WPS in Brief April 2025

New Commissioner, Superintendent Steps Down, Vision of a Learner, Fundraising Burden

Welcome to the 28th issue of WPS in Brief. This month covers key topics from two school committee meetings and two subcommittee meetings.

Let’s get to it:

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¡New Commish!

​​“And we always, unapologetically, always look at students that are farthest from opportunity.” -Pedro Martinez, new Massachusetts Education Commissioner

In a week full of depressing education news, I wanted to lead with one glimmer of hope: Pedro Martinez has been chosen as the new Massachusetts Education Commissioner. The commissioner oversees the Department of Elementary and Secondary education (DESE) which “provides leadership, oversight, funding, support, and accountability for the Commonwealth's approximately 400 school districts.” Martinez moved to the US from Mexico when he was five, grew up in poverty, and graduated from Chicago Public Schools. He has been a superintendent in Nevada, San Antonio, and most recently Chicago. The quote I most appreciated from his interview as it relates to Worcester: “I always have this caveat: the proficiency rates that are in our schools are a reflection of the poverty in that community. The growth you see, that’s a reflection of the practices in the schools. And that’s where you hold people accountable." In a city like ours, that receives over half its funding from the state, what happens at the state level has a big impact, so Martinez’s appointment is hopeful news.

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Superintendent Rachel Monárrez Steps Down.

And in not-so-hopeful news, Superintendent Monárrez is leaving at the end of the school year to go back to California. She still had two years left in her contract, but, as she said in an interview with Manny Jae Media, the decision had a very relatable motive: prioritizing her family. In that interview Manny articulated beautifully a feeling I am hearing from people in the community: “Emotionally it’s going to be a struggle, but systematically we are in a good place.” The Superintendent has brought some much needed outsider perspective to Worcester. As any good leader who cares about succession planning, she has built up a team to carry forward the work. At the April 17 school committee meeting she said she’s confident that the team she has cultivated can continue the vision. Here is that team (also known as “the Cabinet”): 

The superintendent’s cabinet from the 2024-2025 budget book. The executive director of the South Quadrant, Dr. Timothy Sippel, is now the Superintendent of Malden Public Schools. His replacement, Shannon Conley, was recently appointed Assistant Superintendent of Waltham Public Schools and will start that job June 30. A new south quadrant ED has not been publicly announced.

As a parent, my number one priority is stability for our kids and for our educators. Keeping the strategic plan as our north star is paramount and we need a new superintendent who will commit to continuing in that direction. Personally, I think we have people on the leadership team right now who can do that.

So what’s next? The school committee now has to do one of their most important jobs: hire another superintendent. Hopefully there will be an item on the next school committee agenda so the committee can share their plan for a process and timeline. 

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Vision of a Learner.

The Report of the Superintendent for both school committee meetings in April covered the implementation of the Vision of a Learner framework. The district created a task force that looked at each of the seven implementation strategies:

The report went through each implementation strategy, and talked through accomplishments and the next steps.

• Culture of Innovation: Focused on leadership development and school growth plans. Next steps are creating AI guiding principles for educators and intentional incorporation of VOL in Principal and Assistant Principal professional learning.

• Curriculum & Pathway Alignment: Updating curriculum maps and pathways to reflect innovation and multilingual learners. Next steps are to develop a tool to help elementary students self-assess their strengths and implement the culturally responsive auditing tool in the curriculum maps.

• Communication & Outreach: Expanding Vision of a Learner visibility through videos, WooStars posts, and parent engagement. Next steps are creating more videos and collaborating with parent groups.

• VOL in Action: Ongoing professional development and educator support, and next steps are sustaining and deepening professional learning and creating onboarding materials for new teachers.

• Spark Coaches & Teachers: These are innovator educators piloting strategies to guide VOL across the district. Right now there are 17 spark coaches across 12 schools with the plan to add 20 more coaches next year.

• Spark School: Wawecus Road School has been the pilot spark school, where teachers pilot unit and lesson planning for innovation and pilot elements of the learning journey like artifacts, reflections and digital portfolio tools.

• Learning Journey & Digital Portfolios: Focus on elevating student agency, identity, and voice in learning. With digital portfolios students curate artifacts showing growth aligned with VOL.

Through real classroom examples, the presentation demonstrated instructional shifts that are happening as the district moves from traditional to more authentic, student-centered learning. My favorite such example was a video that six graders at Belmont St. School students created to demonstrate learning in their social studies class. Ed Tech Coach Annie Cohn, who gave much of the second presentation, really impressed me with her depth of knowledge and authentic excitement about the Vision of a Learner. A nice part of the Superintendent’s reports is hearing from WPS employees doing the work on the ground.

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Autism Resolution.

