While the winter winds battered away at the south coast of Nantucket, the island hummed along in year-round mode. Around 14,200 people puttered into work, sent their kids to the local schools, hit up the few dozen restaurants open during the off-season, and dodged downtown when the tides rushed in and flooded over brick and cobblestone. 

Before the high summer season roars in, when the population booms to 80,000, the wind and the water will have carved off more of the island, prompting some returning seasonal residents to pace around their properties with a wary eye on the bluff’s edge. 

“If people aren’t there during the winter, and they’re not seeing some of the biggest impacts and changes to the beach,” said Cynthia Dittbrenner, vice president of natural resources for The Trustees of Reservations. “So they come back to this beautiful, occasionally tragic, scene of erosion,” she said. “But if you’re there in the winter, you’re experiencing these incredible storms and the winds, and you see the erosion happening first-hand right in front of you. It’s like an education tool.” 

Across the Cape and Islands – the region with the highest share of seasonal housing in Massachusetts – headlines and eyeballs have been transfixed on the bluff-side luxury vacation homes tumbling into the ocean or threatening to do so.  

The region is already struggling with the workforce impacts of changing housing patterns while trying to maintain the seaside tourist draw that’s essential to local economies. A 2022 state assessment noted that a major consequence of climate change on the Cape and Islands is a reduction in affordable housing availability and tourist attractions and amenities.  

This is creating a housing crunch and a climate crisis at the same time – demand for these sandy, tony shores conflicting with the need to literally shore up the coastline.   

Groundwater is rising, low-lying areas are regularly flooding, and the ocean is slowly turning some peninsulas into islands, but there’s nothing like a house toppling into the sea to drive the point home: plan or paddle. 

And regardless, someone has to pay. 

The anecdotes, at first blush, seem like first-world math problems.

If a $5.5 million home nearly falls off a cliff in Wellfleet, who foots the bill? If a house bought on an eroding beach on Nantucket drops in value from $2.2 million to $200,000, but needs another $200,000 of work before the town finally orders it demolished, was it worth it? If the value of homes across the coast more than doubled during a global pandemic and the water continues to rise, who can afford or be able to live there now?  

The demand for coastal houses is quickly bumping up against the reality of nature, with soaring pandemic prices dropping along some of the more erosion-prone shorelines.  

At-risk houses pose a threat to more than the owners’ wallets. The saga of a controversial 5,100-square foot Wellfleet mansion entered its final chapter this year, after it was purchased for $5.5 million in 2021 despite the fact that wind and water had already clawed the bluffs dangerously near the sprawling house.  

A 2024 report prepared for Wellfleet by Bryan McCormack, a coastal processes specialist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant, estimated that the bluffs were eroding at a rate of 3.8 to 5.6 feet a year. The report estimated the house would collapse within three years.  

Cape residents and officials fretted that, should the property fall into Cape Cod Bay, the nearby oyster beds could be physically damaged and poisoned by toxic fiberglass and refrigerant materials. Radio station CAI reported that, after years of back and forth over who would shoulder the cost of demolishing the property, a demolition crew surprised the town by starting to dismantle the house in February.  

McCormack talked to CAI as the home was demolished. “Seeing that this is happening, going into dumpsters and being taken off site, rather than next week in a storm, it is, I think, a preferable outcome for a lot of the people in the town and for the people that use the beach, the people that are eating shellfish out of Wellfleet Harbor, the people that are living all through this system,” he said. 

But the showpiece homes aren’t alone. A 2020 report by First Street Foundation, a climate data organization, found 193,000 properties in Massachusetts face a substantial risk of coastal flooding, which includes more than half of the properties in some coastal towns.   

“Water doesn’t know property lines,” said Leah Hill, Nantucket’s coastal resilience coordinator, as she stared at a grey ocean. Hill was out in the field on a late March afternoon, checking on a stretch of the island’s 88 miles of shoreline, along which perches some of the state’s priciest and most vulnerable real estate.   

A 2021 assessment of Nantucket’s coastal risk, which informed a tailored resiliency plan, slapped a $3.4 billion cumulative annual price tag on doing nothing over a 70 year period. By 2070, some 2,373 structures on the island will be at risk from flooding and erosion, the assessment found, and the costs would rack up through direct physical damage, direct and indirect economic disruption, and direct social disruption for things like relocation and health costs from injuries and mental stress.  

“We’ve got essentially three types of flooding,” explained Hill. “We’ve got flooding from rain, so stormwater flooding. We have flooding from coastal storms, when we get those big nor’easters. And then we get flooding essentially from sea level rise.”   

When sea level rises around the island, it pushes on groundwater, which then pushes fresh water up above ground. This can cause water to settle on areas that were historically dry, expanding wetlands and causing issues like basement flooding far inland. It also causes salt water to intrude into wells and make them undrinkable, Hill said.  

And then of course, there’s erosion. 

“We have one of the highest erosion rates in Massachusetts,” Hill noted. “We are essentially, as you know, a body of sand in the middle of the Atlantic.” 

Nantucket’s climate assessment noted a key tension between “current private development practices and norms” and “a future built environment that is resilient.” It continued, “given these norms, any approach that aims to restrict development is likely to be met with significant opposition and must be carefully crafted to encourage resilient development.” 

There are strains on resources created by “a growing and seasonally fluctuating population,” the assessment further stated. There is more foot traffic, more vehicular traffic, and more demand for services and utilities on one hand. On the other hand, there are more people contributing to the seasonal economy. 

On Martha’s Vineyard, a 2022 climate action plan noted that the island’s south shore beaches are eroding three to five feet every year, threatening more than 700 local jobs that could be lost in vulnerable areas and impacting travel to the island when weather events force the ferry to suspend operations.  

“Shipping, trucking, and ferrying food to the island is becoming increasingly unpredictable,” according to the Martha’s Vineyard plan, and increased demand for local food as the climate changes will be constrained by lack of affordable housing and access to affordable land.

Depending on the time of year, prime waterfront housing on the Cape and Islands is also some of the state’s emptiest.  

About 60 percent of Nantucket units are now only in seasonal, recreational, or occasional use. The island’s part-time percentage is topped only by the Martha’s Vineyard towns Chilmark and Edgartown, both of which are in the high 60s, and Truro near the northern tip of Cape Cod, which is 71 percent part-time homes. 

“We’ve been growing,” Nantucket Select Board member Matthew Fee said of the island where he grew up. “We have more houses, and more bigger and nicer houses, and more people than we’ve had at peak before.” 

Fee wears two hats: select board member running for a sixth term and owner of the local bakery and sandwich shop Something Natural. He’s always been able to tell when a summer is in high demand mode by his “bread index,” that is, how many loaves of southern Massachusetts’ classic Portuguese bread have trundled out his bakery doors. 

The island, like much of the region, has always had a strong vacation season identity. But the savvy economic move for those who want to rent out a house is now to optimize short-term rentals. A one-to-three-bed Airbnb during the prime season can run from $350 to over $1,000 a night, while some eight-bedroom homes on rental listings will still go for around $25,000 a month. 

As state Sen. Julian Cyr puts it, “the real issue is our housing market is valued basically on what a given home or apartment rents for by the night in July and August.”

Fee’s bread index theory “really holds true,” he said of late, “and we are seeing huge spikes now over a Friday-Saturday-Sunday.” 

According to the state’s recent housing needs report, half of all registered short-term rentals statewide are in Barnstable County, despite having only 6 percent of the state’s housing units. From 2009-2019, 5,800 year-round homes on Cape Cod were “lost” – taken out of the normal housing market – to seasonal use or for other reasons. New production made up part of the difference, but not enough to stem the overall loss of year-round units. 

“Thousands of homes are at risk due to increasingly severe coastal and riverine flooding,” the report’s authors wrote. “But a home doesn’t have to be flooded to be lost. … The availability of modestly priced homes and apartments is dwindling as they are acquired and upscaled by investors who sell or rent at a much higher price point.” 

Sale and rental data trackers show a slow but consistent climb for years across these seasonal communities, but the pandemic sent prices into a new stratosphere. Buyers who wanted to spend more time on idyllic shores dropped in with higher budgets, with an eye toward short-term renting or leaving it vacant except for personal vacation use. 

What once was a “life-cycle” of housing is more complicated, Fee said.  

Past a certain price point, the house “usually doesn’t get rented but still demands all the services,” Fee noted, in terms of needing town infrastructure, contractor and staff parking and housing, and utilities to serve the bigger footprints. 

And, the houses that are now being bought, renovated, and kept empty during the off-season are the ones that used to be rented to middle managers, teachers, or town workers. They now have to find somewhere else on the island to live, if possible. Workers on the Cape have a similar issue, often commuting in from the mainland rather than compete for pricey housing where they work. 

“It’s good for business and we rely on it,” Fee said of the seasonal resident ebb and flow, “but it also puts pressures on the island.” 

For Cyr, who grew up in Truro and represents the Cape and Islands, the focus on the billionaire home imperiled by nature is something of a distraction. Coastal erosion risk is “a compounding challenge” to the broader housing crunch, he said.  

“There’s going to be some places that we’re going to have to retreat,” he said, citing locations with severe erosion along the Cape Cod National Seashore in Barnstable or the bluffs of Nantucket. But Cyr and resilience experts noted that erosion is a long natural process, which itself has carved the outlines of Massachusetts’ iconic shape. “This is part of a natural rhythm of a place,” he said, pointing to areas with little development that are eroding as well. 

Martha’s Vineyard beaches have lost more than 1,400 acres since 1897, and Nantucket nearly 1,900 acres, according to the State of The Coasts report from the Trustees, which preserves places of scenic, historical, and ecological value for public use. The islands also have nearly 1,800 acres of marsh at risk from sea level rise. 

In Cyr’s experience, the focus is on the dire day-to-day impacts of places dealing with groundwater issues and ever rising tides. 

“How do you bolster Commercial Street in Provincetown, or Beach Road from Oak Bluffs to Edgartown [on Martha’s Vineyard]?” Cyr said. “How do you deal with the pretty routine flooding that’s occurring now during high tides in Nantucket? That’s what much more of the conversation is, less these bigger, more dramatic examples.” 

Climate and planning efforts in Massachusetts have tended toward the town-by-town, until recently. 

Cyr’s brisk reference to “retreat” connects to a thorny debate over managed retreat, a process of moving infrastructure, people, and property out of vulnerable areas through policies that could include options like voluntary buyouts, relocating roads, and changing zoning districts. 

A 2023 state-wide assessment of coastal communities’ willingness to consider managed retreat, reported on by CommonWealth Beacon, found that there is still significant reluctance to contemplate relocating infrastructure unless absolutely necessary. Chief concerns were the lack of places to relocate to, political feasibility, and a loss of tax revenue – especially when it comes to high-priced real estate. 

Since then, some municipalities have moved ahead with plans to consider significant changes.  

The small coastal town of Hull, a peninsula including the particularly vulnerable Hampton Circle neighborhood, is engaged in planning efforts that include elevating certain homes or planning for a buyout program encouraging homeowners to move out of an area with a particularly high risk of flooding. 

In Falmouth – which considered a plan to make a historic retreat from its iconic Surf Drive coastal roadway in the face of sea level rise, flooding, and other impacts of climate change – there is a desire to push the conversation off as long as possible. According to The Enterprise, town officials recently learned that, because of an eelgrass bed near the beach, the town will no longer be allowed to dump new sand onto Surf Drive Beach to stall erosion and protect the roadway. 

Beach committee chairwoman Barbara Schneider said people need to face the fact that Surf Drive Beach will disappear. “We are no longer talking about saving beach,” Schneider said, according to The Enterprise. “All we’re talking about right now is saving a road and people’s homes.” 

Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, both of which occasionally lose coastal houses to erosion, are working to refine their resilience plans. 

Hill, from Nantucket, is putting out a bid soon for a retreat and relocation program that would incorporate a climate risk assessment and put procedures in place for contacting and technically assisting homeowners if they need to relocate their home – either to a safer perch or for demolition. 

Resiliency advocates are somewhat limited in their efforts because of public-private barriers. Nantucket’s climate plan is only tailored to town-owned land, where it can build up sea walls or beaches. 

“We don’t have control of what private property owners want to do on their property as far as risk management, if anything, unless it’s through a regulation,” Hill said. “So we’re focused on mitigating flooding and erosion out to 2070 on our most critical roadways – the way to get to the Steamship Authority and all of those critical assets.” 

State building code regulations can create some obligations. For instance, if an owner in the downtown Nantucket flood plain wants to do renovations that would cost more than 50 percent of the market value of the structure, the whole building must be brought up to code including flood mitigation measures. But, the parcel-by-parcel process can be unwieldy. 

A new report from Massachusetts’s Unlocking Housing Production Commission on meeting the state’s housing goals recommends creating a separate residential building code so that projects that cost a higher percentage of the total building value will have to meet higher flood protection and other climate requirements, and vice versa. 

Given the speed of erosion on the islands, finding a way to contact owners if their houses are in trouble can be essential. It’s a quirk of the wealthy seasonal community – on some streets the owners of many properties are corporations or LLCs, not a person, so the town will send a letter to the corporate address if there is a structural concern.  

There may be a chance for less piecemeal planning on the horizon; at least, less piecemeal than town-by-town. 

Recent initiatives on coastal climate resilience planning and seasonal housing stressors offer a chance for more coordination between regions. 

In late 2023, the Healey administration launched ResilientCoasts, an initiative that promises a “comprehensive framework” to coordinate local and state efforts. According to public presentations in March, a final draft plan is expected this spring, which will establish coastal resilience districts based on geography, coastal characteristics, and risks, as well as identify strategies to support local and regional efforts to improve resilience coastwide. 

“Climate change presents a unique opportunity to build safer communities – but no municipality can do this alone,” said Maria Hardiman, spokesperson for the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management, in a statement. Though no exact figure is attached to the effort yet, Hardiman said “for every dollar we invest in resilience now, we save $13 in damages and economic impacts in the long run. These investments are critical to protecting public safety and our economy, including the Massachusetts tourism industry and access to beautiful outdoor spaces.”  

Discussion about who should pay for resilience improvements reminds select board member Fee of debates about sewer access decades ago as the island expanded.  

There is a “natural tension,” he said, between the homeowners who need upgraded infrastructure because of modern building demands and those who are adequately served by the older systems.  

“One side says it’s a common good and we all should pay for it, and one side says half the island doesn’t require sewer,” he recalled, so why put them on the hook? After years of debate, the island split the coverage and the tax burden – balancing the costs between the current tax base, those who use the sewer, and areas with expected future users. 

That sewer system, which covers about 60 percent of the island, is now actively endangered by erosion and in need of quick remedial action.  

Similarly, the question of resilience often turns onto a question of “who is this for?”  

Nantucket’s resiliency plan lays out about $1 billion of investments to help the town weather the changing climate, and voters at the annual town meeting approved splitting the island into resiliency districts based on their unique challenges. Town officials have mulled – to residents’ chagrin – imposing fees on property owners who stand to benefit the most from the resilience projects. 

Dittbrenner, the vice president of natural resources for The Trustees, said the communal stakes of preventing climate impacts are rising.  

“We haven’t necessarily had conflicts, but we’ve needed to work more with our adjacent landowners, because some of the impacts of climate change and increased flooding and erosion, of course, extend beyond our boundaries,” she said. 

Property owners can have strong aesthetic feelings that sometimes conflict with conservation interests, Dittbrenner noted. Natural brush can hold a beach in place but look untidy, netting to protect sea bird habitats can seem visually disruptive, and sometimes the solid appearance of a sea wall is more comforting than a natural wetlands barrier that might be more appropriate.  

Given the cost of some erosion interventions, like beach nourishment, groups like The Trustees are trying to find a balance for municipalities when there are overlapping property interests. 

The Trustees co-owns the Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge, some 1,117 acres of rapidly thinning barrier beach that stretches around to create Nantucket Harbor, with the Nantucket Conservation Foundation. 

