On October 22, Boston School Committee Chairman Michael Loconto resigned, after publicly mocking Chinese names during a virtual school committee meeting on October 21. In response to this, Councilor Ed Flynn hosted a virtual meeting to discuss what happened at the meeting.

“This process has also unfortunately highlighted several times that the needs of all Asian immigrant communities are not a priority or respected,” said Councilor Flynn.

The two-hour long meeting had both Cantonese and Mandarin interpretations from beginning to end, to ensure that all attendees were included in the discussion. During the meeting, Councilor Flynn, Superintendent Brenda Cassellius, and Councilor Michael Flaherty, each gave their word to prevent another similar incident from happening. “I just want to express my own deepest regret for what happened last night. And I will work as your Superintendent so that it never happens again,” said Cassellius.

During the meeting, several parents and longtime residents in the community were able to voice their concerns and comment on the incident. They called out racism and lack of language access, and they expressed strong opposition against the proposal to revise admission criteria for Boston Public School’s (BPS) exam schools.

The proposal that was passed on October 21 stated that for the upcoming school year, rather than admitting students based on exam scores, students would be admitted based on their 2019 MCAS scores and use students’ zip codes to ensure diversity. While diversity and inclusion was a unanimous agreement, the proposal and the meeting’s voting process had a lot of problems. A longtime resident of South Boston Mark Mooney said, “The proposed plan that was discussed and approved last night does not achieve is not the right way to do that.”

“If you only admit kids based on zip code, it’s a huge insult, and it really means like this is discrimination. You’re discriminating against Chinese,” said Wu, a community member who opposes the proposed change.

Those who attended the October 21 meeting witnessed a lot of opposition during the public comment time, and yet the proposal was still passed. Jen Lee said, “We had a lot of opposition, but then they didn’t really give enough time to further think about it… So I don’t know whether this vote is equitable, so I was wondering if there’s any way we can re-do it?”

Another parent shared that her son was distraught after learning that the exams were cancelled right before they were supposed to take place. Susan Oh said, “My child asked me, ‘Mom, why did they cancel the exam? We study so hard and we’ve studied for so long to prepare for this exam. Is this fair? How could they do this to us?’”

In response to the Superintendent’s promise to provide language access, Maggie Chen, a parent of two children enrolled in BPS, said, “in her commitment to provide interpretation, I just want to emphasize that it needs to be quality and competent interpretation.” On October 21, despite having interpreters, they were only interpreting the public comments section and did not interpret the first two critical hours of the meeting.

Chen said, “A lot of us parents are new immigrants. We were forced to just hang on to the meeting or a few hours… Because we felt that was the only chance it was our only platform to speak… When it was actually time for names to be called, the host didn’t know how to pronounce our name.”

When their names were called, Chairman Loconto publicly made fun of the names. Eric, an attendee who witnessed the entire eight hour long meeting said, “I was shocked that the chairman laughed at Asian Americans in a public hearing conference.”

Councilor Flaherty outlined the hopes of all those present in the virtual meeting. He said, “The Asian community has made great contributions to our city of Boston, and they should always be appreciated and respected. I will join you in continuing to work alongside you to fight for language access, voting access, and also access to housing and employment opportunities, as well as supporting local businesses.”

To read this article in Chinese (Traditional), please click here.