about this a bit and, among other things, has pointed out that there does not appear to be any formal arrangement around the Hanover Insurance name being attached to the program.

It’s also worth noting that at a November 2024 Teaching, Learning and Student Support subcommittee meeting school committee member Sue Mailman (at-large) raised concerns that the honors programs in the district are not following similar acceptance criteria as Worcester Tech, like having allocations by quadrant, for example.

And that concern makes sense when you look at the demographic data reported back in April 2024 for both the Burncoat Hanover Insurance honors program and the Goddard Scholars honors program (see above). Enrolled students in those programs do not reflect the WPS student body and disproportionately come from the Burncoat and Doherty quadrants. One data point that wasn’t included, but that I’d really want to see, is how many students are low-income versus non-low-income. At a recent school committee meeting Mailman requested updated demographic data for these programs and I will include that here when it is released.

Visual and Performing Arts Magnet at Burncoat Middle School.
The longest standing K-12 magnet program in the city (dating back to around 1985), the Visual and Performing Arts Magnet at Burncoat Middle and High School is a continuation of the K-6 Worcester Arts Magnet (WAMs). Students can concentrate in dance, media arts, music, visual arts and theater.

It’s my understanding that students who go to WAMs automatically get a spot in the magnet at Burncoat Middle, but I could not find that in writing anywhere. If your kid wants to join the magnet, but doesn’t go to WAMS, they can be a part of the arts magnet program if Burncoat Middle is their assigned middle school. If you don’t live in the Burncoat quadrant, you would need to submit a voluntary transfer request to attend. As far as I can tell, this is less of a separate admissions process and more about whether Burncoat is your assigned school or whether you’re able to transfer in.

Voluntary transfer is the process families use to request that their child attend a different WPS school than the one they are assigned to. Students are accepted on a “case-by-case” basis, and transportation is only provided if a student receives specialized transportation as a related service through an IEP or 504.

While not explicitly stated in the policy, which can be found on page 5 of the student handbook, families are told in practice that voluntary transfer can be rescinded for “lack of seats, attendance, or other issues.” That kind of case-by-case decision making, combined with the ability to rescind a placement for essentially any reason, creates an inequitable process for families. It means there is no real transparency around how many seats are available at different schools, who gets them, or who decides.

I have heard stories of favoritism in the voluntary transfer process, including seats being held for gifted athletes, district employee’s kids, students that school committee members advocate for, or for certain arts magnet students. But it is hard to verify these stories because the process itself is not transparent. And that is a problem: when there is no clear system for who gets access and why, families are left to rely on rumors, relationships, and luck. A public school system should not have a process this consequential operating this informally.

Worcester Dual Language Magnet School.
The district recently announced that the Spanish/English dual language program 7th and 8th grade will no longer be at Burncoat Middle, but will be at Worcester Dual Language Magnet School. If space is available, students can join in 7th or 8th grade if they speak, read and write in both English and Spanish. This is a big change, but one that could create a stronger and more cohesive pathway for students continuing in dual language through middle school.

University Park Campus School.
University Park Campus School (UPCS) is a 7-12 school and the application is open to students who live within the UPCS zone. According to the district, the school’s partnership with Clark University means student teachers provide individualized support, students have access to Clark’s athletic facilities, and upperclassmen can take courses at Clark and could qualify for the Neighborhood Scholarship, which covers four years of free tuition as long as they have lived in the UPCS zone for at least five years before enrolling. Enrollment for students who live in the zone is determined by a blind lottery, with sibling preference.

A few other things to keep in mind.

High School Career Technical Education Admission: Admission to Worcester Tech is determined in part by the middle school a student attends. Lottery seats are distributed to each middle school based on its share of the total WPS 8th-grade enrollment. Below is the slot distribution for Worcester Tech’s incoming 9th graders (Class of 2030).

For the CTE programs at Doherty, North and South High Schools, there are no seat allocations based on where students attend or live.

School hours: You can find school hours on each individual school’s website. The middle school day is 18 minutes longer than elementary school, and start times vary— some as early as 7:20 a.m. and others as late as 8:47 a.m. (This is also one of the things that could potentially change through the district’s realignment process.)

Transportation. If you live within two miles of the school, your kid will need to walk, take the city bus, or you’ll need to drive them; unless they qualify for specialized transportation services as written in their IEP or 504. If you live two miles or more away, they will generally be assigned a bus, assuming they are not a voluntary transfer student. Two miles is a lot, and one expressed goal in the realignment process is to create more transportation efficiencies, so that more students can get access to busing. But as of right now, two miles is the rule.

Extra-Curriculars: Every middle school has extra-curricular offerings, but what’s available may vary by school. You can check out athletics here, and here are examples of what’s offered at Worcester East Middle and the clubs offered at Burncoat Middle. I could not find similar sites for Sullivan and Forest Grove.

Star Scores. The district does not automatically send parents their students’ star scores, and they are not available in Woo Edu. You can sign up to get your student’s Star scores emailed to you when they take them. To do that, log in to their Clever account and then click on the Renaissance app. If you scroll to the bottom it says “For parents and guardians” and click “get email updates.” The only way you can get past Star scores is to ask your child’s teacher to send you the reports. If you do not know how to log in to your child’s clever account, it’s their school email as the username (student.studentidnumber@worcesterschools.net where studentidnumber is the 6 digit number assigned to your child) and the password is their birthday (DDMMYYYY).