“We can’t afford to spend millions of dollars to come and place a bunch of sand on the beach just to shore it up in that way, because that is really transient and would only last for a few years and costs a lot of money,” said Dittbrenner. “So the cost benefit isn’t there. But if there are nature-based ways that we can improve the resilience of that buffer and increase the habitat, then that’s a mutual benefit that makes sense.” 

For that sort of project, groups can usually go to the state and federal government. Dittbrenner expects the cost will now fall more to the state given the pullback of many federal funds.  

A state grant will cover the last permitting phase of raising Argilla Road in Ipswich, which is the only road with access to interstate tourist draw Crane Estate and Crane Beach. The road has been flooding frequently on the king tide, which are exceptionally high tides tied to moon cycles. Dittbrenner said The Trustees and the city are partnering to nail down a design for the project, but have secured funding from the state. 

Town budgets are tight, Fee noted, and municipalities with areas of sparse but vulnerable housing can be stuck paying for outdated obligations. 

“The state rules have to catch up with the reality of climate change,” he said. “A town road can’t be abandoned if someone’s [living] on it, but what happens when the road goes into the ocean?”   

Don Vaccaro, a businessman and philanthropist who co-founded Ticketnetwork Inc., had owned a Sheep Pond Road property on an-erosion threatened stretch of Nantucket since 2014 and purchased the house and lot next door a decade later for $200,000, putting about the same amount into renovating and eventually demolishing the property. He demolished the second house at the town’s request just six months after buying it, for a $400,000 loss. 

“I was able to use it one week with my family and kids in both houses, which was a priceless experience, so it was worth it in the end,” he told the Nantucket Current in January. 

Housing dynamics are involved in an awkward push-and-pull with climate and open space interests. Protected coastline and green space are desirable to nearby buyers and renters, but also drive up housing costs by limiting available land. And when the impacts of climate change get too pronounced, the land value tanks. 

The former owners of the small Sheep Pond Road house bought it for $2 million in 1988 and held on for decades as the shoreline receded, imperiling the structure. Even local housing nonprofits weren’t interested after three storms carved out the little remaining beach. When they sold it to Vacarro, they got back just 10 percent of their initial investment.  

“Most of these properties that you see that have this dramatic erosion loss,” Cyr said, pointing as an example to a house that had to be relocated at Ballston Beach in Truro two years ago, “these are seasonal homes. These are second homes. I think I hear much more from concerned constituents who may not be living at the water’s edge, but whose homeowners insurance rates have gone up astronomically, or they can’t get homeowners insurance.” 

The state should be able to step in and offer assistance, said Cyr, who supports efforts to establish a flood insurance market and has filed legislation to offer incentives and encouragement to make home investments that would be more resilient to a changing climate. 

The majority of residents are not scrambling to save million-dollar homes, but demand for housing has made even risky bets seem like a good option if the buyer doesn’t mind a short use window or taking a loss that costs as much as buying a studio apartment in Boston. 

And as in the case of the former owner of the demolished Sheep Pond Road house, buying a home in 1988 with a wide stretch between the house and the beach is no guarantee of safety. When the ocean comes, if it’s every homeowner for themself, the options are demolition or a fire sale. 

The post ‘Water doesn’t know property lines’: Where Massachusetts’s climate and housing crises meet appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

WHEN IT WAS her turn to testify last month to the state board of education before it voted on a proposal from KIPP Academy Lynn Charter School to add 450 seats, the school’s executive director, Nikki Barnes, tried to send a message before she even began to speak.  

“Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round,” Barnes sang as she approached the microphone, unspooling several lines of an old spiritual that became one of the anthems of the US civil rights movement.  

With that, the veteran African American educator was tapping into the idea that schools like KIPP Lynn, part of a national network of charter schools focused on preparing students – almost all of them low-income Black and Hispanic pupils – for college, are a modern-day extension of the struggle for civil rights.  

“I believe that now more than ever that our families must know that their voices matter, and that their desire to have access to a public school option that best supports their students, regardless of how uncertain the times may be, matters,” Barnes said to the board, pointing to the 1,700 students on a waiting list for a seat at KIPP’s K-12 school in Lynn, which enrolls 1,600 students.  

The language of the civil rights movement once served as a powerful force animating bipartisan support for charters, which are publicly funded but operate independently of local school districts. Today, however, charter schools have become a lightning rod for partisan strife.  

Charter schools still enjoy support from conservatives and some on the left. But they have increasingly become targets of attack from Democrats, their teachers union allies, and other liberal-leaning groups, who say charter schools undermine traditional school districts by diverting public funding from them.  

That shift was cast in sharp relief at February’s state education board meeting, where Gov. Maura Healey’s education secretary, Patrick Tutwiler, voted against all five proposals for expansion of charter schools that the state’s acting education commissioner recommended for approval.  

It was an extraordinary display of anti-charter sentiment, and it came with no explanation of the thinking behind the votes. 

After the meeting, Tutwiler, who is one of 10 voting members of the board, issued a statement in response to a question to his office about the across-the-board vote against each charter proposal.  

“I voted no today as I believe this is not the right moment for charter school expansion, as schools and students are still recovering from the pandemic, and we are all navigating a changing federal landscape,” Tutwiler said.   

Three of the proposals were nonetheless approved by the board, but two – including the KIPP plan – were rejected in close votes. The KIPP proposal was voted down 6-4, while a plan to add just 34 seats to the Advanced Science and Math Academy Charter School in Marlborough was rejected in a 5-5 tie vote.  

While Tutwiler opposed all the charter proposals, only the KIPP expansion plan had generated strong public opposition in the runup to the board vote.  

Lynn officials, led by the mayor, school superintendent, and the local teachers union president, lobbied strongly against the proposal, arguing that adding the new seats would strip the Lynn school district of $8 million per year. Under the state school funding formula, public dollars flow with each student to the school system they attend.  

“An $8 million budget cut would devastate our efforts to turn the district around,” Lynn’s mayor, Jared Nicholson, told the board prior to the vote.  

Under the state’s charter school reimbursement law, meant to cushion the financial impact of students exiting local districts for charters, districts continue to receive payments for three years for each new charter student, starting with 100 percent of the per pupil funding the first year, 60 percent the second year, and 40 percent in the third year.   

The KIPP proposal presented a challenging decision for Tutwiler, who previously served for four years as the school superintendent in Lynn. What’s more, he and Barnes, the KIPP school leader, worked to bridge the divide that often exists between district public schools and charter schools. They forged a strong relationship and developed an initiative that jointly counseled groups of district and KIPP students on college and career readiness planning.  

“We partnered around the idea that we can get more done collaborating than we can by fighting with one another,” Tutwiler said in a 2023 interview with CommonWealth Beacon, shortly after taking the reins as education secretary.  

“We hit it off early,” Barnes said in an interview at the same time. “We cared about kids and determined that we were going to work together.” Barnes said she and Tutwiler, as fellow Black educators, were fond of referencing a James Baldwin quote, whose message is, “all of the children are all of ours.” 

That relationship hit a big snag with last month’s vote. Exactly what transpired in the days and weeks leading up to it is unclear.  

Tutwiler’s office did not respond to multiple requests to speak with him over the weeks since the February 25 board meeting. Barnes also did not respond to messages seeking to speak with her.  

KIPP originally sought to add 1,388 new seats but, in consultation with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, agreed to ratchet back the proposal to 450 seats.  

In education circles, there has been talk that Tutwiler’s decision to vote against the KIPP plan came at the direction of the governor’s office, which was responding to the strong opposition from municipal leaders and teachers unions. Several education observers also suggested that Tutwiler’s votes against all the other proposed charter expansions – and the declaration that it’s “not the right moment” for charter expansions – may have been part of an effort to avoid singling out the KIPP proposal.  

Gov. Healey’s office declined to comment on whether Tutwiler was directed to oppose the KIPP plan. The office also would not comment when asked whether Healey or Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll lobbied other education board members to vote against the KIPP proposal.  

Katherine Craven, the education board chair, a position appointed by the governor, joined Tutwiler in the 6-4 vote against the KIPP plan. Craven also did not respond to a request for comment on her vote. 

Tutwiler’s explanation that it isn’t the right time for any charter expansion seemed strained in the case of the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers in Boston, which sought to add 352 seats.  

Unlike most charter schools, which operate apart from districts, often with non-unionized teachers, the Kennedy Academy is among a smaller group of in-district charter schools. It’s part of the Boston Public Schools, so its expansion does not involve any money being shifted out of the district.  

The plan had the support of the Boston School Committee and the Boston Teachers Union. It passed 9-1, with Tutwiler casting the lone dissenting vote.  

Mayor Michelle Wu trumpeted the expansion earlier this month in her State of the City speech.  

With a $38 million donation from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the largest gift in Boston Public Schools history, the Kennedy Academy is growing its partnership with Mass General Brigham to develop a robust school-to-career pipeline for Boston students. 

Tim Nicolette, executive director of the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association, called Tutwiler’s votes – and the rejection of two proposals that had passed muster with officials in the state education department – “appalling” and “deeply troubling.”  

After hearing from opponents to the KIPP plan about the financial impact it would have on the Lynn Public Schools, the state’s acting education commissioner, Russell Johnston, who recommended that the board approve the expansion, emphasized that weighing the impact of charters on local districts “is not a consideration in law or regulations.”  

Several board members nonetheless voiced exactly those concerns, including Tutwiler, who said, “I can’t ignore the context in which we are making this decision, and it is a pandemic recovery context.”  

That put Tutwiler in sync with teachers unions and district leaders in the state.  

Jessica Tang, president of the American Federation of Teachers – Massachusetts, testified at the meeting that the charter proposals were coming at a time of growing budget concerns and the uncertainty of threats from Washington. “To ignore the realities of this context would be gravely irresponsible,” she said.  

Mary Bourque, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, authored a Boston Globe op-ed the day before the board meeting urging its members not to approve any of the charter proposals.  

“Policy makers are striving to ensure that the state makes the investments needed to maintain its standing as a leader in public education,” she wrote. “While that important work is ongoing, now is not the time to approve the expansion of any charter school.” 

Jamie Gass, director of the Center for School Reform at the free-market-oriented Pioneer Institute, which has been a strong supporter of charter schools, said despite the law not including the impact on local districts as a factor in weighing charter school proposals, it has increasingly seemed to figure in decisions. “It’s been de facto added as a criterion,” he said.   

“The charter school law was created specifically to insulate authorizing decisions from politics,” said Nicolette, of the charter school association. “If politics and district financial situations are going to determine the outcome of charter school authorizing decisions, that has the potential to undermine the entire charter school authorizing process.”  

At last month’s board meeting, Tutwiler said he’s not focused on the governance structure of schools and supports quality education, whether it’s in the district public school sector or charter school sector. He offered the same view two years ago when, in the only other charter school votes by the board since he became education secretary, Tutwiler opposed a new Worcester charter school. “I’m sector agnostic,” he said at last month’s board meeting. “I like good schools.”  

But his party-line vote against all five charter expansion proposals seemed to undercut that claim.  

He also voted against a proposal by a sixth charter school, the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School in South Hadley, to reduce the number of communities it serves from 34 to 18 so that it could afford to fund transportation for all students. It passed 8-2.  

The board’s vote against two of the charter proposals “shows a change not in how charters are being regulated, but more so in how they’re being politically perceived,” said Will Austin, a former public school teacher, principal, and nonprofit leader, who now works as an education consultant. “What once was a very bipartisan issue became a very partisan one. There is this perception that if you’re a progressive, you have to be against charters.”  

The growing partisan divide on charters emerged in full force a decade ago, said Margaret Raymond, executive director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University.  

“In the early days, it was about innovation and equity, and both parties could get behind that,” she said of the view that charter schools brought another option for lower-income families who could not afford to leave troubled urban districts for suburban schools. But that changed as teachers unions, an important part of the Democratic Party base, escalated opposition to the school model.  

“Hillary threw support for charter schools under the bus,” Raymond said of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, in which she leveled criticism at charter schools, a sharp break from the pro-charter views of her husband, Bill Clinton, during his two terms in the White House.  

In Massachusetts, the same strong turn by Democrats away from charter schools was seen in the resounding defeat of a statewide ballot question the same year that sought to increase the state cap on charter schools. Healey, then serving as attorney general, opposed the ballot question.  

The 2016 ballot question drubbing, said Gass, of the Pioneer Institute, has left “charter politics in a really precarious state.”  

Bourque, the head of the state superintendents association, said she hopes Tutwiler’s stance signals a turn away from charters. “There should be a freeze on all expansion of charters until we can really settle and calm down the financial challenges facing our districts,” she said.  

Nicolette, the charter school association director, challenged the idea that it’s not the right time for any charter expansions, pointing to the hundreds of families hoping for seats at KIPP Academy in Lynn and the Advanced Science and Math Academy, or AMSA, in Marlborough, the two proposals that were turned down.  

“If you were to talk to the students and families in Lynn or Marlborough that were trying to access KIPP or AMSA, I think they would say, why isn’t it the right time for our kids to be able to access the rigorous academic programming and strong family supports of this school?” said Nicolette. “And it begs the question: What needs to be in place for it to be the right time?”  

Paul Reville, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and former state education secretary, said the showdown over charters at last month’s education board meeting was an unfortunate sign of the times.  

“It’s a missed opportunity to find some middle ground on a divisive issue at a time we desperately need parents and students to be motivated about their choices in education,” he said. “There ought to be a recognition that there are legitimate claims on both sides. It will hurt districts,” Reville said of charter growth. “At the same time, it will benefit parents and students.” There ought to be “some more nuanced middle ground instead of taking an across-the-board position about charters in this moment.”  

The post Mass. education secretary’s votes reflect growing Democratic hostility toward charter schools   appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

Leer en español.

On a chilly November evening, the first after a string of 70-degree days, people made their way to a former storefront on Acushnet Avenue in New Bedford’s North End. Some of the 50 or so gathered made small talk with friends, mainly in Spanish and K’iche’, a language spoken by over a million people in rural Mayan communities of Guatemala. 

Voters had elected Donald Trump to the presidency a second time just two weeks before, and this fact sat heavily in the air among those in attendance — primarily immigrants from Central America, many of them undocumented — at the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores (CCT), or Worker’s Community Center. 

During the campaign, Trump promised voters mass deportations, pledging at points to declare a national emergency and involve the military in rounding up immigrants. He has publicly mused about changing the Constitution to end birthright citizenship. In an appearance on “Meet the Press,” Trump said he’d consider deporting US citizen children of deportees to avoid separating families, and his pick for border czar, Tom Homan, said the largest deportation operation in history would start on January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration.  

The first speaker of the evening was New Bedford Police Chief Paul Oliveira, who was peppered with questions in Spanish about how Trump’s deportation plans might affect the work of the local police. If we suffer a hate crime, can we still report it? If Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issues a detainer, do police act on it?

“We have nothing to do with ICE,” Oliveira reassured the crowd through an interpreter. “Nothing changes between the police and how we interact with the community.” 

After Oliveira, Jennifer Velarde, a New Bedford immigration attorney, stood in the front of the room and began listing ways to prepare for a dramatic shift in immigration policy: Don’t open the door to anyone you don’t know unless they have a warrant. You have a right to remain silent. Abstain from — and seek treatment for disorders related to — alcohol and other mind-altering substances to avoid legal problems.

Velarde also advised people to draw up documents granting custody of their children to a trusted person and to ensure their passports are ready to visit parents abroad.

“If you know there’s a chance you could be deported, now’s the time to talk about it with your family,” she said. All the advice she had to offer could be summed up in two words: brace yourselves.

“There is much about what will happen that we don’t know about,” Velarde said. “What I do know is much of what I know about immigration [law] is going to change, and it’s not going to be pretty.”

For two centuries, immigrants have sought refuge in New Bedford and have become the backbone of the city’s main economic driver — the fishing industry — which generates $11.1 billion annually in economic activity, according to a 2019 study commissioned by the Port of New Bedford. Their presence in this city — extending back to the heydays of the whaling and textile industries — continues to grow.  More than one-fifth of New Bedford’s more than 100,000 residents were foreign-born as of the 2023 American Community Survey One-Year Estimate, almost 55 percent of them non-citizens.

