Mayor Wu and BPS Supt. Mary Skipper proposed sweeping, “generational” changes to Boston Public School (BPS) high school configurations on Tuesday, chief among them moving the John D. O’Bryant High School from Roxbury Crossing to the vacant West Roxbury Educational Complex (WREC).

Wu said the move will ensure that BPS facilities can handle new and exciting collaborations with business and industry for the future of Madison Park Vocational and Technical High School, which is located next to O’Bryant High School. To do so, her proposal calls for the long-shared campus between O’Bryant and Madison to be broken up.

That, she said, creates an opportunity for the O’Bryant to move into a full “gut-rehabilitated” building that used to house the WREC until it closed abruptly in 2018 following concerns over the safety of the building. Construction on the old WREC would start in 2025, transforming it into the new O’Bryant, which would house an expansion in the grades 7 to 8, by 400 students, and bring total enrollment to 2,000 students, according to Skipper.

O’Bryant – an exam school focusing on math, science, and engineering - moved from its former home on Townsend Street on the Roxbury/Dorchester line years ago to a shared space at Roxbury Crossing with Madison Park. The move made room for Boston Latin Academy (BLA), another exam school, which is still housed in the Townsend Street building.

The Wu administration’s plan was publicly announced at a press conference in front of Madison Park Tuesday morning. Parents and students had not been officially notified as of Tuesday morning, but staff and teachers were told Monday afternoon, sources said. Traditionally, most students at Madison Park and O’Bryant hail from Dorchester and Mattapan.

“It can be scary to talk about such big changes as a prospect happening in Boston,” Wu told reporters in a Monday briefing. “This is on a scale of a generational change we haven’t seen in quite some time in the district, but we really believe this is the scale of opening up opportunity that would really create room for all of our BPS students to have what they need and deserve in the generations to come.”

She said as they talked about changes to Madison Park and new training collaborations with industries like the airline giant JetBlue, the facilities became the limitation.

“As we revisited Madison Park, thinking about getting it to the fullest potential possible in this city with all these eager businesses and anchor institution partners, we kept coming back to the facilities’ [space and upkeep] constraints,” said the mayor.

Skipper said she is more excited about the possibilities created by the move than she was during her previous tenure with BPS 10 years ago as a principal at TechBoston in Dorchester.

“I think of being at TechBoston in Dorchester High, and I think of the generations of students that settled,” she said. “We don’t want our students to settle; we want them to thrive. To do that we need the village of Boston to come together and follow our mayor’s lead. That’s what we’re about right now and that has me pumped and excited in a way that I certainly never was when I was here (before) because that potential and hope didn’t exist in a concrete way. Now it’s starting to.”

Richard O’Bryant, the son of the late John D. O’Bryant, a citywide elected School Committee member, is an alumnus of the school named for his father, and his son is currently attending the O’Bryant.

“Obviously, if it were to be able to stay in the community, that would be most ideal,” he said. “But being an alum of the school, it was never a very happy situation when it moved from Townsend Street to where it is. It was never an adequate facility for the school’s needs.”

He said the mayor presented the plan to him a short while ago, and they talked through concerns like transportation and making sure the diverse demographics “don’t shift too drastically from where they are now.”

“The distance (to West Roxbury) doesn’t make it ideal, but the grounds and location are beautiful,” he said. “It will create an opportunity for the O’Bryant to be an even better school than it is now.”

He added that locating the city’s most diverse exam school student body to West Roxbury was “a sign of the times that our city is changing.”

State Sen. Liz Miranda – whose district includes the O’Bryant and Madison, and who is an alumna of the O’Bryant – said she is reserving judgment until after public conversations.

“I credit OB for being the lever of opportunity in my life, but we want to make sure that we hear from the community, students, families and other alumni about its future to ensure it continues to be a trajectory-changing institution for all Bostonians,” she said.

District 7 Councillor Tania Fernandes Anderson, who represents the O’Bryant campus and is also an alumna, did not return a request for comment.

Tito Jackson, former District 7 councillor and a Dorchester resident, said an investment in Madison Park is overdue, but he said this kind of movement will need “critical” community discussion before going forward.

“I think it’s high time that Madison Park Vocational Technical High School has a new facility,” he said. “The future of the City of Boston is clearly in these investments in vocational technical training and facilities that are set up for 2023 and not 1973."