Nelly Medina, a WPS parent and candidate for school committee district E, brought a public petition proposing a resolution in recognition of Autism Acceptance and Awareness month. The petition was heard at the April 17 meeting and many members of the public came to speak in support. It passed unanimously by the committee without any surprise rewrites.

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Fundraising Burden.

At the April 17 school committee meeting Molly McCullough (district A) clarified an item to fully fund special arts chorus at Worcester Arts Magnet School (WAMS), saying  “Special chorus is an offering at WAMS that is provided as part of the curriculum at the school. We already provide the educator for that initiative and this I believe is a smaller dollar amount so I’d ask that this go to FOG for consideration so that it takes off some of the burden for fundraising that some of the families do for an actual offering that we currently provide.” The smaller dollar amount is $3,000 to support travel to performances. It’s my understanding that WAMS is not the only elementary school with a special chorus, but I am still waiting on the district to confirm that. 

While the Superintendent called the $3,000 “inconsequential” to the WPS budget, it is not inconsequential to the majority of elementary schools which have a far greater fundraising burden than WAMS. Worcester's challenge in having socioeconomically segregated schools means that financial, social and political capital is imbalanced and it creates major inequities around fundraising and access to resources. According to demographic data for the 24-25 school year WAMS (42.5 percent low income) is the third wealthiest school in the district, after Flagg St. (27.9 percent low income) and West Tatnuck (38.5 percent low income). The WAMS PTO raises around $20,000 a year, which is about $54 per student. For context, Flagg St. raises about $60 per student a year and West Tatnuck raises about $58 per student. In contrast, Worcester Dual Language Magnet (61.7 percent low income) raises about $29 per student a year, Gates Lane (73.7 percent low income) raises about $9 per student a year, Woodland (88.6 percent low income) raises about $3 per student a year, and Belmont St. (89.4 percent low income) raises $0 per student per year.¹ The burden of fundraising is not the same across our 33 elementary schools. This is not a matter of who works harder, or which school has more parent involvement, but who has access to resources.

Neighborhood schools are culturally entrenched in Worcester, and it’s a model that I don’t imagine will change anytime soon. But it exacerbates socioeconomic segregation in our city (and it is a choice to keep it that way). A whopping forty-five percent of WPS elementary schools have 83 percent or more low income students, with a median of 87 percent. On the other hand, just 27 percent have 60 percent or less low income students, with a median of 47 percent.² It’s also worth noting that since passage of the Student Opportunity Act, districts receive more funding for low-income students, but Worcester does not allocate money to individual schools according to those demographics.

It is a choice to consider earmarking limited WPS dollars for a school that currently (and historically) has more resources. There are plenty of curricular offerings at other lower-resourced schools within the district that are not receiving full funding. Short of creating an equity policy I’m not sure how else to ensure the school committee takes that into consideration.  

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Net School Spending.

On March 31 there was a joint meeting of the city council committee on education and the school committee finance, operations, and governance committee. Deputy Superintendent Brian Allen and CIty Chief Financial Officer Timothy McGurthy gave a presentation on the school department budget. Much of the conversation centered around “net school spending” which is the amount the state decides what the City of Worcester must contribute based on local income/property tax wealth. It makes up about 27 percent of the school budget. The state then makes up the difference. There are costs that are not considered part of that net school spending calculation, such as building rentals or the money to pay back the debt for building new schools. And that is true of every district in the state. The biggest non-net school spending expense is transportation, at $25 million. That cost would be much, much higher if WPS had not taken transportation in-house. In fact, the biggest increase in transportation costs over the last few years has been McKinney-Vento transportation, due to the increase of homeless students; a direct result of city housing policies. It’s also worth noting that many urban communities do not pay for transportation for their high school students because students are expected to use public transportation. Unfortunately, Worcester does not have a reliable city bus system.

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Upcoming Dates:

• Finance, Operations, and Governance Meeting April 28, 4:45pm

• School Committee Meetings are May 1 and 15, 6pm

• Budget Hearing is May 28, no time scheduled yet. 

• Teaching, Learning and Student Supports is May 8 at 5pm

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Also.

Mayor Petty announced he’s running for another term while standing in front of Burncoat High School. His pitch was that he promised he’d be the Mayor to rebuild schools, and he is fulfilling that promise because Burncoat High is next. But SOMEONE KNOCK ON WOOD PLEASE! Given the federal funding nosedive we are in, and that the state wouldn’t be able to make up for the loss of that federal funding should it happen…let’s not count our Burncoat High chickens before they hatch. Especially when they’re estimated to cost $500 million.

That’s it. See you next month!

1. These numbers are from parent teacher groups/organizations and do not include the fundraising done by the school itself, which is typically organized by the principals and done through things like ice cream sales or a school store.

2. Overall the district is 72 percent low-income, well above and the statewide 42 percent. Low income status in Massachusetts is determined by the percentage of families at 185 percent of the federal poverty level, which for 2025 is $59,470 for a family of four.