Immigrant advocates have good reason to think New Bedford may figure prominently on a list of places that will be targeted under an aggressive deportation campaign by the new administration. Activists here founded CCT in the aftermath of the March 2007 Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid — the largest in US history at the time — on the Michael Bianco Inc. textile plant in New Bedford’s South End, which resulted from a tip from a worker. Agents detained 361 undocumented workers from Cabo Verde, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Portugal, and other countries. One activist with the group, an undocumented Guatemalan man who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of deportation, said CCT was born of struggle and will continue to fight for local workers and the immigrant community under the second Trump administration.

Mass deportations on the scale Trump is promising would, many experts say, mean families ripped apart, livelihoods lost, and a drain on the social safety net as undocumented immigrants pay billions into Social Security and Medicare through payroll taxes without being able to access payments or services from the programs themselves. It would not only upend New Bedford’s fishing houses but also affect state tax coffers and potentially force many residents to leave in search of jobs.

Having lived through the Bianco raid, New Bedford already has more first-hand experience than most communities with deportations at scale. In 2007, more than half of those deported were from Guatemala, and most were indigenous Maya from the district of El Quiché in the nation’s northwest. Families were split apart as social services, city agencies, and even schools attempted to navigate the chaos.  The raid also made it impossible to ignore how large swaths of the US economy quietly rely on undocumented immigrants. 

The lack of details about Trump’s plans leaves officials, activists, and civilians apprehensive and anxious about the scale, tactics, and impacts of such an operation.  Nonetheless, activists in New Bedford say they are sure the city won’t escape the consequences. 

“I’m confident [Trump] will follow through,” said a CCT activist who also works with Pescando Justicia (Fishing for Justice), an organization focused on labor conditions in fish houses in New Bedford and the surrounding areas. He asked to remain anonymous due to fears of deportation related to his undocumented status. “Our community is not ready for what’s coming.”

Though a small segment of the Massachusetts economy, fishing and seafood processing dominate New Bedford. City officials tout its status as the largest fishing port in the country when measured by the value of the catch. In 2023, the port’s landings were valued at more than $363 million, National Marine Fisheries Service data show. (The second-place port, Dutch Harbor in Alaska, had a catch value of $224.5 million.) Much of this is due to the price of the Atlantic sea scallop, which makes up 80 percent of the New Bedford catch.

The city’s maritime heritage is key to its identity, with deep roots reaching at least to the 19^th century, when it was a world leader in whaling and processed whale products. A history of whaling ships stopping in the Azores and Cabo Verde islands to rest, recrew and resupply planted those communities’ roots in the city. Both groups have become an integral part of New Bedford’s identity. Those immigrants were vital to the city’s maritime industries then and remain so now, whether in the US legally or not, said Helena DaSilva Hughes, president of the Immigrants’ Assistance Center (IAC) — a local social services nonprofit. 

“You can’t talk about how New Bedford is the number one [fishing] port in the country for 20 years without talking about who’s doing the work. [The fish houses] are the economic engine of New Bedford,” Hughes said, and without immigrant labor “they would cease to function.”

About 10,000 undocumented people reside in New Bedford, according to the most recent estimate provided by the IAC, a conservative one in Hughes’s eyes. She added that her organization is arranging clinics to help families prepare for the worst. 

“It’s not just going to be undocumented immigrants who are deported; legal permanent residents are not citizens yet, and they can be deported as well,” she said.

“There are a lot of people who are perceived as undocumented but really are not,” said Corinn Williams, director of the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts (CEDC), another local social services nonprofit that works extensively with immigrant populations. “They are under precarious circumstances because a lot of the programs they are here under need to be periodically renewed.”

Programs such as deferred action for enforcement purposes, childhood arrivals, and Temporary Protected Status have enabled many to stay in the country and work legally in the US, as have asylum policies. Their continuation under a new Trump administration remains an open question. 

Yet that uncertainty is, to an extent, the point, said Williams, even if deportations do not happen in as flashy a manner as the Bianco raid. “The purpose is to terrorize communities and instill fear,” she added.

Immigration happens more at an individual level, she added, as each case has its own context and nuance that makes legal processes difficult to navigate. Overwhelm the system, and not only do processes slow, but the resources to help maneuver through the system disappear altogether. 

“That was the tragedy of the Bianco raid,” she said. “It was a big sweep, and people didn’t get access to legal counsel. But who has the bandwidth to stand beside every single case?”

The Central American presence in New Bedford began in the 1980s due to the confluence of two significant events. The first was the Guatemalan Genocide, a part of that nation’s almost 36-year civil war, when the US-backed military regime killed or “disappeared” around 200,000 mostly indigenous Maya. The violence launched a wave of Guatemalan migrants north, many without documentation. 

The second was a series of strikes by fishermen and fish house workers in the 1980s over earnings, pensions, and hiring practices. The Seafarers International Union of North America strike in December 1985 was broken when non-union workers were brought in to keep the boats in operation. Shortly thereafter, the union dissolved and became one of the many destroyed amid the anti-union sentiment ushered in by the Reagan administration, creating vacancies for new arrivals willing to work at lower rates.  

As a result of the unions’ dissolution, many hiring restrictions were lifted on boats and in New Bedford’s more than 45 fish houses and processors. Undocumented workers, initially led by Guatemalan K’iche’ and hired through temporary placement agencies, began to stream into New Bedford via Providence, with friends and family often following. 

That’s how the Pescando Justicia activist — who labored in multiple fish houses for 17 years — found work. 

“[Fish houses] would regularly give work to undocumented people,” he said in Spanish, adding that he was only aware of two among 50 coworkers at his last job with proper documentation. “They definitely know it, too.”

His former employer — Atlantic Red Crab Co. — has been under investigation by the US Department of Labor for “possible violations of child labor, overtime pay, and anti-retaliation laws,” The Public’s Radio, Rhode Island’s NPR station, reported in September 2023. A year before that, Pescando Justicia began circulating a Code of Conduct for fish house operators and local officials to sign, asking them to respect the rights of all workers regardless of their citizenship status. Around this time, the activist said the company began cutting hours.

“They’d hire us because they knew we wouldn’t complain because of worries about our status,” he said. “When we started [organizing], that’s when they came after us.”

Atlantic Red Crab Co. officials did not respond to a request for comment. But in an interview with The Public’s Radio, owner Jon Williams said a 16-year-old found to be working at his plant came through a staffing agency.

“It isn’t like I hired this person, but the staffing agency sent that person to my building,” he said in the interview. “And yes, that person worked in my building. I can’t deny that. But sometimes I have 150 people working in my building, and they all wear hairnets and face masks. So it’s pretty hard to tell an 18-year-old from a 16-year-old.”

The most recent census data show that 1,500 Guatemalans now live in New Bedford, though that figure is likely low because many undocumented residents don’t respond to the census for fear of being deported. Many familiar with the community say 6,000 is a more accurate estimate. (By 2022, their presence was strong enough for New Bedford Public Schools to enter into an agreement with the Department of Justice to improve interpretation services in K’iche’, an indigenous language.) The flow of migrants from Guatemala never stopped as decades of war shattered society and institutions. Immigrants from El Salvador and Honduras — nations dealing with similarly tumultuous histories and politics — soon followed.

Many of those immigrants work on fishing boats and in processing houses, but the actual numbers are difficult to calculate, said Daniel Georgianna, a fisheries resource economist and chancellor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.  

“They don’t count undocumented people,” he said. “They just don’t.” 

Whatever the exact number, Georgianna said undocumented workers are essential to the operation of New Bedford’s fish houses. “The processing sector couldn’t survive [mass deportations],” he added. “It’s low wage, hard work.”

Representatives from the Port of New Bedford, the National Marine Fisheries Institute, a business group, and multiple seafood processing plants did not respond to requests for comment. 

Jobs in the fish houses are often monotonous and physically demanding, requiring long hours on one’s feet in low-temperature environments with hands submerged in water for long periods, swiftly fileting marine products with sharp tools. 

“If you ever saw a fish cutter at work, you just wouldn’t believe it,” Georgianna said. “They filet a fish in 20 seconds and get a better yield than a machine.”

Should mass deportations begin on the new administration’s first day, as Trump frequently says they will, Georgianna conceded wages might increase to attract citizen labor. But with the rise of technology, he suspects most companies would simply freeze the products and ship them overseas for processing before returning to American markets, much like what happened with the textile and garment industries. Once there, transportation costs and the potential impact of tariffs proposed by the president-elect would impact prices in stores and restaurants. He said that is where most Massachusetts residents would feel the effect.

“It would cause a large shift, not only immediately but longer term,” he said. “Quality would decline, and prices would go up because immigrants do food production. Period.” 

State Rep. Christopher Hendricks, a New Bedford Democrat whose district includes the North End and much of the city’s port, concurred.

“It could potentially be devastating for New Bedford,” Hendricks said of Trump’s mass deportation threat. “Especially the fishing fleet in New Bedford. When fish comes off the boat, it gets processed, chances are, by an immigrant from Central America.”

“I don’t know anybody who’s not from that community who’s gotten a job in fish processing in the last 20 years,” he continued. “I hope those companies are vocal about their workforce and their true needs and how it’s going to be disruptive.”

Despite the widespread knowledge of immigrant labor’s role in their industry, support for Trump is high among fishermen here. Many were drawn by hopes that he’d lift fishing restrictions and take their concerns about the effects of offshore wind farms on marine habitats seriously. 

Tyler Miranda, a captain of four scalloping boats docked in New Bedford who voted for Trump in November, said the local impacts of such deportations would be short-term and evolve over time.

“I don’t think [fish houses] will shut down,” he said. “He can’t just come through and take everybody; that’s just unrealistic.”

Miranda added that he thinks border crossings need to be brought under control, and not deporting people incentivizes more migrants to come to the United States. 

“It is not that they’ve committed any crimes or anything while they’re here, but they are here illegally,” he said. “Our workforce shouldn’t be made up of illegal immigrants.” 

Trump has not released specifics about deportation plans beyond saying he would declare a national emergency and use the military to round people up. (In a December interview with NBC News, Trump said he would like to work with Democrats to figure out a legislative solution to help undocumented immigrants who came to America as children stay in the country legally.) Miranda acknowledges the contributions of immigrants — with or without documentation — to the industry. Nonetheless, he said they should face consequences for entering the country illegally. 

“Unfortunately, there will be some economic ramifications because we’re in this position,” he said.  “Most of them are good, hard-working people. But there’s a process for coming to this country.”

Recent history may have lessons as to what those ramifications may be. Georgianna pointed to the textile and apparel industries that once employed thousands. In the 1920s, there were 70 textile and fabric mills in New Bedford before those began to close and move south to states like Alabama and Virginia where wages were lower.  Apparel and stitching mills began employing many immigrants, especially women — a trend that continued into the 1990s. 

When the US signed the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, which became effective in 1994, companies moved millions of jobs to Mexico. According to the Executive Office of Labor and Development, there were 14 textile and fabric mills in New Bedford in 2001. Today, only three remain. The apparel mills, more prominent in the city by the 1990s, dropped from 28 to 13 over the same time period.

“I came in [19]77, and there were still a lot of stitching shops in the city,” Georgianna said. “They’re pretty much gone now.”

That meant paychecks disappeared, and spending and tax revenues were severely diminished — a trend made worse by more people leaving the area to find work. According to one city analysis, New Bedford’s population dropped by 6 percent in the 1990s. It also led to a 6 percent drop in median household income, from $29,441 in 1989 to $27,569 in 1999.

Significant as the effects of the garment and textile industry collapse were, sudden mass deportations could have a far bigger impact given the truncated timescale.  The adverse effects would be felt swiftly and widely, activists say.

“Southeastern Mass. in general is vulnerable because we haven’t enjoyed the boom that happened in the Boston area and we depend on sectors like fishing, manufacturing, construction,” Williams, of the Southeastern Massachusetts CEDC, said. 

Massachusetts has taken center stage in the immigration debate on multiple occasions in recent years. In September 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida airlifted 50, mostly Venezuelan, asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard. The ensuing media storm generated widespread public sympathy for their plight. However, many red state governors followed suit, and a steady stream of migrants, most notably 14,000 Haitians, many seeking asylum and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protections, arrived in the two years since. Stories swamped the local media about the new migrants sleeping in Logan Airport and overwhelming the Massachusetts shelter system, prompting Gov. Maura Healey to declare a state of emergency last year. Consequently, sympathy among sectors of the general public ebbed and gave way to hostility toward the new arrivals. 

It was against this backdrop that Trump promised to “launch the largest deportation program in American history” on day one of his second term and to deport people “as fast as possible.”  What that looks like in practice remains to be seen. The logistics of deporting millions of people — some estimates put the number of undocumented residents as high as 11 million nationwide — would be costly and have ripple effects across the economy. Massachusetts is home to an estimated 130,300 undocumented immigrants, with a total spending power of $3.7 billion. They tend to work in cleaning, construction, food service, and manufacturing jobs.

Nonetheless, several prominent politicians statewide — including Healey — have said they will not allow the use of state or municipal resources to assist ICE with enforcement actions. 

“I think it’s absolutely appropriate that there be enforcement and deportation of individuals who commit crime, including violent crime. That’s very, very important,” Healey told NBC Boston shortly after Trump’s victory. “We recognize it would be devastating if there were mass raids, here and across the country, that took out people who’ve been working in this country for a long time, who have families and kids here.” Healey’s office declined requests for an interview from CommonWealth Beacon.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has also gone on record to say that the city will be relying on the Boston Trust Act, an ordinance that prohibits Boston police from asking people their immigration status and making arrests on administrative ICE warrants, to resist pressure from the Trump administration to assist in deportations.

“The Boston Trust Act puts strict prohibitions on local law enforcement from being pulled into becoming the enforcement arm for the whims of whatever the sort of approach of the federal immigration law might be,” Wu said in November on “Boston Public Radio.” “Our charge here is to take care of the residents of Boston and to use the resources that we have from all the sources that are available to get things done on the issues that matter.”

Neither Massachusetts nor New Bedford has sanctuary legislation on the books prohibiting police cooperation with ICE. But a 2017 Supreme Judicial Court ruling declared that police officers in the Commonwealth lack the authority to arrest or hold an individual solely based on an ICE detainer. 

When asked for comment from New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, city spokesman Jonathan Darling said municipal authorities are waiting to see how the situation evolves. 

“The City will monitor potential changes in federal policy on immigration and other areas and will continue to advocate for the interests of New Bedford residents and businesses,” he said in an email.

In the reigning confusion and panic following the Bianco raid, families were separated, and many began their journeys through immigration court. State Rep. Antonio Cabral, a Democrat whose district contains New Bedford’s South End and portions of the port, said he remembers the moment vividly. 

“Are we going to break up families like [what] happened in the Bianco case?” he said. “Little kids, US citizens, who expected to see their mother or father after school and that didn’t happen.  That’s devastating and I think there are better ways of dealing with the issue.”

He did not feel comfortable speaking about possible actions to navigate such a situation in the coming years until it is clear how Trump’s mass deportation plan plays out.  

“At this point, we don’t even know what mass deportation means,” Cabral said. 

Corinn Williams said state and local leaders should be exploring how best to support communities now, though she knows it’s difficult when so much is uncertain. Still, she hopes they take these concerns seriously since the mere threat of mass deportation is enough to hamper local activities.

“There are certain vulnerabilities we have as a community, and many have told us they don’t want to even ride the bus or take their kids to school,” she said. “People are going to retrench, and it’s creating the kind of terror that stops people from circulating in the community and the economy.” 

Police Chief Oliveira told Commonwealth Beacon that the city’s police will continue to serve all members of the community, regardless of their immigration status.  

“I’m going to continue coming and continue to be an advocate for what they do here in our city,” he said. “They’re a vital piece of our city. I’m proud of that, and I know they’re proud of that.”

“They’re a big part of our workforce here in New Bedford,” he continued. “[Mass deportation] would definitely take a toll on our city, and that’s why I don’t even like speculating on it.”

