Wu announces restructuring plan for 2 Boston schools

BOSTON (WHDH) - Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced new plans for two of Boston’s schools on Tuesday, planning to move and expand one school currently in Roxbury into a new home in West Roxbury while expanding another school.

Under the plans, the city will relocate the O’Bryant School for Math and Science, which shares a campus with Madison Park Vocational High School in Roxbury.

“We’re talking about generational change at a scale that we haven’t seen for quite some time in our district,” Wu said.

The move will allow the neighboring Madison Park to expand into the space O’Bryant is leaving. In their announcement, city officials also rolled out a partnership with JetBlue to train students to aviation jobs at airlines and Massport.

“Our kids deserve what the other cities have,” said Coach Collins of the Friends of Madison Park. “Our kids deserve what the other communities have.”

Wu acknowledged there will be challenges getting inner city students who traditionally call O’Bryant home out to a new West Roxbury campus. She said, though, school bussing in Boston is not the hot button issue it once was.

“We are a city now that is more welcoming and diverse and inclusive than ever,” she said.

She continued, saying building a new high school in West Roxbury makes sense because the city already has land and buildings there.

The site of the former West Roxbury High School was closed down five years ago after city inspectors declared it unsafe.

With this week’s announcement, though, Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper said the new school will be something else.

“The bones are really good,” she said. “But the entire inside needs to be redone, which is what we would expect. So, when we say a gut reno, we mean a gut reno down to the studs.”

Wu and Skipper said one of the benefits of the two schools having more room is that they’ll both be able to take more seventh and eighth grade students.

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