I hope this is a helpful starting point for families trying to make sense of Worcester’s middle school options. If you’ve been through this process and have anything to add or correct, please share. I’d genuinely love to make this guide more useful and accurate for other families. You can reach me at aislinn.doyle@me.com

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Aries- The moon and the stars are facing off in the sky. The moon has the size but the stars have the reach! Sure the stars are fading, but the moon too waxes and wanes! It’s the fight of the universe and you are insignificant.

Taurus- If love is what makes a Subaru a Subaru. Then hate is what makes a Kia a Kia. Steal a catalytic converter.

Gemini- Don’t prank anyone this April Fools. Just act like you’re being pranked all day. Offended or amazed, you pick the path. To act is to prank.

Cancer- The weather is getting nicer, the birds are chirping, the squirrels are chasing each other to begin to mate. Take a note from spring, show off your legs, sing a song and be relentless towards your potential partners.

Leo- Reportedly Banksy’s identity has been revealed. Remember there are always losers in the world who want to take any whimsy or mystery out your life. One day you’ve captured culture with your secret art, and the next you’re just a dude named Robin Gunningham.

Virgo- You are not the main character. You’re not even the dead body in Law & Order. You might be an audience member at the hockey game during Heated Rivalry. But most likely you’re getting swallowed up by the sea in The Day After Tomorrow.

Libra- Let’s play wiffle ball!

Scorpio- You’re going to get married soon, if you’re already married your partner is going to be so pissed.

Sagittarius- Get a new haircut. Take a big swing. Bring back the “Flock of Seagulls” look, you could be a trendsetter.

Capricorn- An apple a day keeps the doctor away. But a push up a day gets a guy screaming behind you that you need to do 14 more, then push this tire and then swing this rope! Now throw a heavy ball! You can do it and only I can help you! This is the cult of our gym!

Aquarius- Libra is going to invite you to play wiffle ball, but I’d prefer if you stayed home. You get too competitive and it just kind of kills the mood.

Pisces- It was your birthday last month. Just keep celebrating. The world is going to end soon.

NEWS

This Thursday, is the monthly show at Boland’s! We have Andrew Mayer headlining and he has already put out two incredible album’s and is about to record a third. Come see how the sausage is made!

Then on Friday I’ll be hosting one of my favorite band lineups to date at Ralph’s! Hedge is releasing a new EP, and they’ve invited Hey I’m Outside, Jake McKelvie, and Ezra Cohen to play as well. In between sets I’ll be telling some jokes. I really think it’s going to be great.

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Chris has more to say on the substance of the talk down below, but first I come to you hat and hand asking for a small amount of your hard earned money so that Chris and I and everyone else at Worcester Sucks can keep doing all the local journalism we do. Paid subscriptions are best, second best are tips, third best is merch orders.

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And if you like what you hear help us spread the word! Send it to a friend, post about it, go up to the person pumping gas on the other side of the gas pump and grab the phone out of their center console and type it into the address bar of their web browser—whatever you have to do, you do it. And yes that is financial advice.

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Chris here: A thing we talk around a lot in this is the dynamic of firefighters and the communities they serve vs. police and the communities they serve. I wanted to say two things:

First, firefighters put their turnout gear just as fast for a fire in the poorest neighborhood as they do the wealthiest one. In fact, they maybe do it faster for the poorest one. People say fire doesn’t discriminate, but that’s not entirely true. Fire discriminates in insidious ways- It discriminates in your landlord not noticing or caring that your boiler or wiring are pretty janky, because your landlord doesn’t have to live there. It discriminates in how dense your housing situation is, and how fire suppressed it is to the standards of that density. It discriminates in who lives in housing units that aren’t even legally habitable units, as we saw on Gage Street. It discriminates in how adaptive to escaping a fire your housing is if you’re disabled and/or have mobility issues. It discriminates in how fucked you are if you survive a fire and have to deal with the financial ruin that a fire inevitably causes. Etc. The theme of this one for me is I could go on but I won’t.

Second, I have this weird lived experience where I have been on the scene of hundreds of fires, first as a firefighter, next as a Disaster Services volunteer for the Red Cross, and finally as just what is known as a “buff”, or a person who loves watching and documenting a fire department at work.

If you know what you’re doing, you can get very, very close to the scene of most working fires. Don’t put yourself in a dangerous position and don’t impede the firefighting operations, and you can get close enough to feel the heat and have your eyes burn with the smoke. UDizzy1969, who comes up in the episode, has nearly all-access videos from almost every fire of consequence in Worcester for years. One of our unsung heroes tbh.

Back when I was learning about how to navigate a fire scene as a “non-combatant”, I remarked to a photographer who was a retired firefighter about how close they let us get. He said “Firefighters do a job to be proud of, and they are very proud of what they do”. I never forgot that. Who wouldn’t be happy about being documented doing the “public safety” job they do when it’s rescuing people and putting out fires and pulling people out of wrecked cars and all of that. I’ll leave it to you to compare and contrast that to another division of alleged “public safety”, and how transparent they are about letting random people document their work.

Last Call Foundation

IAFF (the main firefighter’s union) calls for a federal investigation into fire apparatus price-fixing

MA, NY Firefighters File Lawsuit Over PFAS In Firefighting PPE

If you want to get pumped up by watching another amazing firefighting documentary, here’s “Burn” (2012) in it’s entirety.