The Pescando Justicia activist noted that low wages and the struggle for survival mean that many in the community are unaware of the political situation and the chaos he foresees. 

“They’re only thinking of work and getting their daily bread,” he said. “They don’t stop to think beyond that.” 

He added that the Bianco raid taught the community a lot and gave many firsthand experiences with family separation. Even though he worries about the potential scale of the coming immigration enforcement, the threat is something he’s grown accustomed to.

“It’s not the first time we’ve faced massive deportations,” he said, noting that millions were deported under the Obama administration. We’ve lived through them before. It’s just that no one talked about it then.”

He said he and his wife, who is also undocumented, have two US citizen children, aged 15 and 17. The family has made contingency plans and spoken about the possibility of their removal.

“My family is psychologically prepared as well,” he said. “These are things that our community still needs to do.”

Williams said it looks like the message is starting to hit home and that people are bracing for the worst even amid the daily struggles for survival.

“The day after the election a woman called from St. Luke’s Hospital,” she recalled. “She just had a daughter and wanted to know how to get her passport so she could come with her parents to Guatemala.”

The best activists say they can do now is to take Trump at his word and prepare their communities for the worst.

That’s work that Adrian Ventura, CCT’s founder and director, takes on every day. “Look at all we have accomplished,” Ventura said to a gathering of 350 mostly K’iche’ and Spanish speakers in mid-December, trying to strike a hopeful tone. “We’re not going to stop fighting just because Trump won.”

CCT had once again convened a meeting to help immigrants — many in attendance had obtained deferred action permits, but many more remained undocumented — navigate the incoming administration. Oliveira again pledged local police support for the community and immigration attorneys went through the list of actions people could take now to protect themselves. 

But then the talk turned to the Code of Conduct pledge Pescando Justicia began circulating two years ago, asking the fish houses to agree to advise workers of their schedules with 12 hours’ notice, give regular breaks, and refrain from using deportation as a threat. CCT organizers along with Justice at Work, a Boston-based non-profit that helps workers in low-wage jobs, were hoping to get the crowd motivated to stand up for their rights and advocate for better working conditions, despite the changing federal landscape.

“Who’s going to sign the petition?” asked Ventura, who obtained US citizenship earlier this year.

Everyone’s hand went up.

The post ‘It’s not going to be pretty’ appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

EVER SINCE the US Supreme Court handed down a paradigm-shifting ruling two years ago, Massachusetts policymakers have had to retool their approach to making and defending laws regulating weapons, trying to become passable historians as much as lawmakers.

In New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, or Bruen, the US Supreme Court doubled down on a relatively recent expansion of Second Amendment rights. An earlier case in 2008 – Heller – concluded that a right to keep and bear arms for self-defense extends outside the home. Bruen created a new framework to determine the constitutionality of restrictions by rooting them in the “nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The decision has opened almost all aspects of the state’s gun safety law regime to challenge and sent lawyers scrambling for history books. As recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decisions have shown, if a policy is not tied to a founding-era law or practice – a so-called historical analogue – it likely will not survive judicial scrutiny.

The Gun Owners Action League, the local state affiliate of the National Rifle Association, followed this approach in challenging a recently passed gun law on Beacon Hill. The league’s court filing described the new law as “onerous firearms legislation” because it includes restrictions on gun ownership and the carrying of weapons “that are as burdensome as they are ahistorical.”

Attorney General Andrea Campbell, whose office defends most state gun laws, says judges now find themselves grappling with historical as much as legal precedents.

“The Supreme Court has put courts in the very difficult position of looking to the habits of 18th and 19th century Americans to determine the constitutionality of modern weapons laws,” Campbell said. “These laws address threats and technologies that were completely unknown to earlier generations of Americans.”

In the past, states could justify their varying firearms restrictions by showing that there was a substantial state interest in preventing some element of gun violence and that the law in place was narrowly tailored toward that goal, with limited imposition on constitutional rights. This analysis, essentially tasking the government with proving that its legal means are justified by a sufficiently important goal, is known as the “means-end” test.

Heller decision

That approach suffered a setback in 2008, when the US Supreme Court split 5-4 in handing down District of Columbia v. Heller. The Heller decision established a constitutionally protected right to bear arms unconnected to military purposes as long as the weapons were commonly used for a purpose like self-defense.

States and courts responded to the decision by adopting a framework for Second Amendment cases that looked at both the history of weapons regulation and a version of the “means-end” test. Staffers in Campbell’s office said they were able to rely on social science and public safety studies to prove gun regulations kept people safe. State attorneys could point to the low rates of gun violence as evidence in favor of keeping safety laws in place.

By 2016, however, there were already signs that the US Supreme Court was tilting toward an approach more anchored to the founders’ original intent. A Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling the year before upheld a state ban on possessing a number of weapons, including stun guns. The court held there was a rational basis for the ban on stun guns and it was not the sort of weapon protected under Heller. 

“There can be no doubt that a stun gun was not in common use at the time of enactment, and it is not the type of weapon that is eligible for Second Amendment protection,” Justice Francis Spina wrote. Stun guns, in the court’s reading, could be banned along with other “dangerous or unusual weapons.”

In a brief opinion in 2016, the US Supreme Court swatted away the SJC’s ruling. 

Heller found, the Supreme Court noted, “the Second Amendment extends … to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.” That stun guns are modern does not make them unusual, the court wrote, nor did it matter that they were not used in military situations.

The hard pivot toward the historical approach came in 2022, when the US Supreme Court handed down Bruen. The ruling declared New York’s system of gun licensing unconstitutional because it used a “may issue” policy for carrying concealed handguns, where licensing authorities have discretion to deny concealed-carry licenses if the applicant has not shown a “good reason” to need a license to carry.

This standard, also used by Massachusetts and a handful of other states plus Washington, DC, is contrasted with a “shall issue” rule, where anyone who meets certain threshold requirements must be issued a concealed-carry license. 

Decided 6-3 on partisan lines, Bruen marked the end of the prior test, which took into consideration the history of gun regulations along with the means-end analysis. 

“The Court rejects that two-part approach as having one step too many,” the court opinion concludes. Instead, the court found that historical analysis should rule the day, where the state has to put forward a founding-era analogue – but not necessarily an exact twin – to the challenged law.

“To be clear, analogical reasoning under the Second Amendment is neither a regulatory straightjacket nor a regulatory blank check,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court.

Then-Attorney General Maura Healey issued a biting response and immediately told licensing authorities to stop enforcing the “good reason” provision of the state license-to-carry statute.

“In a country flooded with firearms, today’s reckless and anti-democratic decision poses a grave danger to Americans as they go about their daily lives in public spaces like supermarkets, hospitals, and playgrounds,” Healey wrote. “Gun violence is a public health epidemic, and I remain committed to doing everything I can to keep our residents and our communities safe.”

Jim Wallace, executive director of Gun Owners Action League of Massachusetts, said at the time that the Bruen ruling marked “a good day for civil rights.” He predicted that legal and legislative challenges to firearm laws would surge post-Bruen – and they have over the last two years in Massachusetts and other states with restrictive firearms laws.

Playing historian

In practice, Bruen means prosecutors must prove that any regulation restricting the use of weapons has roots in the nation’s “historical tradition” of firearm restrictions. Attorneys in Massachusetts – and in other states – are now spending considerable time sifting through 18th- and 19th-century records to justify modern policies. 

Officials from the attorney general’s office have changed their entire approach to defending laws challenged on Second Amendment grounds, bringing in historical experts and availing themselves of resources like the Duke Center for Firearms Law. The center is a searchable database of gun laws from the medieval age to 1776 in England, and from the colonial era to the middle of the 20th century in the United States.

Gun rights groups, meanwhile, are challenging the state’s “gun roster” and handgun safety regulations in federal court. The Firearms Policy Coalition argues in one of its briefs that “in the approximately 400-year history of the colonies and later the United States, no regulations at all like the Handgun Ban appeared until recently and then in only a few states. That is hardly a historical tradition of such regulations.”

In a brief, Campbell argued that the “regulations are fully consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation, as evidenced by historical laws throughout the states, from the colonial period through the end of the 19th century.” The office points to laws requiring inspection of guns before sale and safe storage, as well as bans on unusually dangerous weapons.

Massachusetts and other blue state courts, long inclined to uphold weapons restrictions on policy grounds, are now hemmed in by historical analogue analysis. When a weapons ban came back to the Massachusetts high court, this time focused on switchblades, justices evinced no desire to be overturned by the US Supreme Court. 

Kaitlyn Gerber, the attorney for a man charged with possessing but not brandishing a switch-blade style knife, reminded the justices at oral arguments that Heller and Bruen apply to weapons other than guns as long as they were in existence at the time of founding. 

“Well,” Justice Frank Gaziano remarked, “we found that out the hard way in the stun gun case.”

The justices are at times openly wrestling with the new rules. 

Justice David Lowy, who left the bench earlier this year to become general counsel for the University of Massachusetts, prodded the “national historic tradition” metric in the switchblade case. Other courts, like the Northern District of California, spent significant amounts of time on that question.

“I will tell you, for one, I do not know what national historic tradition means,” Lowy said, “and if we can consider regulation after the Fourteenth Amendment or not.”

The SJC declared the switchblade ban unconstitutional, citing Bruen, and looking at knife usage traditions up until the Fourteenth Amendment. 

States looking to uphold their weapons laws say they have some hope that not all firearms restrictions are necessarily going to fail under a historical analysis, as this year’s United States v. Rahimi case showed. In the 8-1 decision, in which only Bruen author Thomas dissented, all nine justices of the US Supreme Court wrote opinions analyzing the case of a man barred by statute from possessing a firearm because he was currently subject to a restraining order.

The 103-page Rahimi decision, finding that the law was constitutional, wrestled with the long tail of Bruen and its muddled application around the country.

“[S]ome courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.” The test, he said, is if a law is “relevantly similar” to “laws that our tradition is understood to permit,” applying founding generation principles to a modern era.

Some of his fellow justices don’t see that as a straightforward ask.

“It is not clear what qualifies policymakers or their lawyers (who do not ordinarily have the specialized education, knowledge, or training of professional historians) to engage in this kind of assessment,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a Rahimi footnote. “And dutiful legislators are not the only stakeholders who are far outside their depth: Bruen also conscripts parties and judges into service as amateur historians, casting about for similar historical circumstances.”

In gun law cases before the Massachusetts high court since Bruen, justices have tossed convictions or elements of convictions based on the state’s gun licensing requirements. But the limitations of the new historical analytical framework can twist arguments into pretzels. 

This term, justices are considering two cases about New Hampshire residents who were driving in Massachusetts with guns in their vehicles. The guns were legally licensed by New Hampshire but not Massachusetts. After car crashes, police found the guns in each car and charged the men for carrying firearms without state permits. 

Ryan Rall, assistant district attorney with the Middlesex District Attorney’s office, argued that surety laws and “going armed laws,” also known as brandishing arms laws, are relevant historical analogues. 

Those laws presume that the state has a right to make sure – through licensing – that a person does not pose a danger to others before being armed, he said. But the justices pointed out that those laws tend to involve some display of public danger and may not be the best historical analogue for people legally licensed by other states traveling across Massachusetts.

“Massachusetts, as all colonies and states – whether we’re talking about the founding area, or moving forward into the passage of the 14th Amendment – have this foremost prerogative and sovereignty to create their own criminal code and enforce it as a general principle against all who go within its borders,” Rall argued. 

But those general arguments about federalism aren’t necessarily relevant “analogues” for the specific laws at play. In the Rahimi case, where the US Supreme Court considered whether a person could be prohibited from carrying a gun if they were actively under a restraining order, all justices delved into history for signals that this was the kind of policy consistent with founding-era principles and practices.

“[T]he Second Amendment permits more than just regulations identical to those existing in 1791,” the court concluded. “Under our precedent, the appropriate analysis involves considering whether the challenged regulation is consistent with the principles that underpin the Nation’s regulatory tradition.”

Considering the New Hampshire cases, SJC justices wondered how to square practical public policy interests with historical tradition, if that was at all possible. Justice Dalila Wendlandt explored part of attorney Kathryn Hayne Barnwell’s argument as the court considered both cases. 

“Your position is that the Second Amendment prohibits a state from temporarily disarming somebody, period, unless [officers] then determine that they’re a prohibited person,” Wendlant said. “While they’re armed they may or may not be prohibited, but we don’t have a time at all – zero time to determine?”

Barnwell tentatively agreed, “unless and until the person is actually found dangerous” or the state “puts up a historical analog” for allowing that disarming.

Justice Serge Georges Jr. broke in, saying “that can’t be right … How would they ever know? If we just limit it to prohibited persons, and you’re saying that every state could just enact a statute that says if you’re a prohibited person, you can’t carry, who’s walking into the state saying, ‘hey, here by the way, I’m a prohibited person?’” 

That may be a compelling administrative reason to allow for temporary disarming, Barnwell acknowledged, “and if we were in a ‘means-end scrutiny’ world, that would probably be dispositive. But the body of Bruen says you gotta do historical tradition.”

Law professor Jacob Charles, the former executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, worried in 2022 that “courts are now “entitled” to strike down democratically enacted legislation if whatever responsible government officials defending a given law neglect to insert relevant historical evidence into the record, even if that history would have supported the law.”

He foresaw two outcomes: that the Second Amendment right changes over time as new historical evidence is unearthed, or that the high court’s pronouncement about historical facts becomes “binding for all time.”

Historians on Beacon Hill

Historical defenses are being baked into new gun law legislation, with lawmakers assuming there will be legal attacks based on these grounds. That’s what happened with the latest gun legislation to gain approval on Beacon Hill.

“The bill is consistent with the rights afforded under the Second Amendment,” Senate Majority Leader Cynthia Creem of Newton said during debate on the Senate’s version of the bill. To ensure it was constitutional, she said, “We consulted with legal experts on constitutional law who specialize in the Second Amendment-related issues, including the attorney general’s office, the head of their constitutional law department. Constitutional experts within the AG’s office, who would be the ones charged with defending this legislation, stated to us that they were comfortable with the constitutionality of the provision.”

Recent US Supreme Court cases, she said, allow states to impose regulations that keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and those who pose a threat to themselves or others, which ties into the “red flag law” expansions. 

Rulings from the nation’s high court have also allowed restrictions on carrying weapons in “sensitive” places. As a result, the new Massachusetts law criminalizes carrying firearms in government buildings, courts, and election/polling areas. 

Creem noted that the Supreme Court still permits the regulation of abnormally dangerous weapons, so the Massachusetts law updates state prohibitions on assault weapons and weapons that function like them.

“That’s what the provisions of this bill do, and I’m confident that they are consistent with the Bruen decision,” Creem said.

Gun rights advocates and gun sellers profoundly disagree. 

Two federal lawsuits now target the gun package, which was given an emergency gubernatorial preamble to take effect immediately last week. One suit filed in August by a group that includes the Gun Owners Action League focused on the overhaul of gun licensing requirements. Another newly filed complaint from Gino Recchia and his Bellingham gun shop, Mass Armament, argues that the law’s assault weapons section runs afoul of Second Amendment protections and would affect roughly 70 percent of his store’s sales.

Changes to the licensing regime, GOAL argues in its initial claim, involve “objective, subjective, and discretionary preconditions” which, “including their attendant burdens, expenses, and delays, are not consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation.”

Campbell’s office can file its answer any day up until November 6, one day after the presidential election. 

Regardless of the outcome of the election, state courts will continue to grapple with the winding tail of Bruen. To protect or attack Massachusetts gun laws, advocates on both sides will continue to hit the history books.

The post Post-Bruen decision, everyone has to be a gun-law historian appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

A QUIRK OF BEACON HILL was recently on display as senators readied to approve their version of Gov. Maura Healey’s housing bill in late June.

Sen. Pat Jehlen, a Somerville Democrat, rose to speak on an amendment to bring back rent control for cities and towns that are interested in implementing the policy, which has been banned since a statewide vote in 1994. “I hope you will all consider the needs of communities like mine,” she said, pointing to the housing crunch facing the state. “It’s a time for all hands on deck.”

