Serving North Shore Tech Students A Focus Of Beverly Joint Committee Summit

BEVERLY, MA — As Beverly students seek more and more career and technical educational opportunities at a time when capacity at Essex Tech cannot keep up with demand because of space constraints, the subject of how to provide those chances both for students who want to pursue them and students for whom a traditional college path is not necessarily ideal was a key topic at this week's annual joint meeting of the City Council and School Committee.

State Sen. Joan Lovely (D-Salem) and State Rep. Jerry Parisella (D-Beverly) addressed the concerns of the Council and Committee on the issue, while Beverly Superintendent Sue Charochak talked about alternatives the district is taking to provide those opportunities in collaboration with Peabody and Salem.

"One of the things that we are coming to is that the vocational schools are on their own island as far as decisions that can be made and things that we can do," Charochak said. "So we as public schools are looking at things we can do together. What partnerships can be made? What regionalization can happen? The conversations that (Peabody Superintendent) Josh (Vadala) and (Salem Superintendent) Steve (Zrike) are having, and I have been in some of those conversations as well.

"That is probably the direction that we will probably need to go if we're going to expand looking at our own way."

An expansion of CTE programming is being included in preliminary plans for a new Salem High School, Zrike told the Salem School Building Committee at a recent meeting, which would include some Beverly students attending those programs. Peabody has also received state School Building Authority acceptance into a program for a new high school building as well that could have similar expanded capabilities when completed.

Lovely said a meeting she had at Essex Tech last month indicated that "everyone's opposed" to moving toward a full blind lottery system when it comes to school admissions and prefers a partial lottery system that is balanced with interviews and criteria that consider discipline, absenteeism and grades — albeit to a lessened extent in recent years.

"Lots of strong discussions," Lovely said of the lottery issue at the state level. "And at the Voke level, from the administrative side at least, no lottery. Don't want a lottery."

Essex Tech Superintendent Heidi Riccio told Patch on Wednesday that the interview is an important part of the admissions process to determine why a student wants to attend Essex Tech and that simulations the school has run do not show a strict lottery system would necessarily provide a more diverse student population.

"This is because we have 17 sending communities and another 41 communities for agricultural education that have very different demographic populations," she told Patch. "We have large cities and small towns which could push the smaller application pools — such as Nahant — out of the running for admittance when you have almost 300 kids from Peabody applying to come here and five from Nahant. Yes, Nahant is required to pay for the building.

"As you can see, there are many variables."

She added that the school does have a weighted lottery for agricultural students and that the school has tried to update the admissions process to include a multilingual family liaison.

Parisella said he hears from many constituents frustrated with the inability of their children to get into Essex Tech and its waitlist — which can be up to 1,000 students each year, though Riccio said it is actually about half that because some students get in and choose not to attend the school, while other students are counted twice because they are on multiple waitlists.

"There's been some discussion with the school about expanding the footprint of the Tech to get more kids in there," Parisella said. "You build it and they will come. Essex Tech is a very popular school. I would love to see us expand that capacity."

Riccio agrees: "My solution in a perfect world? Add more seats. Give infrastructure money to add more seats."

As long as seats remain limited — or even if there is the type of expansion within the existing footprint that Essex Tech has embarked on in adding 165 students per grade level since 2017, there remains a debate about which students should be given priority.

"To the extent that vocational schools are looking to add programmatic space for programs for kids that are typically appealing to kids who are going to be college-bound, maybe that isn't where the investment should be going," said Beverly Mayor Mike Cahill, who is also a member of the School Committee. "That's a fair conversation for the state government to be having with this collection of vocational schools."

"We really do need these students to have more opportunities who perhaps aren't college-bound," Lovely said. "If we're not going to build a bunch of vocational schools (we need) to have this programming in the high schools as well."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)