“Burnin’ Down The House” documentary on Instagram, and Facebook

Intro by Bill Shaner 3.30.26

Outro: “Burnin’ Down The House”, cover by Bonnie Raittv

April 2 School Committee Meeting
The next school committee meeting is scheduled for April 2. Executive session starts at 5 p.m. and the regular meeting is scheduled to start at 5:30 p.m. The actual start time depends on how long the executive session takes. See the agenda here. You can watch it via zoom or Youtube Live. Spanish translation is available on zoom.

Here’s my preview:

Executive Session consists of discussing collective bargaining strategy, as well as strategy with respect to negotiations for Tammy Murray, Director of Special Education (and husband of Tim Murray).

Adding Recess to the Middle Schools.
There is a public petition from Sullivan Middle School students requesting that recess be added back to the middle schools.

Report of the Superintendent

This month’s Report of the Superintendent is on Autism program updates. The focus is on the SAIL program, which stands for Specialized Approaches to Individual Learning.

New Elementary Math Curriculum Approval.
There’s an item requesting the school committee authorize the purchase of a six-year contract for a new elementary math curriculum, Reveal Math, not to exceed $3.2 million. The backup does not include the contract up for authorization.

For some background, the district says the new curriulum would provide more consistent instruction across schools, stronger supports for multilingual learners, more opportunities for discourse and problem solving, and better alignment with grades 7–12, which have been using Reveal since last fall. District leaders feel that because teachers have been heavily supplementing the current curriculum, students are not receiving the same learning experience across classrooms. They have also pointed to the fact that Reveal is already being used in grades 7 through Algebra 2, saying a K–6 adoption would improve K–12 “vertical alignment.” (I was not able to find examples of other Massachusetts districts using the same curriculum across K–12.)

At the Teaching, Learning, and Student Success subcommittee discussion on March 23, math curriculum liaison Heather Farrington described Reveal as offering stronger language supports, more structured problem solving, more opportunities for student discourse and collaboration, built-in differentiation, better digital tools, and a clearer lesson structure. The district also outlined a yearlong implementation plan intended to support the transition. Farrington said elementary curriculum maps would be updated by mid-May, followed by district onboarding in early June and several days of training for teachers. If some of that training takes place during the school day, it could also mean teachers are pulled from classrooms, raising concern about substitute coverage and lost instructional time for students during the transition.

Questions remain about both the process and the timing of the change. Elementary teachers did not pilot the curriculum, and it was not clear how they were involved in the selection process. The teachers’ union was also not informed until the proposal appeared on the School Committee agenda. At the same time, district data reportedly shows that midyear math performance across grades 1–9 is currently the highest it has been since Worcester began using the Star assessment.

Other Items.

• Sue Mailman (at-large) has an item requesting the implementation of a formal process for logging race-related complaints across all sports.

• There is a report on the progress of the high school grading change to “mastery based grading” and an update on the roll out for middle school which is planned for the start of the 2026-2027 school year.

• An update on programs that address cyber bullying and social media

  ---

Proposed Policy Updates.

A bunch of proposed policy updates are up for approval, including:

• The removal of the third party service opt-out form as related to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act

• A policy update that due to electronic messages between public officials potentially being considered public records, “the district shall provide district e-mail addresses, cellular telephones, and laptop or iPad to members of the School Committee, which are archived” and the school committee members must use these for all district business

• A policy clarification that schools cannot host raffles or games of chance as the sponsoring organization, and that students and student groups are also barred from hosting raffles and games of chance, and from participating in sales or buying tickets.

  ---

That’s it. Have a good week! If you have feedback you can always get in touch: aislinn.doyle@me.com

A taste: H. Ladd Plumley, the chairman of State Mutual Life Insurance (Hanover Insurance), and the one-time head of both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Worcester Redevelopment Authority received a letter from George Herbert Walker Poppy Bush on July 22, 1980 that read...

Dear Ladd,

Your letter to Governor Reagan must have done the trick.

I am honored to have been placed on the ticket and Bar and I will work our hearts out to insure his election. Jimmy Carter must go for the good of the country.

Thanks so much for your support.

Sincerely,

George Bush

(dictated but not signed)

Just five days earlier, Reagan made the last-minute decision to add Bush as his running mate, effectively ending the competitive primary contest between the two, and consolidating what would end up being a decades long and nearly complete capture of the federal government by “the free market” that is in many ways ongoing though I think we can admit it’s mutated slightly from the haughty “high minded” days of Plumley and Co’s silent corporate coup. Whatever Plumley said to Reagan—that letter didn’t end up in the archives—did “the trick,” as Bush put it. And here we are, four or five failed Middle East wars later, in the throes of our dumbest one yet, with H. Ladd Plumley to thank, apparently, for all of it.

An interesting hingepoint: What if Worcester’s own little Robert Moses didn’t throw his political weight behind the fusion of Bush and Reagan? An unholy matrimony of the proto-Trump sensationalist media politics in Reagan and Bush’s Spook Skullduggery that, among a million other evil things, put Dick Cheney in charge of the Department of Defense.... What If Reagan Would Have Chosen Someone Else If Worcester’s Biggest Historical Dickhead Didn’t Cash In His Ill-Gotten Political Capital? There’s a version of events where Plumley minds his own business, Dukakis wins, and we’ve got a three hour train to Chicago. Instead, we ended up in the reality where you might get to see a doctor.