Councillor At-Large Erin Murphy, a former BPS teacher, said she supports the spending more on the O’Bryant, but she opposes moving it to West Roxbury.

Murphy said there are plenty of buildings and sites centrally located in the city that could serve as its campus. “We can do right by the school communities of both the O'Bryant and Madison Park, but not by using the O’Bryant, once again, as a pawn or a puzzle piece in a larger master scheme,” she said.

Louis Elisa, president of the Garrison-Trotter Neighborhood Association and a member of the Friends of Madison Park, said he’s hearing concerns from parents in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan about accessing the O’Bryant in such an isolated location.

“Parents from the neighborhood are talking about access and participation in the school,” he said. “The reason is parents there are committed to the school and concerned about not being accessible to the new school and especially for the high school. It’s one thing to get on the bus and travel across town as a 9th grader, and another thing to do so as a 7th grader.”

He said the Friends of Madison Park are withholding comment on the plan for Madison Park – saying they heard the news like everyone else last week as it trickled out through the grapevine. He said they have been planning and designing – with a few public meetings already held – for a campus that is shared with O’Bryant.

“We asked for specifics last Friday and there weren’t enough yet,” he said. “I said that regardless of what they want to put there, this plan changes the paradigm completely. Without the O’Bryant, the whole concept, design, and objective has to be re-considered…I take no glee in people having to move. The O’Bryant has been pulled out of two places already.”

Elisa was listed by the mayor as being on a steering committee for the Madison Park changes, a committee that also includes Coach Dennis Wilson, IBEW Local 103 Union representative Renee Dozier, and Jim Rooney, the head of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. They are charged with overseeing a process for Madison that involves “expanding and tailoring” the institution to the future needs of vocational technical education.

Wu told reporters there would be a detailed transportation plan for getting students to the old WREC building. The complex has long been a dangerous and difficult MBTA trip for students, and in 2005 a student walking to the school was killed by a snowplow on VFW Parkway and two others were injured. That situation will be averted with a guaranteed transportation plan, said Wu.

“We recognize the geographic location of the West Roxbury campus will mean that we must offer and provide dedicated shuttles and transportation to that campus to get to school and to and from after-school programming…Providing that dedicated transportation will be an important piece of this and perhaps we can match the experience of some of the other students at other exam schools already have,” she said.

Valduvino Goncalves, an alum of the school and current guidance counselor at O’Bryant, supports the idea, but has concerns.
“It seems to me there is a plan for the Malcolm X Boulevard campus and that plan doesn’t include the O’Bryant,” he said. “I understand it’s Madison’s building and we moved here temporarily in 1992 and we have outgrown it. I feel like right now there’s a train moving, and if we don’t hop on it, they might pick another location that presents less opportunity.”
Goncalves said a new campus presents opportunities for teachers and students to have better science labs and to not have to share classroom space, but he worries about how students will get there and if they’ll be accepted in West Roxbury when they do arrive.
“It is a concern for me with West Roxbury and the history of racism and potential changing of the school demographics of O’Bryant,” he said.
He favors a transportation “gamechanger” by adding a commuter rail stop on the Needham Line adjacent to the WREC. That line runs to Forest Hills and on to Ruggles, he noted, and could quickly deliver students from Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan to WREC, which he described as being a bit “on an island.”

Delavern Stanislaus, BPS chief of capital planning, said they have done a feasibility report suggesting a “gut-rehab” to the studs of the WREC building could be accomplished. There is already $18 million proposed in the 2024 capital budget to design the WREC for O’Bryant, and another $45 million in the capital budget for re-designing Madison Park. Construction would be funded by $2 billion that the administration said had initially been proposed.

“We don’t know how much this project is actually going to cost yet,” said Stanislaus during the press briefing. “We have to go through the design process that will bring us closer to understand the full cost of the build.”

Wu said regardless of whether they rehabilitate WREC or not, there will be a high school campus located there.

“There will be a brand new beautiful high school campus in that location,” she said. “I don’t think anyone is saying we can only do it if it’s a gut renovation. We believe that is the plan most feasible now, but the focus is on making sure students have what they need…”

The plan will be subject to School Committee approval, but there is no plan to submit it for funding by the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA), as has been done with other BPS expansion and new construction projects.