With that, she then withdrew her amendment.

Cynthia Stone Creem, a Newton Democrat who was wielding the gavel inside the chamber, asked Jehlen: “Were you going to speak about four amendments? Are you going to withdraw all of them?” Jehlen indicated yes, she was, and the other amendments were withdrawn in quick succession, too.

The interaction followed the script for amendment withdrawals, a growing trend on Beacon Hill. A lawmaker gets up to make a speech, notes how important it would be for his or her colleagues to pass the amendment, and then withdraws the very amendment that was supposed to be so important. The move underlines how little debate there actually is on Beacon Hill these days, and how much of it can seem like theater, as Democratic super-majorities are content to let a handful of legislative leaders set the agenda and shove bills onto the governor’s desk.

It’s an idiosyncrasy that drives some crazy, while others say it’s just pols being pols. The quirk isn’t limited to the Senate. Progressive Massachusetts noted that the House’s version of a climate bill drew 107 amendments, and 91 ended up withdrawn. “Our great deliberative body,” the advocacy group sarcastically posted last month to X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

According to Jonathan Cohn, the group’s policy director, the strategic case for moving a policy issue forward by taking to the floor via an amendment, even if it gets withdrawn, rests on the idea that enough people see or hear the speeches. “I don’t mean to burst the bubble of legislators, but people don’t watch it,” he said. Writing an opinion piece has more impact than a floor speech, which he likened to “fan service.”

“Filing an amendment, getting a handful of supporters and then saying, ‘I’m done, I’m withdrawing it,’ doesn’t move the ball forward,” Cohn added.

It also highlights the decline of debates. As the State House News Service summary of the Senate’s passage of a housing bill noted, “There was little disagreement and few divided votes.”

Beacon Hill observers say some lawmakers would prefer not to be put on the record about a topic that could cost them support, or even worse, reelection. That amounts to an “incumbent protection racket,” Cohn said.

But others defend the practice of amendment withdrawals after an impassioned floor speech. Sen. William Brownsberger, a high-ranking Democrat, suggested that the audience for the speeches is the rest of the Senate.

“You want to put it forward because you want to advance the concept, to get it discussed,” he said. “But if the amendment’s not really appropriate for the current bill, you wouldn’t want a no vote against it just because it doesn’t fit within the current scope of the bill or the current intended scope of the bill. If you’ve positioned the Senate as having voted against it, you don’t really want to do that, you’d rather get a yes vote at a more appropriate time. I think that’s the most common situation.”

The move lays a foundation for action in the future, Brownsberger argued. He pointed to a state law that limits non-compete agreements as a policy that took 10 years to get passed. “The key thing to understand is that ultimately legislation crosses the finish line when the majority of the body wants it to cross,” he said. “You get to that point through efforts to socialize new concepts. Speaking to an amendment and withdrawing it is an opportunity to socialize a new concept that eventually is going to catch hold, enough people will have it, and it’ll get across the finish line. It changes consciousness when you speak up, whether or not you withdraw the amendment.”

Other lawmakers eschew the maneuver, calling it a waste of their time. “I find there are folks who want to make sure they can say something publicly so people can hear them, it’s something they’ll be able to say to their constituents: ‘I advocated for this,’” said Rep. Russell Holmes, a Mattapan Democrat who has often clashed with House leaders. “I think mainly that’s why that’s done.”

Holmes added that it’s a “function of how the building works,” and how little debate there is. Forcing a vote on an amendment could be viewed as “scarring” colleagues, and going against what House or Senate leaders have already decided behind closed doors. “Essentially, the leadership has said, ‘You’re not going to get this bill,’ but they still want to make sure they speak on it and advocate for it, they still want to make sure their constituents know that they advocated for it,” Holmes said.

John McDonough, a former House lawmaker, called the practice harmless and said some advocates may be protesting too much. “[Lawmakers] want to indicate to leadership they don’t want to give up, but they don’t want to piss everybody off by demanding a roll call, which they’re going to lose overwhelmingly,” he said.

Every legislature in the country has its own customs and rules that can appear odd, and to some extent, they all run “incumbent protection rackets,” he added. “But they’re all essentially going after the same dynamic. People are looking to get as much as they can out of the process to make them look like a hero at home. That’s just the nature of the place when I was there from 1985 through the end of 1997 and I think it’s still true today.”

“You can curse it but you might as well curse the rain and the snow,” McDonough said. “It’s kind of human nature. That’s how these places function and work.”

The post Why are so many amendments being withdrawn on Beacon Hill? appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

IN OREGON, any person can walk into a “service center” to go on a supervised hallucinogenic trip on mushrooms. 

A group called Mass. for Mental Health Options has gathered the necessary signatures to put a question on the November ballot that would make it possible for Massachusetts residents to do the same. However, the measure in Massachusetts is much more expansive than the one that legalized psilocybin therapy in Oregon in 2020. In addition to creating a service center model like the one in Oregon, it would decriminalize five different psychedelics including psilocybin, mescaline, and ibogaine. It would allow anyone over the age of 21 to cultivate, possess, and consume these substances. Selling psychedelics would be illegal but people who grow them would be allowed to “share” the substances.

Research indicates psilocybin has shown promise in treating anxiety, depression, end-of-life distress, post-traumatic stress disorder, and a myriad of psychiatric and behavioral disorders that do not respond to other interventions. Advocates in Massachusetts have cited the mental health benefits of psilocybin therapy as a reason to set up a therapeutic model. 

In Oregon, psilocybin therapeutic centers have been operating since June 2023, with over 7,000 psilocybin products sold. The drug can only legally be administered under the supervision of licensed “facilitators,” who are trained to guide and support clients through psychedelic therapy. 

Andreas Met, a licensed facilitator and owner of Satya Therapeutics, a psilocybin service center based in Ashland, Oregon, said that having regulated therapeutic spaces where clients can go to consume the drug is important. The approach, he says, can yield mental health outcomes that personal use of the substance doesn’t.

“There are plenty of people who come visit us who have tried it at home but it just didn’t work right,” said Met. “They understood why it didn’t work. The idea that you’re gonna be completely safe, completely supervised, and there’s a human connection as well with a facilitator makes a huge difference.” 

Someone seeking to take mushrooms in a therapeutic setting must first set up a “preparation session” with a licensed facilitator and answer a set of screening questions. Clients must speak to the facilitator about their past history of trauma, drug use, medical history, and any trigger points they have. 

“The average client comes in with very serious mental health conditions,” said Met. “Usually decades of treatment-resistant depression, often times coupled with alcoholism or other substance abuse. They typically have OCD, really deep anxiety, or existential crisis because they’re gonna die soon.”

The client can choose to do an individual session or a group session. The group session generally costs less because it allows a single facilitator to take care of multiple clients at the same time. Clients get to pick a room – typically furnished with a comfortable couch, pillows, a coffee table, and maybe a view of the outside if they are willing to pay extra. 

The client also decides how much psilocybin to take. Some choose to take a smaller dose, which generally costs less. Once the preparation session is out of the way, it’s time for the client to schedule another session to actually take the psilocybin. 

The psilocybin is usually given to a client in the form of tea, according to Met. A regular trip can take six to eight hours, with a facilitator always in the room. 

Psychedelic drugs appear to encourage the growth of new connections between neurons in the brain. This is said to promote brain plasticity, which allows those taking the substance to effectively “rewire” their brain. 

“The way we look at a person’s psychedelic experience is that everything they do in that experience is normal,” said Met. “Most people are trying to escape prior harms done to them, such as abuse when they were young, or maybe assault, sexual assault, rape, those kind of things. And typically people will respond to that. There could be purging or vomiting. You could have screaming and lots of crying. Any behavior that happens during a journey is very normal.”

Met said that the sessions can be intense in his service center but never dangerous. 

After the session, the client can choose to attend a follow-up session where they can talk with the facilitator about their experience and their plan to support their mental health in the future.

There are over 20 licensed service centers in Oregon. The whole system is regulated by Oregon Psilocybin Services, which is made of a staff of 20 people housed within the Oregon Health Authority. They oversee the licensing and compliance for the psilocybin industry. They license manufacturers, facilitators, the service centers where the drug is administered, and laboratories where the psilocybin is tested. 

The Oregon therapeutic model has not been without its problems. 

Angie Allbee, the head of the regulatory body that oversees the licensing and operations of the centers, said that a single session can cost anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to the fat price tag of $15,000.

“I think the biggest issue [with the Oregon model] is equity, access, and affordability,” said Allbee. “We’ve been able to really focus on safety, but the one piece that really has been a gap is creating opportunities for affordability so that people can access services who are appropriate for services, and to ensure that diverse communities can access services.”

Met said that his service center is one of the most affordable, with prices averaging around $1,500. 

Oregon Psilocybin Services requires every service center to submit a “social equity plan,” which can include making services more affordable to lower income people. There are also nonprofits like the Sheri Eckert Foundation that provide grants for facilitated psilocybin therapy to people who can demonstrate financial need or belong to an “underserved” population. 

Health insurance companies do not cover psilocybin treatments because psilocybin is currently illegal under federal law, just as marijuana is.

Oregon Public Broadcasting has reported that the majority of the clients who have taken advantage of the centers have come from out of state. Met said roughly 80 percent of his clients are from out of state.

The Massachusetts ballot measure sets up a regulatory framework similar to what exists in Oregon but, unlike in Oregon, it calls for the creation of a five-member commission like the Cannabis Control Commission to oversee the system of service centers. The commission model has come under fire at the Cannabis Control Commission; the state’s Inspector General has called for the agency to be placed under receivership. 

Some psilocybin advocates in Massachusetts are worried the ballot measure will replicate the high price points of Oregon and are pushing for a bill that would decriminalize psilocybin. Instead of creating a licensed service center model, this bill would task the Department of Health with issuing facilitator licenses the same way the agency issues licenses for counselors with a far lower licensing fee. Licensed facilitators would be allowed to provide services at home and “in nature.” The bill would also allow for individuals to grow and possess a larger amount of psilocybin than what the ballot measure proposes.

“If people cannot afford these treatments, then they’re not truly legal. That means they’re only legal if you have extreme levels of wealth,” said James Davis, the head of the Bay Staters for Natural Medicine, a grassroots organization pushing for the legalization of psilocybin which has come out in opposition to the ballot measure. “The better model is allowing people to grow and share. We don’t need a whole other unelected agency.” 

Jennifer Manley, a spokesperson for the ballot campaign, said that the high prices quoted in the early days of psilocybin service centers in Oregon were due to a scarcity of service centers. She said initial prices were in the neighborhood of $3,500 per treatment, but now therapy at centers like Satya Therapeutics is about half that.

“We obviously want to make this accessible to everyone,” said Manley. “So we want to keep a close eye on what [Oregon] is doing and they have already been able to bring costs down dramatically.”

But the high cost is not the only concern being raised about the ballot question.

A legislative committee set up to review all of the Massachusetts ballot questions cited concerns that the hallucinogenic measure, in seeking to both decriminalize a series of psychedelics and to set up a therapeutic model, would create two separate systems for the use of psychedelic substances that would undercut each other. The committee said that allowing personal use and the “sharing” of psychedelics would create a loophole that would allow people to subvert any safety regulations imposed on the licensed therapeutic model. 

The Massachusetts ballot measure is much more similar to the one that passed two years ago in Colorado, where the therapeutic model is yet to come online but there are already people exploiting the gray areas in the law by “sharing” psychedelics alongside support services that they charge for.

The post Lessons to learn from Oregon on psychedelics ballot measure appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

MARGARET MILEY IS frustrated, in pain, and dying. 

But Massachusetts law says she cannot die on her own terms. The state has thus far resisted the movement, now law in nearly a dozen other states, to allow patients near their end of their life to obtain medication that would hasten their death. 

“Who benefits from this?” Miley wonders, more than a decade after an ill-fated tick bite on her 50th birthday left her with painful enduring diagnoses, compounded later by lung cancer, leaving her, at 63, bedridden and unable to speak. “Why can we opt for pain avoidance for surgery but not death? Why do we have this choice for our pets but not ourselves? Massachusetts claims to be a pro-choice state. Why are we so behind other states on this?”

That may change. But only if the Legislature has the appetite to push past stigma and concern surrounding the latest end-of-life options bill before it, which would allow people with terminal diagnoses, if they choose, to take a fatal dose of medication and die in their sleep.

The idea is deeply contentious. It came before voters more than a decade ago, in 2012, when a medical-aid-in-dying ballot question was narrowly defeated. Polling over the last few years consistently finds roughly two-thirds of Bay Staters now support physician-assisted death, which is legal in 11 states and touted as a humane choice for those who face agonizing and slow roads to natural death.

Yet, each iteration of the aid-in-dying bill has faced pushback from religious organizations concerned about a slippery slope of suicide and from those who worry that it will make it easier for people who lack the funding or family support for robust end-of-life care to choose death instead.

From her home in South Acton, supported by family, Miley described over a series of email exchanges in recent weeks her health decline and decision to choose her own end-of-life timeline. 

While she hopes, deeply, that lawmakers move quickly enough to let her die in her home state, she is hedging her bets with a backup plan to travel to Vermont to avail herself of its legal physician-assisted-death options if necessary. 

A career-long activist and advocate, Miley’s voice comes through sharp, focused, and darkly funny in the exchanges, even through rounds of brain fog brought on by medication and pain. 

“I had very lucky and privileged health and access to health care until age 50; with only minor surgeries, seasonal illnesses, and broken bones typical of an active lifestyle,” she wrote. “Because of that, I’m embarrassed to admit I had a childlike ignorance of real pain and disability. In childbirth classes, we were offered a no-pain option, leading me to incorrectly assume that modern medicine can contain pain in a hospital setting in all cases. I was sympathetic to disabled people, but I had no idea of the daily grind of it all, nor how one disability can change the life of an entire family.”

That ignorance changed in a flash. In 2011, she biked 50 miles to celebrate her 50th birthday, and at some point along the way a “blasted tiny bug gave me three illnesses in one bite and sidelined my life plans forever.”

A TERRIBLE TURN 

After the birthday ride, Miley contracted three debilitating diseases all caused by bites from infected ticks – Lyme, babesiosis, and ehrlichia – and never recovered, transitioning into myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, which are characterized by extreme exhaustion symptoms that many now associate with long Covid. 

“I entered the world of disability and tried to adapt quickly, working for years remotely, before it was cool!” Miley wrote. “I grieved while I adjusted to the limitations; no more civic life nor the joys of physical exertion.” 

Miley’s life before the tick bite centered on public service, tracing a career through nonprofit economic development programs, community leadership, business training and lending, a business incubator, and worker-owned companies. In 1999, she was the founding executive director of The Midas Collaborative, a statewide network of nonprofit organizations aimed at advancing the financial security of low- and moderate-income residents. 

Sen. Jamie Eldridge, who grew up down the street from Miley and worked with her on many political initiatives over the years, nominated her to the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women’s 2017 class of Unsung Heroines, presenting her with a citation personally. 

“Margaret has been one of my biggest mentors for my career as a legislator,” Eldridge said, particularly on anti-poverty and asset development issues. “It’s just been so heartbreaking to see someone that was so active on state and national policy – wearing so many hats, with so many groups, to really make a difference in public policy – and now to to be in touch with her regularly and know how much pain that she’s in, and yet she cannot take advantage of an option in Massachusetts, and therefore has had to use all of her resources to consider ending her life in another state, and all the challenges that go with that.”

In the mid-2010s, some work was manageable, Miley said. The treatment options for her symptoms were frustrating, as most US medical schools do not teach about chronic fatigue syndrome – a complicated multi-system condition – and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledge the few programs dealing with it are often under-resourced. 

But another devastating diagnosis was on the horizon. In late 2021, it came.

Lung cancer. Stage 4. Terminal.

“This was a surprise as I never smoked, nor lived in polluted areas, and lived with a gas stove for only six years,” Miley wrote. The one positive, she said, compared with the underwhelming treatment response to chronic fatigue symptoms, was that her health providers were well equipped to deal with cancer. 