This letter’s one of the more interesting standalone tidbits gleaned from a 15 hour session over multiple days at the Museum of Worcester library, poring through dusty bins that haven’t been opened in at least eight years, I’m told. Some, I was the first. There’s so so so much more. In order to get back to that work, I gotta do this work though. Please subscribe!

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The city council meeting is going on as I type this. I’m not watching because I need to re-evaluate this newsletter’s approach to the council in a big way. The thought of having to write about these people and what they do is a major contributing factor to the massive block I’ve been dealing with over the past couple weeks. I cannot find an honest reason to care, and won’t insult my readers with a pandering faux enthusiasm. The only question worth asking about the city council is why it’s so useless, and I’ve got nothing new to add to that discussion at the moment. I’ve contributed my fair share over the years.

On the agenda tonight there’s city reports on leaf collection and street sweeping. So... that’s four hours of diffuse grievance airing right there. And then another report on Newton Hill (originally preserved as a fire buffer between the West Side and the slums—I will never pass on an opportunity to bring that up.) So tack on another two hours. Nothing, at the end of the day, will get accomplished that wouldn’t have gotten accomplished without them. They’ll likely make a few things harder and more annoying for the real city government in the process.

It gets harder and harder to give a crap about this council. They are worse than useless. I’ll watch the meeting on double speed with a transcript tomorrow. Just because they don’t value their time doesn’t mean we all have to masochistically fall into the same hole.

Here’s the agenda. And here’s a public Google Drive folder I set up for links I need to share here that aren’t otherwise available: “WorcSux - Public Links”. Something to bookmark if you just want a repository of easy to access links relative to Worcester stuff. It’s going to end up being mostly agendas and minutes and other city documents.

I’ll say it one more time I guess: It is insane that you cannot get a standalone link for an agenda with the city’s new system. PrimeGov, at least the way Worcester has it implemented, fucking sucks.

Then again, should we expect any better from the city that surreptitiously decided to block any and all social media engagement?

Then again squared, This Week In Worcester has some of the screenshots of the shit people were saying about the South High girls basketball team a few days before this ban went into place... Will not be repeating any of it here in any form. But it’s a friendly reminder this city is extremely racist, in ways we have yet to even come close to reckoning with. And now that it’s apparently out of style to “do woke” I don’t foresee a circumstance in which we will.

That’s what was animating a joke I made at the Roast of Worcester on Saturday that definitely landed the worst of all of them.

—”Civility” has returned to the city council! Now that we’ve gotten rid of all the women and queers.

Every meeting now is just the last five minutes of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm

‘Grandstanding? Oh grandstanding? Oh im not grandstanding you’re grandstanding’

But instead of five punchy minutes it’s five agonizing hours

Here’s one that hit though...

—Someone should tug on Kate Toomey’s hair and see if it’s a disguise like in Scooby Doo

‘Gahhhh it was Anthony Petrone the whole time?!’

Just kidding. No one do that to Kate Toomey. That’d be assault and battery on a make-a-wish police officer.

And here’s one contributor at-large Gillian Ganesan wrote as soon as they showed up to the White Room, ripped off a stiff martini or two at Femme, spitting hot fire like it’s nothing.

Yeah I’m on Grindr... for work. I gotta check and make sure Eric Batista is putting in full days at City Hall.

I had all intentions of doing it then forgot. Woulda hit hard.

There’ll be video of it eventually but there isn’t any right now. Will share when it’s available.

Stuff coming up!

Tomorrow (Wednesday): There’s a fundraiser and community celebration for Etel Haxhiaj at Mint. 7-9 p.m. See you there! Funds are going toward the appeal process and to LUCE. You can donate here as well.

Progressive Worcester, a new political advocacy group, is holding its first meeting tomorrow as well at 5:30 p.m. Jonathan Cohn is speaking which is pretty cool I like him. Takes place at 301 Pleasant Street.

Also on Wednesday (sheesh) Remembering and Imagining A Vernon Connected Exhibition and Workshop 6 to 8 p.m. at Girls Inc. (125 Providence Street)

The idea is it’s a workshop to look at the bridge, at the surrounding neighborhoods, what they used to be like before the highway and what they could be with a better bridge design. While you can attend the whole thing, the organizers say it’s perfectly fine to bop in for a few minutes, leave some ideas if you have any, then head off into the gray March night to do whatever it was you were gunna do anyway.

Here’s a dropbox folder with some slides and such. Vernon Connected - Dropbox

Aaand Ghost of Christmas Future I guess, the Laurel Street Bridge will be closed starting Thursday 5 a.m. until April 3. Telegram: Laurel Street Bridge over I-290 to be closed for upgrades

On Thursday, an interesting labor action at Holy Cross. Justice For Contingents, a grassroots campaign to pressure the administration for better treatment and protections for non-tenured faculty, is holding a rally at 3:30 p.m. on the Fenwick Lawn. I’ll probably go down there and check it out, loathe as I am to spend any time at all on the most accursed grounds in the city. Here’s a release from the newly formed group about the rally and the mission.

Worcester, MA— Justice for Contingents – Holy Cross, a grassroots campaign at Holy Cross, will hold a rally calling on Holy Cross’ administration to respond to concerns raised by contingent faculty. The rally will take place on March 26 at 3:30pm on the Fenwick lawn.

