An Open Letter to the Falmouth School Committee

Dear (Falmouth School Committee),

I am writing to express my disappointment in your school committee’s disingenuous and harmful decision to vote in opposition to Question 2. Despite the fact that the ballot question would have no impact whatsoever on schools in your district, and even though Falmouth is nowhere near state caps that limit the number of public charter seats—with only 64 Falmouth children currently enrolled in public charters—you are scaring voters in your town into falsely believing my child’s education will come at the expense of theirs.

Allow me to introduce you to a child who actually would be impacted by Question 2: my daughter, Janea. Right now, like 32,000 other children across Massachusetts, she is stuck on a public charter waiting list. The vast majority of these kids don’t come from wealthy suburbs like yours, but neighborhoods in places like Boston, Lawrence and Springfield, where children are three times as likely to be African-American or Latino and nearly twice as likely to speak limited English and to be living in poverty.

Unlike parents in your town, who can send their children to some of the best public schools in the entire country or afford to send them to private school, parents like me have no choice but to send ours to schools that rank in the bottom 3% of districts in the state – schools where fewer than half of children can read and do math on grade level and where dropout rates are three times as high.

Lifting the public charter school cap (as Question 2 would) could change all this for my child – and give tens of thousands of others access to public schools that universities like Stanford and MIT have found give kids longer school days, more personal attention and hundreds of additional hours in the classroom each year.

Trust me, I have seen the incredible benefits of charters firsthand. My son Joshua, Janae’s younger brother, is a second grader at KIPP Academy Elementary here in Boston. KIPP has been an amazing experience for him. Since he was accepted as a student in kindergarten, Joshua’s progress has been nothing short of remarkable. I often find him reading to his youngest sister, Jianna, before she goes to bed at night. I feel so fortunate that Joshua’s number was drawn during the KIPP lottery just 2 years ago.

However, at the same time, I am heartbroken that Janea does not have that same opportunity. Why must Janea attend an underperforming school in our neighborhoods, while her brother attends one of the best public charter schools in the state? Why can’t she get the extra help, the extra attention and the extra care that Joshua gets?

The answer, of course, is that state teachers’ unions have made sure that there is a cap on public charter schools in order to protect their own interests. Even worse, at a time when state funding to all Massachusetts school districts has skyrocketed in the last five years and new public charters have actually added billions of dollars to state public education spending, they’ve pressured local school committees in cities and towns not impacted by charter schools into believing that expanding access charters to communities like mine would come at their district's expense.

After all, only 64 children in Falmouth even attend public charter schools currently. Unlike my school district in Boston where more than 10,000 kids are on wait lists, Falmouth still has 256 public charter seats left under state caps. And like most of the districts where school committees have taken symbolic votes on this issue so far, Falmouth is not even in the bottom performing 25% of schools and so would not even be prioritized for new public charters under Question 2.

But beyond the numbers, there’s something fundamentally wrong when local officials in communities like Andover, Beverly, Lexington, and Winchester—where the public schools are among the best in the nation—are telling parents in places like Dorchester, Holyoke and Lawrence that we shouldn’t have the right to choose a better public school for our children.

While it is disheartening to see just how many communities have caved under pressure brought by the state’s teachers union, my hope is that voters will see through these scare tactics and misrepresentations – and see what’s really at stake with Question 2.

For me and for tens of thousands of parents like me, it’s simple: in Massachusetts we are more than just a collection of communities. We are the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We have the best public schools in the country – and it’s time we made sure that every family in the Commonwealth had a fair and equal access to one. And with Question 2 we can.

Sincerely,

Shellina Semexant

Roxbury Parent

Shellinamathuin@gmail.com

Photo: Shutterstock