Radiation initially shrank the lung tumors, but before that the pain was excruciating. 

“I had a preview of what was ahead for me,” Miley wrote. “I understand, with stage 4 cancer, the treatments work until they don’t. I felt some urgency to make a plan to never experience that level of pain again.”

Between the pain, the treatments, and the exhaustion, Miley was now bedridden. Speaking is agonizing, so email and text became her social life – thankfully an active one when her mind is clear between symptoms and medication fog. 

Those who oppose or are uneasy with the idea of right-to-die legislation often point to other palliative care options, like hospice, as a better route for the terminally ill. 

Hospice services in Massachusetts, while “wonderful” in her limited experience, are not in the practice of offering “a quick, painless departure,” Miley wrote. And she had seen a loved one in hospice, having said repeatedly he was ready to die, linger in unconsciousness for weeks before death.

“We did mental gymnastics to try to reassure ourselves that they weren’t suffering,” she wrote. “It was traumatic for us to watch. To this day, I’m troubled by the images of his physical state in his needlessly attenuated departure.”

COMING TO TERMS 

Deciding that a life of uncontrolled pain followed by a lingering death was not how she wanted to go, Miley started to consider alternatives. 

Advocates for right-to-die options push back against the characterization of the practice as “physician-assisted suicide,” which is illegal in the state. The Supreme Judicial Court, considering the question in 2022, concluded there is no right to the practice, though “competent adults who are terminally ill may elect to stop eating or drinking, may agree to the withdrawal of life support, or may choose to pursue palliative sedation.”

Miley calls the idea of allowing those options but not medical death “medieval, honestly. The body can survive days and days without food. Why can’t we use modern medicine?”

Religious opposition to the practice is straightforward.

“Physician-assisted suicide is just that: suicide,” Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley wrote in April in a Boston Globe op-ed. “And it is always tragic whether administered under a doctor’s care or self-inflicted.”

Advocates disagree with that description. In Miley’s telling, she would prefer to live her life, cancer free and unpained. But that isn’t the medical reality, and the treatment that seems most humane to her is a right to die. In her experience researching aid-in-dying and communicating with other advocates, she said, patients are not suicidal or choosing death over a full life.

Having the conversation with family about her intentions was difficult, “but we have always been direct communicators, so it was not out of the ordinary,” she said. “They saw me suffering before the tumors were shrunk. They don’t want to see that again. I recommended they get support  – including therapy – and we say what we need to each other; because when the pain comes back, I have to punch out. My family is in full support.”

Coming to the conclusion that she would prefer to self-administer medication to end her life was “sad and comforting in equal measure,” she wrote. “However, when I found out it wasn’t legal in Massachusetts despite being available in 11 other states,” she wrote in pointed understatement, “I admit to being annoyed.” 

Refiled for years in the Senate by Sen. Jo Comerford and in the House by Rep. Jim O’Day, right-to-die legislation is currently pending before the Senate Ways and Means Committee. Having received the green light from both the Public Health Committee and the Health Care Financing Committee, it is the furthest the bill has ever made it on Beacon Hill.

Recent polling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that 44 percent of Massachusetts residents strongly support physician-assisted death and another 23 percent said they somewhat support the idea, while 11 percent were somewhat or strongly opposed and 22 percent said they neither support nor oppose it.

“In 2012, a question that would have legalized physician assisted death narrowly lost at the ballot box,” Tatishe Nteta, a professor of political science at UMass Amherst and director of the poll, said in a statement along with the poll results. Twelve years later, Nteta said, the picture is different. “With the State Legislature currently contemplating legislation that would provide this right to residents of the Bay State, it may only be a matter of time before Massachusetts becomes the [next] state to legalize physician-assisted death,” he said.

Miley is optimistic about the bill’s current run. 

“Given that more than two-thirds of people favor passage, the legislators would just be doing their jobs, right?” she said about enacting the legislation. “I’m guessing a critical mass of them are Boomers and Gen Xers, and they’ve seen their elders suffer needlessly before dying. Unfortunately, some people need personal experience with policy issues in order to move them to action. Keep in mind Boomers and Gen Xers are the ones that brought us gay pride, destigmatized mental illness, and vanquished panty hose in the workplace, so we know how to end suffering,” Miley wrote, her dry sense of humor still clearly intact. 

The desire to spend the remainder of her life in Massachusetts is an emotional and principled decision, for Miley, as much as it is about the sheer physical pain and difficulty of traveling out of state in her condition.

Massachusetts is her anchor. Except for brief periods out of state, she has lived only in eastern Massachusetts, growing up in Lexington and attending its public schools, earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from UMass Amherst and a master’s in community economic development from New Hampshire College.

She and her husband, Harry Shanley, moved to South Acton 32 years ago and raised their son and daughter there. Describing her neighborhood, Miley writes like the progressive advocate she’s always been, cheering the “densely built homes near the train station, park, walking trails, and good cycling roads.” 

“We were looking for a ‘smart zoning’ neighborhood,” she wrote. “This one was developed in the 1860s, when they didn’t call it that, but they had the foresight to build tight, walkable communities that foster neighborliness.”

She doesn’t have a bucket list in her head, after a career following her calling of economic equity. From promoting housing cooperatives to cooperative business models and micro-enterprise, to personal finance training, to job training and policy advocacy, she tallies up her “wins.” Her one regret, she writes, is that “I wish I could be around to help put this country back together.”

Miley’s productivity mindset – which she credits to a working class upbringing shared with seven siblings – became essential to keeping morale “high enough” as she grew too ill to leave bed or receive in-person visits. It was a vicious turn of events for someone who cherished an active and social lifestyle. 

When well enough, she tries to help her family and friends with research tasks.

“I’m not wired to be a lady of leisure,” she wrote. “If I can’t be helpful, I become unglued.”

THE ROAD AHEAD

The chief policy concern regarding right-to-die laws is potential for abuse, which is top of mind for advocates, opponents, and elected officials wrestling with the subject.

Gov. Maura Healey “supports legislative action to allow medical aid in dying, provided it includes sufficient safeguards for both patients and providers,” said spokesperson Karissa Hand. 

Moral opposition tends to take the form of religious resistance to taking one’s own life – a common objection from groups like the Massachusetts Catholic Conference, the public policy and lobbying office of the state’s four Roman Catholic dioceses, and some legislators.

There is worry that people may feel compelled to seek physician-assisted death for reasons of poverty, depression, or lack of family support in their old age. Some disability advocates in Massachusetts argue that legalizing it will lead to people being pressured to or choosing to end their lives when treatment is possible, with the secular Second Thoughts Massachusetts group calling the practice “a deadly form of discrimination against disabled people.”

In his Globe op-ed, O’Malley referenced countries where medical aid in dying is allowed for reasons of mental illness, arguing that the Massachusetts bill “could lead to a slippery slope of possibilities.” He pointed to a brief 2017 report by the Bioethics Observatory at the Catholic University of Valencia, which said more than 400 mentally ill people in the Netherlands were “euthanized” without their consent among more than 7,000 “assisted suicides” from 2010 to 2015.

A 2009 analysis of two decades of euthanasia in the Netherlands in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry addressed the circumstances of the deaths “without explicit consent,” which account for around 0.5 percent of all assisted death cases in the Netherlands. The report authors write, of the Netherlands policy, “further analyses of the cases of ending of life without an explicit request show that these concern nearly always patients who are very close to death, are incompetent but with whom the hastening of death has been discussed earlier in the disease trajectory and/or with their relatives, and for whom opioids were used to end life.”

Canada announced in February that it is again delaying a controversial expansion to its medical assistance in dying program for people who have a mental illness – a practice that is not permitted or proposed in any US right-to-die legislation.

Physician-assisted death has been legal in parts of the United States for more than 25 years. A  2022 review found that the roughly 5,300 patients who have died from medically assisted death in places where it is legal tend to be older, white, educated, and diagnosed with cancer. About a third of people prescribed medications to hasten death ultimately don’t use them.

Comerford, who co-sponsored the Massachusetts bill, said it has been retooled over the years to account for concerns of abuse or possible coercion.

“The End of Life Options Act offers a compassion option — to allow mentally-capable patients with terminal diagnoses to choose a peaceful, humane death with dignity,” Comerford said in a statement. “At the same time, the legislation establishes rigorous safeguards for patients and physicians to follow in order to protect vulnerable people from coercion.”

O’Day told the Globe, responding to O’Malley’s arguments, that he has a 40-year-old son with cerebral palsy and found the cardinal’s case against the bill to be offensive.

“I am not going to be involved in engaging with a piece of legislation that I feel in any way, shape, or form would put that kid at risk,” he said. “That continues to really be their focus on this, focusing on scenarios that have been proven to be unfounded.”

A recent review of arguments for and against medical aid in dying by Columbia University’s Professor David Hoffman and Emily Beer notes that there have been no documented instances of coercion since Oregon legalized the practice in 1997. They also point to the 2022 review showing the the population of those seeking medical aid in dying skews toward better-educated white patients suffering from cancer, writing that the data raise “a converse concern” to fears that those with fewer resources will be pressured to seek this option. Medical aid in dying, they write, “may, inequitably, not be readily available to less privileged populations or those with a diagnosis other than cancer.”

Neighboring Vermont, which has a right-to-die bill that served as model for the Massachusetts bill, last year began to allow residents of other states to end their lives there if they meet certain requirements. 

The legislation requires that a patient be capable of making and communicating their health care decision to a physician, and make two requests orally to the physician over a certain timeframe. A written request must then be signed in the presence of two or more witnesses without a stake in the death, who must sign and affirm that patients appeared to understand the nature of the document and were free from duress or undue influence.

Both Vermont’s law and the Massachusetts bill require that a patient undergo counseling, be able to ingest the medication themselves, and have a diagnosis expected to cause death within six months. No health provider or pharmacist is required to participate.

Miley has the sign-off from her oncologist and has two doctors in Vermont lined up, “and that’s all we can do for now,” she wrote. “When my treatment inevitably fails and I get within six months of the end of my life, we will take next steps to arrange for the final medication in Vermont.”

Some of the bill’s steeliest Senate advocates – Comerford and Eldridge – say their backing for medical aid in dying was bolstered by watching the slow decline of those close to them. 

Comerford had an aunt who ultimately chose to stop eating to hasten her death. Eldridge said he transitioned from supporter to full-throated advocate of the legislation six or seven years ago, when one of his parents’ best friends was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. They had the means to move Vermont, “where she could end life on her own terms, without pain, and with dignity,” he said.

The Massachusetts bill would have the strictest protections in the country if passed, Comerford said, incorporating feedback from constituents, lawmakers, and disability rights advocates. She said it seems like Beacon Hill “is at a real precipice moment.”

“I feel like this bill has been scrubbed from every angle, and that’s as it should be, because we’re talking about life and death here,” Comerford said. “We should do the most pristine, thorough work on every piece of legislation, but especially on this. And I do think this bill is ready to move. It’s ready to be brought to the floor for colleagues to consider it, and that’s because legislators and constituents have weighed in so profoundly and thoroughly on this bill.” 

House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka, the ultimate gatekeepers for major legislation in their respective branches, have been coy about where they stand since the bill was reintroduced. 

That means it’s unclear whether this aid-in-dying version will advance in the crush of legislation before lawmakers in the final six weeks before the two-year legislative ends on July 31. If it doesn’t, advocates will have to restart their effort once more in January when a new term begins. 

Miley thinks the law will pass “eventually,” but she has been in the advocacy world too long to think that even speedy passage would mean the law takes effect in time for her to avail herself in Massachusetts.

“It feels ridiculous to do this,” she wrote of her voyage to Vermont, “like I’m a medical refugee having to be driven (and dragging my loved ones) to another state to exercise bodily autonomy.”

The post Seeking a right to medical aid in dying  appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

WHILE STUDENTS ACROSS the country continue to struggle to make up the learning loss from the coronavirus pandemic, with many states seeing the gulf separating the achievement of poor and non-poor students grow larger, a study led by researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities says Massachusetts has the seen the largest widening of that gap of any of the states they examined. 

Massachusetts students lost the equivalent of about two-thirds of a typical year of math learning and two-fifths of a year in reading from 2019 to 2022, according to the report from the Center for Education Research Policy at Harvard and the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford. Many of the state’s Gateway Cities, home to lots of the state’s poorer students, saw declines of as much as a full year of learning. While many districts began to see achievement gains from 2022 to 2023 – the first full year when students returned to in-person learning – many Gateway Cities saw achievement levels continue to drop, making the achievement gap even larger now than it was before the pandemic. 

“No one in Massachusetts wants to leave poor kids footing the bill for the pandemic, but that is the path we are on,” said Thomas Kane, faculty director of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research and one of the study’s co-authors.  

The gap within Massachusetts between poor and non-poor students is now roughly half a grade wider than it was in 2019, according to the analysis of achievement trends across 15 states, a finding that shows just how much harder the school disruption hit lower-income students here – and how uneven the recovery from it has been. Five of the 15 states actually recorded a narrowing of the poor/non-poor gap in one or both subjects.

Kane says without focused effort by districts and the state to address the growing achievement gap, research suggests poor students in Massachusetts will face setbacks tied to the pandemic that extend into adulthood, affecting everything from lifetime earnings to incarceration rates.  

Many districts with lots of students from higher-income households began to see achievement start to bounce back between 2022 to 2023, following large drops during the pandemic. In Longmeadow, for example, a well-off suburb of Springfield, proficiency rates for grade 3-8 reading went from 61 percent in 2022 to 64 percent in 2023 and in math rose from 58 percent to 65 percent. 

In many districts with large populations of low-income students, however, it’s been a very different story.

Lynn, where 74 percent of students are low-income, has recorded the largest drop in reading and math proficiency rates in the state since the pandemic, with the achievement falloff from the COVID school shutdowns continuing even after the return to classroom instruction. The district’s grade 3-8 reading proficiency rate fell from 38 percent in 2019 to 21 percent in 2022, before falling two points further to 19 percent in 2023. In math, proficiency fell by more than half during the pandemic, from 37 percent in 2019 to 15 percent in 2022. But the slide continued in 2023, when math proficiency fell to 14 percent.

“Our student achievement is always a top concern, so I think it is absolutely troubling to see the trends we’re experiencing,” said Mayor Jared Nicholson, who also chairs the Lynn school committee. The district is “committed to addressing and reversing the learning loss and getting students what they need to close the achievement gaps we’re experiencing,” he said. 

Kane said there is no single explanation for the widening achievement gulf between poor and non-poor students. But he said many students from higher-income households saw less learning loss to begin with during the pandemic, and they were far more likely than their lower-income peers to have families that sought out private tutoring or other ways to make up for school closures. 

Meanwhile, some of the districts that have seen the biggest achievement declines also saw a  huge growth in student groups that face particularly steep learning challenges. In Lynn, the share of the district population made up of English language learners rose 75 percent over the course of the pandemic, from 25 percent in 2019 to 43 percent today. 

Framingham, where 54 percent of the district’s 9,100 students are low-income, also saw a steep drop in achievement during the pandemic, with no recovery seen in the first full year in which students returned to in-person classes. English proficiency for grades 3-8 fell from 40 percent in 2019 to 27 percent in 2022, but showed no recovery in 2023. For math, proficiency fell from 37 percent in 2019 to 24 percent in 2022, and then dropped an additional 2 points to 22 percent in 2023. 

“Yes, we’re concerned,” said Robert Tremblay, Framingham’s superintendent, who said the district has deployed math and literacy coaches to every school as part of the effort to reverse the pandemic slide. 

Edward Lambert, executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, said the widening gulf between poor students and their better-off peers should be getting more attention from state and local leaders. “I think it’s pretty damning for Massachusetts,” he said. “As we consider ourselves a leader, it’s pretty disconcerting to see the impacts here and what appears to be the lack of rebound other states have experienced, particularly in some of the Gateway Cities.” 

Massachusetts received more than $2.8 billion in federal COVID relief money for schools, aid that has been allocated through three rounds of funding. Districts are currently devising plans for how they’ll use the final round of money, which must be spent by September. 