On March 10, 2026, Holy Cross’s Faculty Assembly voted 137 to 3 in favor of a resolution directing the administration to “devise acceptable remedies to the concerns identified” by contingent faculty. The administration has yet to respond with their proposed remedies.

The Rally will bring together students, contingent faculty members, and tenured and tenure-track faculty allies to ask the administration to address identified concerns about the lack of Security, Equity, and Transparency they face. Speakers will underscore how the Holy Cross Mission calls on the college to address contingent concerns.

Following the gathering on the Fenwick lawn, rally participants will walk down Linden Lane to the college’s main gates and stand in front of the Holy Cross seal. Rally participants will distribute information about the campaign and campaign leaders will be available for questions.

Justice for Contingents has noted that about one third of the faculty is made up of contingent faculty and teach over half of the courses offered on campus. Many contingent faculty at Holy Cross work on year-to-year contracts and face a mandated end to contract renewal after 5 years. They also lack an internal pathway to promotion. Contingent pay is substantially lower than that of their tenure-track colleagues, despite the fact that they carry a comparable workload. Meanwhile, Holy Cross has not published a salary scale with clearly defined raises, and contingents have observed and reported salary inconsistencies. Research funding for contingents has decreased over the past five years, and contingents now only receiving about 80% of promised support.

Then a little further out but the news broke this week: arraignments for the four state police officers charged in connection with the boxing ring death of Worcester recruit Enrique Delgado-Garcia will be held on April 2 for three of them and April 14 for one. The arraignments will be held at 2 p.m. (a cushy timeslot, gotta love the way the solidarity of Massachusetts law enforcement community manifests) at the Worcester courthouse, where a remake of Michaelangelo’s “Moses,” a recurring fascination of Sigmund Freud’s, oversees a straight four-story drop in the middle of the building with no protections against jumpers despite the jumpings in recent memory. Freud pondered the strange angle of repose chosen by Michelangelo, fascinated by how it captured a certain psychic kickback—the moment of introspection following an angry lashing out.

News you can use folks!

Freud’s only trip to America was brought on by an invitation from Clark University, and he spent most of his three weeks in Worcester. His conclusion upon leaving: “America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake it is true, but nonetheless a mistake.”

Good sir I do concur…

In case you missed it, there was a hugely significant lawsuit filed against the WPD on the question of whether they are breaking ADA by sending 100 percent cops to medical emergencies of the mental variety, versus more reasonable responses like EMTs to the physical variety. We covered it in depth on the most recent episode of Outdoor Cats.

A dirty little secret of the WPD is mental health “wellness checks” make up an inordinate amount of their dispatches. Should those be put into more capable hands, the question of what it is exactly the cops do all day will become even more unavoidable. And then maybe we can start having some productive conversations about how we might adequately fund the DPW via some light restructuring in other areas of the municipality.

For now, though, we’re all being forced to swallow this carefully orchestrated line, the product of multiple ‘press invites’ to different outlets for ‘exclusive’ tours that make the reporters feel oh so special and in on it, that the police are in desperate need of a new headquarters building. Our roads are from The Road and as best I can tell the main complaint about that building is the locker rooms sorta suck. Big whoop! Shower at home like the rest of us.

Can you imagine teachers complaining about such things? In a just world not a day goes by where a teacher has to buy their own school supplies that a cop is not filling his cruiser’s tank off his personal debit card. Hard absolutely not to a new police station, not that you or I have a say in the matter. It’s not like this is a democracy...

Odds and ends

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My friend Sam down in Rhode Island (we won’t hold it against her) is putting together a really cool podcast project called “Hex Line,” coming out in earnest sometime in the summer. I did the theme song for it, which you can hear in the teaser they just released. Check it out! The mandate was psych rock that’s a little sexy, a little spooky. I really like how it came out.

Friendly reminder I am open for musical commissions—podcast music, soundtrack, tracking or editing or mixing or (rough, non-professional) mastering. I simply love making tunes I churn them out pretty much every day. Billshaner at Substack Dot Com.

This from This Week In Worcester got a chuckle out of me haha Exclusive Interview: Potathan, Worcester’s Most Famous Pothole

Other stuff:

Skyscraper Plan for 19-story skyscraper with 225 apartments advances in Worcester - masslive.com

Been reading Exploit. Really solid new comic written by Laura Hudson and Tim Leong about journalism and private equity. I purchased Issue #1 on the recommendation of Spencer Ackerman over at Forever Wars (who’s been killing it on the coverage of the Iran stuff.)

And uhhhh good song right here.

Ended the most recent episode of DTF St. Louis (Love it love it love it. Whole soundtrack is killer.)

Talk soon!

Welcome to the March 2026 WPS in Brief. This month covers key topics from two school committee meetings and the redistricting forum, as well as some other important updates.

