Your School, Your Say

The seat you already have

Boston’s School Committee is unusual, and you should understand exactly how. Most Massachusetts cities elect theirs, while all seven of Boston’s voting members are appointed by the Mayor, so the people who set policy for your school reach that seat through the Mayor you elect rather than through a ballot line of their own. How Boston should choose them is a live and much-argued question, and the home rule page takes it apart.

There is also a student member, and that one is appointed by students, through the Boston Student Advisory Council. The seat carries no vote. It carries something that is sometimes worth more: the right to be in the room, on the record, before the decision is made.

The Boston Student Advisory Council

BSAC is roughly forty elected student representatives drawn from more than twenty-five Boston high schools, and it has been organizing since 2002. It appoints the student member of the School Committee, and it helped write the district’s Code of Conduct, the rulebook that governs how you can be disciplined. Very few student councils in America hold a pen that heavy.

Then it did something almost no student group anywhere has done. BSAC pushed a policy letting students give formal, structured feedback on their teachers, it became Boston policy, and from there it was written into the law of the Commonwealth. A group of teenagers changed a state statute. Hold that fact next to whatever you have been told about how little say you have.

Doors that are open to you right now

1. Boston Student Advisory Council. Representatives are chosen at the school level. Ask your headmaster or your student government how your school picks its BSAC reps, and if the honest answer is that nobody does, that is an opening, not a dead end.
2. The Mayor’s Youth Council. Open to Boston residents in grades 9 through 12. Applications for the 2026 to 2027 term close on July 30, 2026, and members serve from October through May. One thing catches people out every year: your letter of recommendation has to be sent by the person writing it, not forwarded by you, and it has to arrive before the deadline. The form is at boston.gov/myc, and questions go to myc@boston.gov.
3. SuccessLink. The city’s own youth jobs program, ages 14 to 24. It paid $15 an hour for 14 to 18 year olds last year and hired more than 10,500 young people. The 2026 program runs from June 23 to August 29.
4. Youth Lead the Change. Boston youth aged 14 to 25 decide how to spend $1 million a year of the city’s capital budget. It was the first youth participatory budgeting program in the country and has directed more than $10 million since 2014. No round is open right now, so get on the list and be ready when the next one is. See boards and commissions.
5. Your free CharlieCard. Every BPS student in grades 7 through 12 gets a free M7 CharlieCard, good year round, on the bus, the subway, the ferry, and Commuter Rail zones 1A through 2. The city already pays to make you mobile, so spend some of it getting yourself to a meeting.

The three exam schools

Boston Latin School was founded in 1635. It is the oldest public school in America, it predates Harvard by a year, and you can test into it. So can anyone else in this city, which is exactly what makes it contested ground.

• Boston Latin School, Avenue Louis Pasteur, in the Fenway. Grades 7 to 12.
• Boston Latin Academy, Townsend Street, Dorchester.
• The John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, Malcolm X Boulevard, Roxbury.

How you get in changed, and it changed because people sued. Under the policy the School Committee adopted on November 5, 2025, which governs the current admissions cycle, your composite score is 70 percent grades and 30 percent assessment, on a scale of 1 to 100. Ten additional points go to students who are experiencing homelessness, are in the care of the Department of Children and Families, or live in Boston Housing Authority housing.

Then the seats are handed out in two stages. Twenty percent go citywide, purely by rank. The other eighty percent are divided across four tiers, built out of census tracts and sorted by socioeconomic conditions, so that a student is competing against others from similar circumstances rather than against the whole city at once. Opponents took that tier system to federal court twice. It survived: the First Circuit upheld it in December 2023, and a further challenge was dismissed in March 2026.

You are allowed to think that system fair, or unfair, or clumsy. Whatever you conclude, hold on to the fact that people built it: adults argued about it in public, students testified about it, judges ruled on it, and it can be changed again.

Where BPS actually stands

Boston Public Schools teaches 44,416 students. Two out of three are from low-income families. One in three is learning English. Almost a quarter are students with disabilities. The four-year graduation rate is 81.3 percent, which is the highest it has ever been.

In 2022 the state declared the district underperforming and put it under a Systemic Improvement Plan. That plan formally expired on June 30, 2026, which is to say two weeks before this page was written. BPS was never placed in receivership, and real things did improve: buses run better, buildings got fixed, programs for English learners got stronger. But the gaps between groups of students remain wide, and 44 individual schools are still exposed to state intervention.

This story has no ending yet. You are living inside the part where it is still being decided, and the people deciding it meet in public, in Roxbury, and have to let you speak.

Your civics project. Start it here.

Every eighth grader in Massachusetts has to complete a student-led civics project, and plenty of high schools run one too. If a teacher sent you to this site, that is almost certainly why. So let us be useful about it, because most of the work is already sitting on these pages.

1. Pick something you can actually see. Skip “inequality” and take the bus that is always late, the science lab with no lab in it, the park that locks at dusk. One street, one building, one rule.
2. Find out who owns it. Use the table on the front page of this guide. If the answer is the School Committee, you can be in the room within a fortnight. If it is the State House, you are in for a session, and that is worth knowing on day one rather than in week six.
3. Go and get the document. Every claim you make should rest on something a stranger can check: the agenda, the budget line, the 311 ticket, the bill history, the DESE profile. The four doors are linked further down this page.
4. Check your sources against each other. The state says Boston has one number of schools and the district’s own materials say another. Both are official. Neither is lying. Notice that, say which number you used, and say why. That single move is the difference between a good project and a real one.
5. Take an action with a date on it. Testify. File a public records request. Submit a participatory budgeting idea. Ask a councillor to file a hearing order. Something that happened, on a day, that you can name.
6. Write down what happened, including if nothing did. H.841 had a hearing, students testified at it, and it went to a study order anyway. That is a finding rather than a failure, and an honest account of it beats a tidy story about a win.

One last thing, and your teacher will thank us. Do not cite this website. Click through to the Census, to DESE, to boston.gov, to the Legislature’s own bill page, and cite those. We are the map. They are the territory.

How you actually reach BSAC

Here is the part usually left out. BSAC publishes no application form, no deadline and no selection process, which makes the way in simpler than you would guess: email the adults who run it and tell them you want in.

The Office of Youth Leadership runs BSAC. Dennisse Rorie is its Director, at drorie@bostonpublicschools.org, and Tewahedo Haimanot is Assistant Director, at thaimanot@bostonpublicschools.org. Ask them how your school connects to BSAC and who speaks for it now. A school with no representative is a seat sitting empty, waiting for whoever asks about it first.

Where to go and read the primary source

Every claim on this site points at a document somebody else can check, and you should go and check them. These four doors are where the real evidence lives, and a civics project built on them will beat one built on a summary every time.

• Next Wednesday’s agenda, and every docketLegistar is the Council’s real filing system. Agendas, agenda packets, minutes and video for every meeting, plus the School Committee. The Council’s rules require the agenda online at least 48 hours ahead, so it is there before the meeting happens.
• The budget for your buildingBPS publishes a school by school allocation. The number attached to the school you sit in every day is public, and so is the number for the school across town.
• Every 311 ticket the city has ever takenAnalyze Boston publishes the whole dataset. This is how you turn a complaint into an argument: pull the tickets for your street and compare the response times with another neighborhood. One warning: since October 2025 new tickets land in a separate resource, so check both.
• Watch a bill liveH.841 is the bill to let you vote at sixteen. Its whole history is public: filed, referred, heard, and sent to a study order on March 19, 2026. This is the page where you watch what happens to the next one.