When Boston Public Schools moved to close the West Roxbury Education Complex last year, students and teachers from the Urban Science Academy and West Roxbury Academy, the two schools making up the WREC, blasted department officials for not finding a way to keep the two high schools’ students together. School officials said they exhausted every option, yet documents from the decision-making process suggest that the district may have closed the school regardless of whether a solution had been found.
According to a report by Academic Superintendent Joel Boyd and Assistant Superintendent Ligia Noriega-Murphy from Nov. 16, 2018, acquired through a Freedom of Information Act Request by Boston Parents Schoolyard News, the search for a new facility yielded several space options for the displaced WREC students but none that would keep them all together, although it was limited to BPS buildings.
“It is possible that spaces external to BPS, which were not considered within this analysis, could be available and leased by the district as swing space for one or both schools,” the report stated, “but there remains an overarching need for BPS — perhaps even beyond this decision point — to right-size its high schools.”