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Let’s dive in:

Potential Conflict of Interest.
The School Committee is currently negotiating contracts with multiple collective bargaining units, including teachers, assistant principals, paraeducators, and transportation staff, among others. Until this current committee, it was unprecedented in Worcester for a member to have immediate family employed by the district. Now, three members do: Maureen Binienda (daughter Mairecait Binienda, teacher), Kathleen Roy (daughter Katie O’Leary, School Adjustment Counselor), and Molly McCullough (husband Donald “Moose” Huban, Climate and Culture Specialist). Coincidentally, all of them work at Burncoat High. Binienda and Roy’s children were hired before they were elected to the school committee; McCullough’s husband was hired in August of 2024, while McCullough was serving on the school committee.1

Back on November 4, I requested the executive session minutes from previous meetings, which, after filing an Open Meeting Law complaint, I finally received on March 9. The minutes from September 18, October 9, and October 23 show that Binienda, McCullough, and Roy did not recuse themselves from discussions related to collective bargaining that could impact their family members.

A 1984 opinion from the State Ethics Commission states:

“School committee members may not participate in any way in the formulation, adoption or revision of any aspect of the budget or a collective bargaining strategy or position which may relate to the wages, hours or conditions of employment of any member of his or her immediate family employed by the school department. This principle must be followed both if the family member will be directly and immediately affected or if it is reasonably foreseeable that the family member’s interest will be affected.”

The first recorded recusals from Binienda, McCullough, and Roy happen at the November 20, 2025 meeting, sixteen days after my request. The minutes also note that “it was recommended that any individual with an ethics question contact the state board of ethics for guidance on recusals,” without identifying who made that recommendation.

There is precedent suggesting that even across different bargaining units, a financial interest may still exist if those units are part of a union that negotiates jointly across contracts. Binienda and Roy’s daughters are part of the A/B unit of the EAW, which includes teachers (A) and non-principal administrators (B). McCullough’s husband is part of the paraeducators unit. The EAW also represents bus drivers and monitors, parent liaisons, therapy assistant and ESL Tutors.

Given these circumstances, it appears that for at least a few meetings, multiple committee members participated in collective bargaining strategy conversations despite ethical guidance suggesting they should have recused themselves. This raises serious concerns about whether the integrity of the bargaining process was compromised, particularly given that these ethics laws exist to ensure public confidence and that elected officials remain loyal to the public interest.

Proposed New Math Curriculum.
The district has proposed adopting a new K–5 math curriculum, Reveal Math, to replace the current Savvas enVision Mathematics. However, the discussion at the March 19 school committee meeting left more questions than answers.

In discussion, Molly McCullough summarized the district’s report by framing this as a system-wide improvement and as an opportunity to upgrade instruction, align K–12 curriculum, and support strategic goals around equity, consistency, and high-quality education. She also noted how she appreciated the collaboration between elementary and secondary educators in this transition and pointed to early success in grades 7–12. But after extended questioning from multiple members, no clear evidence was presented by the district to support those claims. (For comparison, here’s an example of what another district did in its curriculum choosing process.)

There are also serious questions about the process. There was no clear explanation of how elementary teachers were involved in this decision, and no pilot was conducted. The rationale given was that this is an “extension” of the secondary curriculum, but K through 5 classrooms are fundamentally different environments, with different instructional needs. I also confirmed with the EAW that the teachers’ union was not informed of a potential curriculum change and only became aware of the proposal after it appeared on the school committee agenda, raising additional concerns about transparency and stakeholder engagement.

Looking more closely, both enVision and Reveal are rated as Tier 1, high-quality curricula by EdReports. Both “meet expectations” across key categories like focus, coherence, rigor, and mathematical practices. This is not a case where one curriculum is clearly better or more aligned than the other, and both already support the district’s stated goals.

A major justification offered was “K–12 vertical alignment.” But using the same publisher across grade levels does not, on its own, guarantee alignment. Vertical alignment depends on how content is implemented, how teachers are supported, and how well concepts build from year to year in actual classrooms. The district did not lay out any concrete plan on how that would happen with a new curriculum roll out. At the same time, midyear Star data shows math performance across grades 1–9 is currently the highest it has been since the district began using the assessment. It’s unclear what portion of that growth is happening at the secondary level, which switched to Reveal in the Fall of 2025, and whether a major shift at the elementary level could disrupt that progress.

All of this raises a fundamental issue: this proposal is moving forward without without clear evidence of how the new curriculum will perform in our classrooms. Curriculum changes at this scale carry some risk. When teachers are learning a new program, instruction is less consistent at first, which is normal, but can impact students. The district is only in its third year of implementing a new ELA curriculum, and many teachers are finally becoming comfortable with it; adding another large-scale change raises legitimate concerns about capacity, implementation, and teacher buy-in which the district has not yet addressed with evidence or data.

The item now moves to the Teaching, Learning, and Student Success subcommittee on March 26 for further discussion, with approval planned for the April 5 School Committee meeting.

Key Takeaways from the District Realignment Community Forum.

On March 23 there was a district realignment community forum, aka the meeting of the decade (click that link for background, I’m not going to cover that here). The Telegram has some good coverage, too. Basically, the consultant the district hired to facilitate the process gave an overview (you can see the slidedeck here) and then most of the time was an open floor for public comments. There was also an initial input survey and mapping tool to provide feedback. A consistent thread to the public comments was the need to make sure decisions are equitable, transparent, and inclusive from the start. Here are my takeaways:

Transportation: Transportation, or lack thereof, was the topic of the evening. Parents expressed safety concerns, lack of clarity on eligibility, and the need for more access. Bus eligibility, walk zones, and overlapping school start times were identified as major constraints for the district right now. The consultant said they are exploring changing the tiered start times for schools which could potentially allow for expanded transportation access due to improved efficiencies. Though these changes introduce additional complexity to the redistricting process.

