Battenfeld: Dorchester school closing due to shooting shows Michelle Wu’s ‘safe summer’ plan is failure
So much for Michelle Wu’s “safe summer” initiative.
The closing of a Dorchester charter school due to the attempted shooting of a student at an MBTA station is the latest evidence that gang violence is alive and well in Boston public schools.
The Boston mayor’s woke plan to “address the root causes of violence through a public health lens and create the conditions for community healing” — which she announced a few weeks ago — has already failed miserably.
While Wu is taking a “holistic” approach to ending violence, gangs are shooting at students and making her plan look ridiculous.
Wu should be talking about nothing else but the shutdown of the Neighborhood House Charter School, which moved to remote classes, for the next few days and putting her full-time focus on the violence.
But she isn’t. A planned meeting between police and parents of the charter school was canceled on Friday because the media was aware of it. That’s not accountability or transparency.
Wu went blissfully on with her schedule of a Caribbean flag raising on Friday, and put out a breathless press release about a “traveling beer garden.”
She is trying to evade responsibility for the shooting because it’s a charter school but public school kids and gang crime comes under the Mayor. Sorry, you can’t escape it.
The closing of the school, which was forced to go to remote learning for grades 8-11 because of the safety threats to students, should be a national story. It’s a crisis that needs police and City Hall’s attention.
It’s the worst kept secret in the city that gangs have infiltrated public schools, endangering innocent kids’ lives.
The shooting this week is the most conclusive evidence of what police have known about for years.
“While there have been no incidents on our campus, many of our students commute to and from school on the MBTA,” school executive director Kate Scott said in a statement to the Herald. “Last Friday, several shots were fired at the Shawmut T station. Police believe one of our students, who is not currently attending school in person, was the intended target.”
The alleged shooters, suspected of being in a gang, were “communicating with members of our community that they intended to return,” Scott added.
Last year, the very same school was forced to go to lockdown several times after a group of adults threatened students, the Dorchester Reporter reported.
Wu released her plan for keeping the city safe this summer earlier this month, calling it a “long-term, sustainable, data-driven and visionary approach aimed at ending violence holistically and year-round through revamped commitment to community engagement and centering lived experiences of residents impacted by violence.”
But the shooting on Friday and the mayor’s non-reaction clearly show that the problem is over her head. Maybe it’s time to reconsider that cushy job at Harvard.