Boston Public School officials held a virtual community meeting last Tuesday (April 4) to discuss the district’s proposed merger of the Shaw and the Taylor schools in Dorchester and Mattapan, respectively. More than fifty people were present, including teachers and parents.

The goal of the meeting, said the district’s Chief of Capital Planning, Del Stanislaus, was to discuss the five “core values” developed by the design team for the merged school. They include giving students access to a rigorous academic curriculum, centering families, and building anti-racist structures.

Despite that focus, the conversation drifted repeatedly to the district’s poor community engagement.

Barbara Fields, a retired Boston Public School administrator and member of the Black Educators Alliance of Massachusetts, said stakeholders and neighbors have not been properly engaged.

“I’m all over this community, and I have seen nothing about what’s happening at the Shaw and the Taylor,” said Fields at the meeting. “I’m the co-chair of my neighborhood association, and I brought it up the other day, and nobody knows anything about it.”

A parent from the Taylor agreed. “I didn’t know about this [meeting] until today,” she said.

The lack of transparency around community meetings is infuriating, said Ruby Reyes, executive director of the Boston Education Justice Alliance, in a phone call.

“Parents plan ahead. Families plan ahead, teachers plan ahead,” said Reyes. “What’s been really frustrating for families is the false narratives around transparency … In this effort to be ‘transparent,’ the district is going to have a meeting to talk to the community, but they’re going to announce it the day before.”

Boston Public Schools has a tab on the Green New Deal website for recent meetings. But that section doesn’t publicize upcoming meetings.

The last Shaw-Taylor community engagement meeting, according to the website, took place last November. There is no recording or notes posted there from last Tuesday’s meeting for community members unable to attend.

“There has to be more effective ways of letting people know that this is going on because I can tell you that they don’t know,” said Fields. “The fact that I don’t know about it says a whole lot about what people don’t know that is happening within their community.”

Stanislaus said the district is refining its community engagement process.

Rebecca Grainger, senior advisor for Youth and Schools, said the district hopes to distribute a survey. They also plan to have four to five more meetings about the merger.

However, there is little time left for refinement. The school committee plans to vote on the merger on May 10, less than a month away.

This short timeline concerns City Councilor Brian Worrell. “Do we expect this engagement process to be done prior to a school committee vote?” asked Worrell. “Does it have the possibility —because not everyone’s in these meetings—to have any feedback from the larger community to weigh in?”

District officials did not answer the councillor’s questions.