Although federal rules require that at least 20 percent of the money is spent on academics, Lynn is planning to spend about 30 percent of the $42 million in its last round of federal relief funding on learning recovery. That will include funding for afterschool tutoring and summer school classes, but also a lot of programming during the school day focused on learning recovery. 

“When we have a student in schools is when you really have to take advantage of that time,” said Evonne Alvarez, the district superintendent. “When you focus on after or before school, you’re really at the mercy of that student and whether they can get there or stay.” 

Framingham is committing more than a third of its final round of federal funding – $4.7 million out of $14.4 million – to mitigating learning loss through tutoring and afterschool programming, and funding for reading teachers. 

“We’re not quite sure what the variable is that’s causing learning to not grow at the rate we want it to be,” said Tremblay, the Framingham superintendent. “It’s not for lack of investment in resources.” 

Kane said districts need to allocate even more of the federal aid to learning loss if they are serious about seeing students recover academically, especially low-income students who have fallen behind the farthest. 

“From the beginning of the pandemic, I have tried but failed to get the message across that districts needed to do the math on their plans,” he said. 

Kane said that means taking stock of the impact of strategies like high-dose tutoring, through which students can make up an entire added year of learning, or summer school classes, which can remediate about a quarter of a year of learning loss. Even districts employing some of those strategies, he said, aren’t doing it at the scale needed to remediate the losses students have experienced. “Nobody’s actually doing a plan that makes sure every district has enough of those things to allow kids to catch up,” he said.

Kane said it’s not too late for districts to redouble their focus on tutoring and summer school with the final round of federal funding. He also thinks districts should be more transparent in communicating to parents how far behind their children are, something he thinks has been widely lacking.

Kane thinks education leaders and families alike haven’t come to terms with the long-term impact of pandemic learning losses, if they aren’t remediated. He pointed to research on the state’s strong K-12 achievement growth over the last several decades, outcomes that he said are correlated with increased earnings, higher post-secondary educational attainment, lower arrest rates, and lower teen pregnancy rates. He said all the positive trends connected to achievement growth are likely to move “in the opposite direction” if scores decline and remain low. 

State officials acknowledged the greater toll the pandemic took on higher-need students, and emphasized the steps taken in recent years to revamp the school aid formula and direct more money to districts serving those students.

“Massachusetts is proud to lead the nation in student achievement, but we recognize that more needs to be done to address learning loss, particularly for English learners and students from low-income families,” said state education department spokeswoman Jacqueline Reis in a statement. “That’s why we have fully funded the Student Opportunity Act, which is targeted at districts with high concentrations of poverty, and proposed a nation-leading literacy strategy.” 

Massachusetts has a long history of deference to local school districts, and the federal pandemic aid did not authorize states to tell districts how to spend the money. But Kane insists the state could do much more to highlight the urgency of the problem and prod districts to do more to address it. 

He pointed as an example to Texas, which didn’t prescribe how districts spent the federal money but passed a law requiring that all students not testing at proficiency be provided at least 30 hours of small group instruction next year. 

“It should be alarming that inequality has increased and we’re not making progress closing that increase that happened during the pandemic,” he said. “We’re the ones who supposedly care about education equity.” 

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ON A COLD but sunny Wednesday in early February, Diana DiZoglio, the Massachusetts state auditor, stepped inside Lynn’s community access TV studio to meet with members of the local chamber of commerce.

With an aide in tow, DiZoglio worked the room like a pol in a union hall filled with voters, shaking hands and complimenting attendees on their clothing and hairstyles before launching into a stump speech.

She won the job in November 2022, after a decade spent in the state Legislature. Not even halfway through her first four-year term, DiZoglio has essentially returned to the campaign trail. She is lobbying voters, and emptying her own campaign coffers, to support an initiative she wants to put before voters this November – a ballot question authorizing her office to audit her former colleagues in the Legislature.

It’s not a move that makes friends on Beacon Hill, but that’s nothing new for the 40-year-old Methuen resident, who has ruffled feathers and angered those in power everywhere she’s been on her climb up the political ladder. If her campaign to audit the Legislature, driven by her call for greater transparency in an institution famous for doing its work behind closed doors, has rankled State House insiders, it’s been political gold for DiZoglio.

She’s become a regular on Sunday morning TV shows spotlighting political figures in the news, and she eagerly accepts speaking invitations around the state.

When the auditor’s position opened up two years ago with the retirement of three-term incumbent Suzanne Bump, DiZoglio was one of two Democrats who jumped into the race for what is probably the lowest profile statewide office in Massachusetts. Many voters have no idea who holds the post, never mind a clue about what the job entails. 

Getting voters excited about your vision for poring over ledger sheets of obscure state agencies is not the stuff of eye-catching campaign headlines. But as the summer progressed – and with even the governor’s race turning into a barely-contested, sleepy affair – DiZoglio put the auditor’s race on the radar with the declaration that one of her top priorities would be probing the workings of the Legislature. That set off a debate over the office’s actual powers, with her rival voicing skepticism about whether a legislative audit was in bounds, and Bump, the outgoing auditor, agreeing with him, calling it a political play.

DiZoglio was undeterred. While her opponents, then and now, have talked about separation of powers principles and offered legal arguments that she doesn’t have the authority to actually audit lawmakers, DiZoglio has focused less on legalisms and instead spun the issue into the compelling narrative of a practiced politician. She has been telling a story anchored by a  time-honored theme successfully invoked by statewide candidates from Bill Weld to Deval Patrick: an outsider vowing to take on the entrenched interests on Beacon Hill.

When she faces pushback from those in power, DiZoglio showcases it as a badge of honor. She told the Lynn business group gathering that months into her new job in 2023, she tried to walk into the Senate, having been invited by a lawmaker who was to deliver their inaugural speech. An apologetic court officer stopped her from entering – a courtesy routinely extended to former members – and DiZoglio instead went upstairs to the gallery, standing next to reporters.

“It’s just reflective of how folks are treated when they’re seeking transparency and accountability,” DiZoglio told the chamber of commerce members. (A spokesperson for the Senate president’s office suggested that DiZoglio was late for the speech, and the custom is to lock the doors once such remarks begin.)

One state lawmaker, echoing what other legislators have also said privately, noted that auditors typically come in, look at an entity’s financials and offer up ways to improve things. “That’s not what she wants to do,” the lawmaker said of what’s behind DiZoglio’s quest to land a legislative audit. “She wants to be the FBI. She wants to catalog the Legislature’s sins,” said the lawmaker, who did not want to be identified.

DiZoglio’s cataloging crusade has people wondering about her motives and end-game. Is this part of a sharp-elbowed vendetta against an institution that treated her poorly, a straightforward play for political visibility, or the sincere reform impulse of someone who saw up close the dysfunction on Beacon Hill? The answer depends on who is asked.

ORIGIN STORY

Born to a 17-year-old single mother who worked as a nurse’s aide, DiZoglio moved around, staying with grandparents and godparents, as money came in and out, and DiZoglio frequently changed schools.

Songs were a salve for a rough-and-tumble childhood; she fell in love with Whitney Houston’s music. She would sing in choirs, and DiZoglio said a conservative Pentecostal church, which she no longer attends, offered a stabilizing safety net.

She didn’t go to college right after graduating high school, eventually making her way to two community colleges, on a part-time basis, before landing an unlikely transfer to pursue a four-year degree. DiZoglio was admitted to Wellesley College on a scholarship obtained with the help of a community college professor who saw potential in her. The elite women’s liberal arts campus intimidated her, but also exposed her to diverse opinions and a sense of empowerment she didn’t feel as a child.

DiZoglio initially believed she was destined to run a youth center, helping young people facing the kind of tough odds she overcame. Before her college graduation, she worked as a cultural arts coordinator for a Lowell youth program. 

But Beacon Hill came calling. The Spanish she had picked up in college came in handy when a friend of hers pointed her to a job as a legislative aide to Paul Adams, a Mormon Republican whose House district included the majority-Hispanic city of Lawrence.

Nearly every lawmaker has an origin story, something that spurred them to run for public office. DiZoglio’s dates to her time as a Beacon Hill aide. 

In April 2011, in a late-night moment in an otherwise empty, darkened House chamber, a State House court officer discovered DiZoglio and Braintree state Rep. Mark Cusack. The incident occurred after a late-night party, and while House Speaker Robert DeLeo’s office issued a report saying nothing inappropriate happened and no rules were broken, rumors and gossip ricocheted around the building, creating a toxic workplace for her. DiZoglio later said she was sexually harassed in the aftermath of the episode.

Adams fired her, and the ordeal was capped by the pressure she felt to sign a termination and non-disclosure agreement from House lawyers (who misspelled her name as “Dianna DiZogli”). It provided severance and health benefits, but also came with a nondisparagement clause preventing her from publicly criticizing the House. The experience “opened up my eyes to how things really work up here,” DiZoglio said during a recent sit-down. “When I ended up coming back to run for office, that stayed with me.”

In 2012, after a stint working as the chief of staff for the president of the Professional Firefighters of Massachusetts, DiZoglio launched a Democratic primary challenge to North Andover state Rep. David Torrisi. “I would question whether she really is a Democrat or not,” Torrisi told the Boston Globe, noting that she had worked for a Republican lawmaker.

Unions, a key Democratic constituency that would back her future bids for higher office, rallied to her side as the 28-year-old picked up the support of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. Laborers Local 175 flipped their support to DiZoglio from Torrisi, and that first campaign of hers was run out of their office in Methuen. “Given the adversity that was in her life, and coming from an economically disenfranchised district, she proved that if you work hard you can succeed,” said Michael Gagliardi, one of the union’s top officials.

DiZoglio was Torrisi’s first Democratic primary opponent in nearly a decade, but she eked out a narrow win, defeating him by 164 votes.

Two years later, she faced what looked like a tough reelection battle. “All the folks who didn’t like me the first time had an opportunity to try to get rid of me,” DiZoglio said. She got a red moped in order to speedily knock on voters’ doors. It was a grueling primary battle, filled with verbal jabs, but she prevailed. 

Two weeks after she beat Phil DeCologero and another Democrat, she invited DeCologero for a beer summit at a North Andover restaurant and they buried the hatchet. Less than a decade later, he would come to work for her in the auditor’s office. She had proven herself to be a fighter, but DiZoglio was also learning to be a retail politician seeking to win over one-time foes.

Returning to the House, she didn’t exactly settle in. As a rank-and-file member, she became increasingly frustrated by the top-down way its leaders ran the chamber. Her loud declaration of independence came when she took to the House floor in 2018, in the thick of the #MeToo moment, as lawmakers were debating new internal policies defining how to deal with sexual harassment allegations. 

DiZoglio argued that the House should ban non-disclosure or non-disparagement agreements, pointing to her own experience and effectively breaking the one she signed as an aide.

The night before the debate, DiZoglio was on the phone with a friend, Wes Ritchie, agonizing over the expected blowback. Both were former State House aides who met through Beacon Hill social circles, and they counted themselves among a group of young people who felt out of place in the building. “As a gay guy I was on the outs of that power structure,” Ritchie said. “Same with Diana as a woman.” 

Not everyone agreed that non-disclosure agreements are improper. Defenders of the agreements say they can, if structured correctly, help victims who seek privacy. But her move placed the House speaker’s office in a rare defensive crouch. DeLeo said she did not mention harassment in 2011, at the time the agreement was reached. Just 21 legislators joined DiZoglio in supporting a ban on what she called a “silencing tactic” to help cover up wrongdoing with taxpayer dollars.

Days after the vote, she filed to run for an open state Senate seat. She cruised through the Democratic primary without an opponent, and beat a Republican newcomer in the general election with 66 percent of the vote.

The Senate is generally considered a more collegial place than the House, but DiZoglio would eventually level the same criticisms there about the tight grip leadership maintained over the chamber. After a compromise bill on police reform was released by House and Senate negotiators at the end of 2020, DiZoglio dinged them for giving lawmakers less than 24 hours to review the bill. “The Senate and the House are becoming strikingly and disturbingly similar these days in terms of process,” she wrote on Twitter.

Looking back on her four years in the Senate, DiZoglio said she would always be grateful to Senate President Karen Spilka for helping her pass a ban on non-disclosure agreements in the Senate, but added, “I wasn’t leadership’s favorite person over there.” 

A MORALITY PLAY 

When she jumped into the 2022 race for auditor, DiZoglio stuck with the anti-establishment themes that she sounded in her previous races, and leaned into her biography. She managed to tie her up-from-nothing story to the auditor’s watchdog role over the public purse-strings. 

“I know what it’s like to struggle and to have to be scrappy, and without the investments made through state government and the investments of others, I would not have had the opportunities I did,” she said during a debate on WBUR. “So I know how important it is that our investments made through your tax dollars are spent wisely, because every wasted dollar puts another child’s future opportunities at risk.”

Running for an obscure state office that carries a bookkeeper’s aura is a challenging enterprise. The official charge of the office, which employs about 200 people, is to conduct audits at least every three years of some 200 different state agencies, dissecting their operations. Auditors typically issue dry reports detailing problems they’ve uncovered in an office and recommending improvements. DiZoglio pitched the race as a morality play, vowing to use the office to right the wrongs of Beacon Hill’s entrenched power structure by pulling back the curtain on the workings of the Legislature.

Her opponent in the Democratic primary, Chris Dempsey, a policy-smart former state transportation official, was hardly a suck-up to the status quo. He previously took on then-Mayor Marty Walsh and the Boston area business elite by helping lead opposition to bringing the 2024 Summer Olympics to Boston, calling it a boondoggle that would leave taxpayers footing the bill.

But he pushed back against DiZoglio’s talk of auditing the Legislature, arguing it was outside the authority of the job. Dempsey wound up gaining the support of large swaths of the Democratic Party establishment, including DeLeo, who had by then retired as House speaker, as well as Bump, the outgoing auditor.

Jonathan Cohn, a leader of the advocacy group Progressive Massachusetts, which kept tabs on lawmakers through scorecards, backed Dempsey and said DiZoglio was a conservative-leaning Democrat in the House and the Senate, a function of her home base in blue-collar Methuen along the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. During the auditor’s race, Cohn said, she undertook a “rebrand” to appeal to a statewide audience, looking to garner support from both progressives and conservatives.

She also brought the kind of campaign charisma to the race that wins votes apart from any policy pronouncements.

Brian O’Connor, a seasoned politico who worked in the 1980s and 90s for then-Congressman Joe Kennedy, was among the operatives who received a call from Dempsey early in the race,  and agreed to help him. When he hit the campaign trail for Dempsey, O’Connor recalled seeing DiZoglio work the room at several different events. She came across as authentic, emotion-fueled, and unafraid. “The audiences were hers,” O’Connor said.

At one political breakfast he attended, she broke into song. O’Connor was reminded of the lore surrounding “Honey Fitz,” John F. Kennedy’s grandfather, who served as mayor of Boston and was also known for carrying a tune in service to campaigns. O’Connor sensed the appeal DiZoglio had in front of a crowd and relayed his impressions to Dempsey.

Dempsey responded that he was leading in the race, according to O’Connor. “Don’t be surprised if that disappears by Election Day,” O’Connor said he told him.

In the primary’s final tally, DiZoglio won 54 percent to Dempsey’s 45 percent. She cruised to an easy victory in the general election over Republican Anthony Amore. 

‘A LESSON IN PATIENCE’

A year and change into the job, DiZoglio clearly chafes at some of its trappings, saying her new role has been “a lesson in patience.” For all her criticism of the Legislature, she says there are some things she relished in that role that she can no longer do in her new job. “One thing I do miss about the Legislature is being able to take to the floor, at any given time and just say whatever I feel like saying about whatever issue of the day,” she said.

Of course, there are those who think that is exactly what she’s doing with her call to audit the Legislature. “This whole effort is just pure politics,” Bump said when asked to assess DiZoglio’s high-profile effort.