Equity & Systemwide Consistency: Participants emphasized the need to address historical inequities, ensure socioeconomic diversity, and create a more consistent, clear enrollment system. Parents voiced frustration with inconsistencies across the system, particularly around magnet schools, feeder patterns, and voluntary transfer policies. These inconsistencies were seen as undermining predictability for families and raising broader equity concerns about who has access to which opportunities.

Student Impact: Families expressed concern about disruption to students, and stressed the need for maintaining peer groups and minimizing reassignment. The consultant emphasized the district’s intent of minimizing disruption, and that efforts will be made to avoid reassigning students already enrolled in schools whenever possible.

School Capacity: The district is analyzing over-enrollment and under-enrollment at schools, with updated capacity data expected soon. People at the meeting felt that they needed that information to better understand the development of school boundary scenarios. And participants emphasized the need to account for future enrollment trends and potential other factors, including shifts in enrollment tied to immigration enforcement.

Community Engagement: While the district has prioritized outreach through forums and surveys, participants raised concerns about accessibility, including the overreliance on technology, language barriers, and bias in how feedback is collected. There were strong calls for more inclusive engagement, especially with multilingual families, and for parents and students to be included in the working group now. (The vibe was an emphasis on NOW, aka YESTERDAY…and just a plug from me to have a public nomination process or something, because inevitably they pick the parents who have political connections.)

Those are my quick takeaways. The next community forums are April 15 and May 5. Mark your calendars!

Family and Community Engagement.

At the March 19 school committee meeting the family and community engagement office and the communications office presented the report of the superintendent on family and community engagement. The report touched on how family and community engagement remains a central focus of the district’s strategic plan, and is grounded in values of partnership, equity, access, shared responsibility, and authentic voice. With the goal of improving attendance, academic outcomes, and students’ sense of belonging, Director Casey Starr emphasized a more intentional, systemwide approach that is moving from reactive responses to streamlined, proactive systems that ensure families don’t fall through the cracks. Key efforts include strengthening parent groups, expanding shared decision-making, increasing access to translation and interpretation, and continuing to build out the role of wraparound coordinators, now in their third year in every school, and universally described as transformative.

On the communications side, Chief Communications Officer Dan O’Brien described how the district has developed a more cohesive framework spanning internal, external, and crisis communication. Internally, this includes weekly principal updates, a new all-staff newsletter, and a centralized memo system. Externally, tools like the ParentSquare platform have significantly improved communication, particularly through real-time AI translation, with survey data showing strong family preference for text-based updates and overall improvement in communication over time. Next steps include refining data collection of surveys and finalizing a communications framework to guide long-term strategy.

Meeting Moment.

At the March 5 school committee meeting, the district had a report back in response to two items from Jermaine Johnson (district F) and Alex Guardiola (district D) around district accountability and MCAS. The report outlines three key indicators in the state’s accountability report: MCAS scores, chronic absenteeism, and graduation rates. In the meeting moment above, Maureen Binienda talks about ways to “get more points” on these accountability measures, raising the question as to whether the district should chase accountability for accountability’s sake, and what actual outcomes that will have on a student’s education.

This report is specifically for Hispanic students, English learners, and students with disabilities and outlines ways schools are trying to motivate students to take the MCAS seriously, including “friendly competitions.”

As you see in the chart above, the pattern from previous years continues, with scores fluctuating the same way as the state. This fluctuation continues to raise questions of the validity of the MCAS as an assessment. In terms of the breakdown between the different student demographics in the report, one thing worth noting is the high degree of intersectionality for the Hispanic and English learner groups–last year about 45 percent of English learners also identified as Hispanic. This overlap means that when looking at testing data, nearly half of the Hispanic subgroup’s test scores are heavily influenced by language proficiency. At the end of the report is an extensive description of the district action plan to improve these metrics, as well as a section on roles and responsibilities.

If you read me frequently, you know that when standardized tests come up I will continue to emphasize that:

• Out-of-school factors have the biggest impact on MCAS, like language spoken at home, family income, and parent’s education.

• Research shows that children who are bilingual and biliterate outperform their monolingual peers on standardized tests, something that is true in Worcester, where former ELs in elementary school have the highest percentage meeting or exceeding expectations on the MCAS of any demographic group.

• One third of Worcester’s student body is a year younger than every other district in Massachusetts, so developmentally it is not an equal comparison.

And repeat after me: MCAS scores ≠ literacy rates!

Recommended Reads.
South High basketball players targeted by racist social mediacomments

Worcester adds 20 electric school buses to move city “into the future”

With fewer students and higher costs, many Massachusetts districts weigh school closures and mergers

Upcoming Dates.
All school committee meetings have virtual options with Spanish translation. See the school committee site for more information.

• Teaching, Learning and Student Supports is March 26, 5pm

• Finance, Operations and Governance is March 30 5pm

• School Committee Meetings are April 2 and April 16, 5:30pm

  ---

Also.
Just a reminder that it’s budget season and it is the most important thing you can pay attention to if you care about schools. Wish it was a shorter walk radius for secondary schools? Want to have smaller classes? Wish all elementary schools had an after school program? It all comes down to how the school committee decides to allocate the budget. For the details of the preliminary budget, read last month’s brief.

