It was a win destined to go viral: Ayanna Pressley, Boston’s first black city councilor, beating out 10-time incumbent Mark Capuano in a stunning upset for the Massachusetts 7th congressional seat. Video taken of Pressley shows the moment she found out about her win—in a forest-green sheath dress, Pressley clutches her chest before leaping to her feet….
As a city councilor, Pressley voted down three Boston public school budgets because they didn’t fund equitable access to school nurses, social workers, and guidance counselors across Boston’s schools.
“I know trauma is a barrier to learning,” Pressley said. Growing up in Chicago, Pressley credited a school nurse at Francis W. Parker, a prestigious private K-12 school, with preventing her from “becoming a statistic,” as the Boston Globe reports. Pressley’s mother, Sandra Pressley, lived paycheck to paycheck, the Globe writes, but with a partial scholarship, Sandra was able to get Ayanna into the elite school.
“I lived in the school nurse’s office—and not because anything was physically wrong with me,” Pressley told Parker students in a 2013 speech, “but because I had so much dysfunction and drama and trauma in my life, Parker was this sanctuary, this refuge, this soft place for me to land. And when I was really going through it, the school nurse was my lifeline.” During her campaign, Pressley mentioned she had survived years of childhood sexual abuse.
“Our schools need to be sensitive to trauma,” Pressley told me. “We don’t need more police. We need more social workers.”
Boston’s public schools, like many others across the nation, have become increasingly segregated as gentrification and economic polarization continue to shape the city’s neighborhoods and resources. A 2015 study revealed that the median net worth of black households in the city was just $8, compared to $247,500 for white households. And a recent report from the Boston Globe found that 60 percent of Boston public schools were “intensely segregated,” meaning black and Latinx students made up 90 percent or more of the student body. Twenty years ago, that number was 42 percent, the Globe reported. Today, many of the schools black and Latinx students attend are under-resourced and underperforming, propelling a cycle of inequality in real time.
“We’re not the only school system that desegregated. So, you know, why is it that it’s so much harder for us to dig out? And I think a lot of it is that same postmortem that we were discussing a moment ago, around the ways in which even Democratic policies have contributed,” Pressley said. “We’re still having a hard time even speaking plainly about race being a factor. And it’s not going to be resolved by fancy algorithms.”