THE EUPHORIA OF yet another Boston sports championship mostly overshadowed a sad ending to the school year for thousands of Boston students.
At the last minute, Boston officials announced last Thursday afternoon that the final day of classes, scheduled for the following day, would be canceled because of the Celtics victory parade. Citing concerns that the crush of a million or more people descending on the city for the parade would throw off school buses, the city instead threw kids under the bus, depriving them – with no notice – of the chance for last-day goodbyes to classmates and teachers.
The city said the decision was made out of concern about students being stuck for hours on hot school buses. The last-minute timing of the announcement, Mayor Michelle Wu said, was because of delays in getting approval for the move from the state education department, a claim that state officials seemed to dispute.
But there would have been one easy way to avoid the whole mess: hold the parade a day later, on Saturday, when it wouldn’t conflict with the school day – or a regular work day for hundreds of thousands of those with jobs in Boston.
Former state transportation secretary Jim Aloisi, writing five years ago after the chaos of the last Boston sports celebration, the 2019 Patriots parade, said it only makes sense to schedule these massive events on a Saturday or Sunday. He pointed to unruly mobs of Patriots fans pushing and shoving at South Station, where poor saps who actually went to work that day were trying to get home, and “liquor-laden fans” who relieved themselves in bottles left on commuter rail trains, or directly on the train floor itself.
“Far be it for me to rain on someone’s parade, but these weekday mega-parade events held to celebrate sports team victories have to stop,” Aloisi wrote. They are “bad for the city, bad for our quality of life, and bad for the public transportation system we rely upon for basic mobility services.” He might have added that they are bad for the already challenging task of running the state’s largest school system.
Alas, apparently no one got his memo.
Asked why the city didn’t insist on pushing last week’s parade date one day further to Saturday, a city spokesman said, “The decision to hold the parade on Friday was made in partnership with the Celtics and TD Garden to ensure all the players could be present.”
But that meant thousands of students could not be present for their last day of school, a contrast that was not a good look for a mayor who has vowed to make attention to the long-beleaguered school system job one.
It did not go unnoticed by angry parents, who also had to scramble at the last minute to rearrange childcare plans for Friday.
“For me, as a person who grew up in the city of Boston, I feel like children are very often not the priority of our policy makers,” Dorchester parent Meghan Rounseville told GBH. “And this was just another moment where you know a private sports team is more important.”
The definition of a publicity stunt
John Deaton, one of US Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s GOP challengers, recently took a break from campaigning in Massachusetts and lit out for the US-Mexico border. In the photo his campaign quickly shared with the Boston Herald, Deaton is shown staring up at a tall fence separating the two countries.
Just after landing back in Boston, Deaton posted to social media a link to the Herald story, and his campaign days later released a digital ad, covering the same dusty ground, to YouTube. The ad also included scenes from the Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, where Deaton was once stationed in the 1990s. For good measure, he also appeared on WCVB’s political chat show, “On the Record.”
All of which made the statement from the Massachusetts Republican Party this week seem rather harsh, calling a trip to the border “nothing more than a publicity stunt that will neither address the migrant crisis in Massachusetts nor reduce the influx of migrants entering the Commonwealth.”
The GOP’s target was Gov. Maura Healey, who just sent administration officials to the border to spread the word that Massachusetts emergency shelters are full, and can’t take in any more people.
When asked about their statement and why it doesn’t apply to Deaton, a GOP spokesman professed there is a difference between what Deaton did and Healey’s move, as Healey’s action was “superficial,” while Deaton headed to the border to “to gain a firsthand understanding of the immigration crisis.”
But another Republican disagrees with that assessment. Ian Cain, the Quincy City Council president running against Deaton in the GOP primary, in his own post on the platform formerly known as Twitter, called both Healey’s deployment of officials and Deaton’s trip “performative acts.”
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