And I guess it should go without saying that all that will go out the window depending on the status of federal funding. WPS gets $52.3 million a year from the federal government, which completely funds student nutrition, head start, and entitlement grants. That money supports 460 jobs and is 6.5% of the budget. According to a Superintendent’s Update on March 10, DESE shared “the preliminary Census data indicates a 10 percent drop in Massachusetts’ share of the national poverty total. Therefore, we anticipate a significant decrease to Massachusetts’ Title I award for FY27.” According to the FY 26 (2025-2026 school year) Budget Book, “These funds support a portion of the Grants Director, 63 instructional coaches, 44 wraparound coordinators, and five other program and support positions.”

Thanks for reading. I hope these briefs are helping you stay informed without feeling overwhelmed. If they are, please consider a paid subscription or a tip to support the dozens of hours of work it takes me to put these together. See you next month!

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Forgot to mention ‘on air’ that I’m doing the Roast of Worcester tomorrow (Saturday, March 21) at the White Room. All proceeds go to LUCE! Come hang. Send me some jokes I’m fresh out. Billshaner91 at Substack Dot Com.

Chris recaps St. Patty’s Day in Worcester, which he does the right way unlike most of us, who tend to drink more like craven Englishmen than the esteemed and steady All-Day Irish.

Three groups have filed an ADA lawsuit in federal court against the Worcester Police Department for dispatching trained professionals to physical medical emergencies and condescending and often violent dicks with guns to medical emergencies of the mental variety. We read a few choice spots from the complaint.

Afroman Wins Civil Trial Over Use of Police Raid Footage in His Music Videos

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Intro music by Bill Shaner 3.19.26

Outro: “Lemon Pound Cake” by Afroman

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Dear Shaun,

I really believe in my heart of hearts that my friend should sing “Somebody’s Watching Me” by Rockwell. I have had heard him sing this song twice. One time while cooking dinner and then another when it came on the radio on a road trip. They crush it. He says that he can’t sing, and I say that is kind of the charm of karaoke! Can you please convince him that it is a good idea and the next time we got out to karaoke that he sing, and sing Rockwell’s seminal work?

-Singing Savior

Dear Singing Savior,

I love karaoke. The Hot Dog Safari Crew regularly hit up karaoke, either just because or as a way to unwind post-event. While we have fun, the rest of the patrons that night have a binary reaction. They are either on board with the freaks who just showed and embrace the weird that is about to happen for the next three hours, or they are very mad that they have to hear me scream sing “Livin’ La Vida Loca” by Ricky Martin. They just want to sing “Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston with perfect pitch because they used to be the solo singer in high school chorus or played Sandra Dee in Grease at their community theatre. And we kind of dampen that mood, because we are mongrels selling each song with toddler confidence.

Your friend does a good job singing Rockwell’s song. That’s great for him. If he regularly sings karaoke with you and is too scared to sing that one, I say he’s dumb and should just do it. What are you afraid of? Most people just won’t make eye contact with you, which at a karaoke bar can be one of the objectives. If he doesn’t regularly sing karaoke, why would you put him through that humiliation ritual? This person may just like singing in their car or while they cook. You don’t have to push him into a room to perform a song in front of drunken strangers.

Think about the types of people that go to karaoke. There’s the cowboy: the guy who dresses like a cowboy and sings in a drawl and brings the house down when he sing “Friends in Low Places” by Garth Brooks, but then he talks to your friend a little too long about how he feels lonely or how he lost everything in the divorce. There’s the person I mentioned before who is a really good singer and kind of makes you question why you’re even out that night to sing. These people are good and it is annoying. Then there are the two friends who think they know every word to “Mesmerize” by Ja Rule and Ashanti but they don’t and they just laugh into the mic. There’s the guy who does know every word to any Shaggy song and him doing the voice makes you feel weird. These are all people that should be embraced, but kept at a distance. And now you want to throw your innocent friend into this mix?

I get it, this is more of a plea to get your friend to share an experience with you. You like karaoke, and this friend has expressed his doubts about participating. So, you found a song that would make him feel comfortable to sing and therefore you can enjoy a night out together. You know what I say? Just ask him out. It doesn’t have to be karaoke. It can just be dinner. I don’t know your relationship status, but just based off this question I can tell you’re into him. You know what? I’ll pay for that dinner. You tell me where you’re going and I’ll call ahead and pay. Heck, maybe I’ll even show up to and sit at another table and witness my matchmaking. As you are dining and talking and realizing that spending time with each other was the real reason for any of the karaoke business, you may feel my eyes. You can’t exactly tell where I am but you can feel my stare. Maybe, you’ll say to yourself or to your friend it feels like somebody’s watching me. You’re welcome for dinner, now get the chocolate lava cake.

NEWS

Saturday is a big night in Worcester. At 8 p.m. we have The Roast of Worcester at The White Room. It is a fundraiser for LUCE Massachusetts. Bill, my boss here, will be on it as well as Bryan O’Donnell, Molly O’Connor, Yawlito, Vi, Nate Hilli, Doug Guertin, and the prodigal son Paul Henry. Donate whatever you can and come hang at one of the most fun shows we put on each year.

When that show ends you got to go to Ralph’s. Caregiver is having a record release party. You may remember a good friend of ours Isaac died last year, and Caregiver is his band. This show is going to be wild and cathartic and you should definitely go and support a great Worcester band.