Members of the Holyoke School Committee will vote August 19 on whether to approve a plan that would guide how they learn required management skills, in preparation for a transition from state control of the district to local control.
"This plan [has] benchmarks that we need to hit, so the state can confidently say, 'all right, great, you did it, you're ready. Here's your local control,'" said Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia who also chairs the school committee, which has been without power to make decisions about budgets or policies for almost a decade.
The district went into receivership in 2015 after the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education designated the schools as "chronically underperforming," based largely on student MCAS scores.
Massachusetts education officials are now actively weighing the return of local control to the city.
At the March 2024 school committee meeting, acting state Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Russell Johnston affirmed that Holyoke was officially entering the transition process to return the district to local control.
Johnston committed to collaboration with the committee over the following six months, in order to develop "a school committee capacity building plan."
Completion of the plan over the next school year is among the requirements for local control, stipulated by the state.
The plan of action
The 13-page document describes how the school board will build its capacity in order to successfully oversee the district.
Longtime Holyoke school committee member and vice-chair Mildred Lefebvre said under the plan, the group will participate in numerous trainings, focusing on finance and personnel, including how to hire and evaluate a district superintendent.
Members will also delve into every school committee policy Lefebvre said, and possibly rewrite them.
"For instance, in previous years no school committee member went to collective bargaining instead it would be our legal counsel," Lefebvre said.
Now they're asking the question, "Is that the process that we're going to continue taking, are we going to develop something different?" Lefebvre said.
How the school committee got to this point
In September, 2023, the Holyoke School Committee petitioned the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), requesting to take back local control.
In a letter from then DESE Commissioner Jeff Riley, who has since stepped down, to Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia, Riley said more conversations needed to take place and deferred action on the request, frustrating city leaders.
Garcia argued the schools should return to local control because receivership hadn't worked. He cited continued low scores on state standardized testing, known as MCAS, which are designed to measure student achievement.
With Riley's departure in February 2024 for personal reasons, Johnston was appointed as interim commissioner.
Within weeks he told the Holyoke School Committee, "we are officially entering the transition process to return to local control." A subset of the school committee began to work with Johnston and his staff on what that would look like for the board.
The final draft, which school committee members could amend or send back to the subcommittee, has month-by-month benchmarks for the board to meet and professional development trainings.
A key priority over the next year, according to the draft plan, is for the Holyoke School Committee to "foster a culture of collaboration with [the Holyoke Public Schools] and with community stakeholders in its governance of the school district."
To ensure this during the transition, the school committee would recruit a Community Advisory Team this fall.
But when does receivership end?
The number one question Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia said he hears from the public is, "when can we expect local control?"
The answer, he said, is as quickly as the committee is ready for the job.
"We don't want to get local control next week, and then things start breaking because we're not, operating accordingly to make important decisions," Garcia said.
It's a setup for failure if receivership were to end "overnight," said Lefebvre, although the school committee is eager to resume taking on the work of managing the district.
Holyoke is one of three districts in the state under receivership, along with Lawrence and Southbridge.
"There should be a process," Lefebvre said, "and the process should be written out specifically how it's going to happen. It's either us or it could be Lawrence [or Southbridge] — somebody's going to come out of receivership first, and the outcome of that will be talked about for a very long time. "
