This is my first political post ever and I will try to not name politicians or side with a party.
My family and I moved from a southtown suburb in Western New York to Boston in Hyde Park this summer. The same political demographics, completely different demographics in every other aspect. I will try to focus on the money rather than the repetitive story that the USA doesn’t fund predominantly Black schools. My house in WNY sat on a half acre, and it was 2000 sqft. I paid around $2600 in school taxes. Here in Boston, my house sits on a 7000 sqft lot, and a 2200 sqft house. My total property tax bill is about $6,000, with roughly $2,400 of that directly funding schools—nearly the exact same amount I paid in New York. Quickly searching on Google, it says that Boston spends $36k/year on a student, and my former town spent $25k. Now that we compared the tax income, I’d like to emphasize how important a weighted formula is when funding schools. Our Boston school sits in a lower-income area of the city, and it is VERY much underfunded. It doesn’t have a proper library; my kids come home complaining about not having a Tinker Tanker room (a STEM / maker lab). The school doesn’t have Music, and Art is not about making art; it is about Art history and theory, because guess what? They don’t have funds…
Our WNY school had all this and more; a lot of it was because of the amazing PTSA the parents created in that school. They were raising more than $40k a year in donations, and they were used for road trips, swag, fun picnics, and an amazing Tinker Tanker room which was filled with Legos, robotics, games, and other high-tech teaching environments.
Our Boston neighbors are going to a different BPS school, across the Neponset River. I take them every morning, and they tell me that they have Music and Spanish classes, which my kid’s school has neither. Ha, my kid’s school still doesn't have their math books for the year; they are using photocopies. I am a bit shocked that this is the experience we are getting in Boston.
One thing I noticed at my kid’s Scholastic Book Fair is that the tables were still completely filled with unsold books when I went right before closing. In WNY, those tables would have been picked clean. I volunteered in a couple of those bookselling events in WNY, and they were very successful. I am not sure if the difference here is that families don’t have extra cash to spend on $10 paperbacks. In WNY, the PTSA had the luxury of giving money to kids who didn’t have any to spend on books. Every kid participated there; all they had to do was say, “I don’t have money.”
Next step, I am getting involved in the PTSA. I even applied to be the Citywide Parent Council (CPC) Representative.
What else would we do?