Some on Beacon Hill clearly view her audit as political grandstanding or payback to legislative leaders who constantly sought to keep her in check. DiZoglio says they are more interested in “character assassination” and defending the status quo.

Both Senate President Spilka and current House Speaker Ron Mariano were dismissive of her audit, saying it is unnecessary, and her effort is a violation of separation of powers. Mariano had the House counsel send a letter to DiZoglio saying she “lacks any legal authority to conduct an audit.”

DiZoglio has said the audit is needed to scrutinize the Legislature’s budgets, procurement and how committee assignments are doled out, in order to discover “what is happening in the people’s house, where the people’s business is conducted, using the people’s money.”

When it comes to bankrolling the effort to put the legislative audit before voters in a ballot question this fall, DiZoglio has put her money where her mouth is. She emptied her campaign account last fall, dumping $105,000 into the ballot drive, roughly a third of the money raised in 2023 by the Committee for Transparent Democracy.  

While the effort is a high-stakes move on her part, DiZoglio’s argument seems to resonate with voters. A UMass Amherst poll in October found that 67 percent would vote for the audit measure, while just 7 percent would vote no. The opposition is about as small a number as one could see in a poll question like this. But then again, it can be hard to find support for what seems like an effort to stifle more transparency and accountability from the Legislature.

Which is exactly the smart political calculation DiZoglio has made. What’s more, her effort has become a classic example of an insurgent campaign against the status quo that brings together disaffected groups on the political left and right.

Members of the Democratic State Committee, populated with liberal reformers, backed a resolution last year voicing support for the audit, and Erin Leahy, a Bernie Sanders supporter who runs the progressive group Act on Mass, which is critical of the Legislature’s secrecy, said she’s behind the effort. Cohn of Progressive Massachusetts also supports aspects of the audit, though he thinks some proponents are overselling what it can accomplish. “She understands how much of politics is theater,” Cohn said of DiZoglio. “I was never a fan of her politics but it’s easy to see how people see her as a compelling candidate.”

On the right-wing side, the Massachusetts GOP is fully supportive of the audit, and the ballot committee has raised contributions from the conservative Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance and donors such as Ernie Boch Jr., a past supporter of Donald Trump.

DiZoglio says the odd bedfellows of the left and right that are backing the ballot question are united in an understanding of how power works. “When you’re taking on a powerful establishment such as it exists up here, you cannot do that in a silo,” she said. “You cannot do that on your own. You cannot be a one-woman show. You very much need all the support that you can get to challenge what’s going on. Because otherwise they will work to divide and conquer.”

So far, no campaign committee has been organized to fight against the ballot question. But the attorney general’s office, in its legal review of the audit ballot question, said that even if it were enacted by voters to become law, there could be questions about whether it’s constitutional for one part of government to take such action against another.

Regardless of the ballot question’s legal fate, the issue has clearly been good politics for DiZoglio, giving her far greater visibility than ever enjoyed by her predecessors. Where she hopes to go with that isn’t clear. But few expect her to stay in the job for as long as someone like the late Joe DeNucci, a one-time state rep who spent a quarter century as state auditor. She’s already set herself apart, throwing more haymakers at the Legislature in less than two years than the office saw in more than two decades under DeNucci, a former middleweight boxer who received a hero’s farewell from Beacon Hill when he retired in 2011.

O’Connor, the long-time Kennedy hand, said DiZoglio has the talent and ambition for higher office. “She doesn’t seem to me to be someone who’s going to bronze her green eyeshade and settle in for the long haul,” he said, invoking the shorthand reference to accountants and others who keep their heads down to focus on fine-grained details. 

Back in Lynn’s community access TV studio, where DiZoglio was meeting with the local chamber of commerce, Rick Starbard, a former Lynn city councilor, joined the others in nodding along as she spoke of taking on the insular Legislature. He had helped Anthony Amore, her Republican opponent in 2022, but now is among the group of people, including Amore, who find themselves supporting her after trading political blows.

As the meeting ended, Starbard praised her singing ability, the hobby that she fashioned into a political skill. DiZoglio thanked him and couldn’t resist ending with a dig at Beacon Hill: “I think some of the legislative leaders thought I was leaving my day job.”

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ON FEBRUARY 10, 2021, Mike Buckley nosed his car into a church parking lot in Medford, just over the border the city shares with Somerville. An old friend, Sean O’Donovan, had texted him earlier in the day to set up an in-person rendezvous, and they agreed to meet at the parking lot behind St. Clement Church, on the edge of Tufts University’s sprawling campus.

Buckley’s car sidled up to O’Donovan’s car, and they rolled their windows down. Buckley assumed O’Donovan, an attorney, wanted to wrap up a loose end of a legal case involving another member of Buckley’s family.

But O’Donovan, a longtime player in Somerville politics who had served 13 years on the city’s Board of Aldermen and a stint on the school committee before that, had something else on his mind. O’Donovan had turned to fully focus on lobbying and lawyering after leaving office, and he wanted Buckley’s help with a marijuana business client looking to open a Medford store.

The panel of local city officials tasked with helping choose a marijuana company to receive a host community agreement – crucial to getting an operating license from the state – planned to hold its first meeting the next day. Buckley’s older brother Jack, because of his position as Medford’s police chief, was a member of the panel, and the mayor of Medford, who would ultimately make the call on who to choose for the agreement, valued his opinion.

O’Donovan said he would pay Mike Buckley $25,000 to talk to his brother about his client’s application when it came before the panel. Buckley was noncommittal. For that amount of money, Buckley thought, it had to be more than a conversation. 

On his way home that night, the full weight of O’Donovan’s request hit him. He swore and banged on the steering wheel. Buckley wasn’t a lobbyist. He didn’t have any experience or interest in the marijuana industry. 

When Mike Buckley called his brother and relayed what O’Donovan said, Jack cursed, too, and hung up on him. Jack Buckley eventually called back. He said the FBI would be in touch. They wanted Mike Buckley to wear a wire.

On February 7, three years after that first parking lot conversion, a federal judge will sentence O’Donovan, who was convicted of attempting to bribe Jack Buckley in connection with the effort to grease the skids for the pot shop applicant. 

The judge rejected defense efforts to introduce the idea that O’Donovan had been entrapped, and the jury didn’t buy the argument that his actions amounted to perfectly legal, everyday lobbying. In October, O’Donovan, 56, was found guilty on three counts; he potentially faces decades in prison.

Corruption cases, and attempted prosecutions, were once a dime a dozen in Somerville, long known as a home base for assorted wise guys and sketchy politicians. The city’s reputation was a blessing for the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team, helping the newspaper’s investigative unit win its first Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for stories exposing shady deals. In the 1980s, it was a Somerville state representative, Vinnie Piro, who made headlines for all the wrong reasons. The State House power broker faced federal extortion charges, but was ultimately acquitted in a case where he was accused of taking a bribe from an undercover FBI agent – but then giving the money back three weeks later.

O’Donovan’s trial came and went without much fanfare. The local media scene has shriveled, with the two papers that once served Somerville and Medford having merged in the months before O’Donovan’s arrest and been hollowed out like so many other local outlets. The Boston dailies all but ignored it. Even US District Court Judge William Young, when he was addressing the jury about its duties to ignore coverage of the case, said he hadn’t seen many news reports on the trial, aside from some mentions in “legal blogs.” 

This story, with its echoes of another era, is based on reviews of court filings, trial transcripts, public records, and interviews, and includes previously unreported details. Most of the individuals who were asked about the O’Donovan case did not want to speak on the record or did not return a request for comment.

These days, Somerville is known for hipsters and cool cafes, and real estate prices through the roof. Politically, most voters chose Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders over Joe Biden for president. In place of the back-slapping Vinnie Piros who once ran the show, they now send democratic socialists to the State House. Not content to deal only with mundane matters of zoning or municipal finances, the City Council now wades into global conflicts, this month becoming the first community in Massachusetts to adopt a resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.

In other words, it’s a far cry from the place where Sean O’Donovan grew up and became practiced in the ways of deal-making politics. That makes him a throwback to the days of the city’s old guard, and his story reads like a tale from an earlier time. 

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Before the hipsters and young professionals moved in, before the progressives took over local politics, before the Board of Aldermen became a City Council, and before real estate values soared and the Green Line extended into the city and neighboring Medford, Somerville was most often described as “gritty.”

The Buckleys and O’Donovans, two large Irish families, grew up in that Somerville, in Ball Square, a block apart, and the children attended the same elementary school.

Mike Buckley, after several jobs working city governments, including as a top aide to the mayors of Somerville and Everett, eventually landed a job at Harvard University, where he helped departments put together their budgets. 

Sean O’Donovan was the son of a World War II veteran from Ireland’s County Cork who served as a cryptography specialist for the US Army. After a stint as Somerville’s city solicitor in the 1960s, James A. O’Donovan went into practicing law, and the son eventually joined his father’s practice until the elder O’Donovan died in 2016.

Sean O’Donovan was also a protege of Stan Koty, whose family in his 2019 obituary called him “one of the most effective political strategists in Somerville’s history.” Koty served in local elected office and later played key roles in mayoral elections and city government. The same year Koty passed away, Koty’s ex-boss and close friend, Vinnie Piro, the former state rep who beat the attempted extortion charge in the 1980s, also died.

After meeting in elementary school, O’Donovan and Mike Buckley’s paths crossed again inside Somerville’s City Hall, when O’Donovan succeeded Koty as Ward 5’s alderman and Buckley worked for Mayor Joe Curtatone. But by 2021, Curtatone was on his way out, Buckley was ensconced in a new job at Harvard, and O’Donovan’s sway in City Hall had waned. O’Donovan was losing interest in the city’s politics. He was focused on neighboring Medford and its burgeoning marijuana scene.

O’Donovan had locked in a marijuana company as a client years earlier. Brandon Pollock, a New York state native and the CEO of Theory Wellness, first came through O’Donovan’s doors in 2016. Pollock initially looked to Greater Boston to site a medical marijuana store, and a location in Somerville was on the list. When he spoke to a Davis Square landlord about a lease, she pointed him to O’Donovan, who agreed to meet Pollock at O’Donovan’s second office on Tremont Street, steps from Boston City Hall. 

O’Donovan bragged about the buildings he helped get through complicated permitting processes, and touted a “very good relationship” with Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston at the time and future US labor secretary, according to Pollock. 

A few months before their sit-down, the Boston Globe had published an extensive story on O’Donovan, with the headline, “Fast track from nobody to City Hall player.” The story detailed how O’Donovan had built influence and easily accessed people inside the building after Walsh’s 2013 election. Chelsea state Rep. Eugene O’Flaherty, who had been O’Donovan’s law partner and shared an office with him on Broadway in Ball Square, had joined the administration as corporation counsel.

Pollock didn’t end up signing the Somerville lease, and after voters legalized marijuana for recreational use through a November 2016 ballot initiative, Pollock’s company changed course and began pursuing licenses for what was expected to be the more lucrative recreational pot market.

When Pollock met with O’Donovan again, it was late 2018, and Pollock was now eyeing Medford. They reached a deal to pay O’Donovan $7,500 a month until the host community agreement was obtained from the city.

But O’Donovan wanted something else far more valuable on top of that: A cut of the store’s profits that could hit $100,000 to $200,000 a year once the pot shop was operational. A clause in the agreement would even entitle his heirs to the profits if O’Donovan were incapacitated or dead. Pollock felt it was too rich a deal. But O’Donovan said another marijuana business was also interested in Medford, and he could either work for Pollock or for them. 

As he weighed what to do, Pollock remembered how he’d reached out to Medford’s city attorney, he’d attended City Council meetings, and he’d gotten nowhere. Pollock signed the agreement.

In the years between the agreement and O’Donovan’s rendezvous with Mike Buckley in the church parking lot, there was a change in Medford city government right as the pandemic started. Breanna Lungo-Koehn, first elected to the City Council in 2001 at the age of 21, was sworn in as the city’s new mayor in January 2020. Months later, Medford put in place a cannabis advisory committee, through a city ordinance that called for five members, all city employees, including the chief of police, Jack Buckley. They would rank each applicant, and then send a recommendation to the mayor.

O’Donovan didn’t have a relationship with Lungo-Koehn and didn’t know most members of the panel. But he knew Jack Buckley from their schoolyard days in Somerville. Jack would be his way in. After their parking lot meeting, O’Donovan reached out to Jack’s brother Mike Buckley again and didn’t hear back. He kept pushing for another meet-up, and Mike Buckley, now coached by the FBI and outfitted with a wire, agreed.

In April, a few days before the competing marijuana companies sent in their applications, O’Donovan and Mike Buckley met up again. Mike Buckley said he talked to Jack about O’Donovan’s request. “He didn’t, like, freak out on me, and he didn’t hit me,” Buckley quipped,  which seemed to suggest some hope for O’Donovan’s cause.

O’Donovan wanted Jack Buckley to give his client a high ranking, and to personally tell the mayor that she should select Theory Wellness. The mayor likes Jack, he continued. She trusts him. “Whoever he gives the nod to, is gonna look great in her eyes,” he told Mike Buckley on video.

THE FIST BUMP

Meetings and communications between the two of them would follow in the months ahead. In late September 2021, they had another confab. Mike Buckley said he had met with Jack over the weekend about the Medford pot shop. Jack did not initially rank your guys in the top three, he said. O’Donovan was surprised. Why?

Back in August, Theory Wellness, which by that point had locations in Chicopee, Bridgewater,  and Great Barrington, was hit with wage law violations because they failed to give their 282 employees premium pay on Sundays and holidays, as required by the state, and they needed to pay $300,000 in penalties and restitution. Buckley said his brother was bothered by the violations. 

But, Buckley added, because O’Donovan was paying him, Jack would change his ranking in the final vote of the committee. “Beautiful,” O’Donovan said, leaning in to fist bump Buckley in a scene captured on an FBI video recording of their meeting. 

“He’s going to move them to the top, No. 1,” Buckley added. “Perfect,” O’Donovan said.

There was another twist, Buckley said. Jack believed his brother was getting screwed, and he wanted proof that Mike would be paid.

O’Donovan appeared annoyed. The company doesn’t want to pay the $25,000 before they win approval, he said. “This is like a mini campaign,” he said, seemingly likening it to an election, with the votes having to come in before a declaration of victory.

O’Donovan wondered aloud during the meeting, and in a later recorded phone call with Mike Buckley, about the various ways he could get the money to Mike, or at least guarantee it. At an earlier meeting, they discussed cash, so “there will be no trace,” O’Donovan said. O’Donovan decided on asking Theory Wellness to commit to the full payment if they prevailed, without going into detail on Buckley’s role.

Days later, as the Medford cannabis advisory panel was wrapping up its deliberations, O’Donovan texted Pollock, the Theory Wellness CEO. “Hi, do I have permission to hire a consultant for $25K? Will need to pay it upon success. I would recommend it.”

Pollock was unaware of the meetings between O’Donovan and Mike Buckley. When O’Donovan’s request came in, Pollock became suspicious and called Jay Youmans, the company’s lobbyist at the state level. 

Youmans, who had worked in state government under Deval Patrick and Charlie Baker before becoming a lobbyist, recommended against it, and Pollock in turn told O’Donovan no. “We’re an above-board company,” Pollock said, according to his testimony.

The last meeting between O’Donovan and Buckley took place October 11, 2021. O’Donovan brought $2,000 in cash, with the rest, he told Buckley, “locked and loaded,” as long as Theory Wellness gets the agreement. 

If anyone asked about the payment, O’Donovan planned to say Buckley was helping him with Boynton Yards, a development that would bring lab space to an area of Somerville less than a mile from Kendall Square in Cambridge, a hub of life science companies.

On December 2, O’Donovan sent Mike Buckley a text, fishing for the latest news on what was happening with the Theory Wellness application. “Hi. Nothing still, huh?”

Seven months later, in June 2022, FBI agents arrested O’Donovan in West Yarmouth, on Cape Cod, after a federal grand jury returned an indictment charging him with two counts of honest wire services fraud and one count of bribery.

‘NO MEANINGFUL DIFFERENCE’

During the trial, Martin Weinberg, the prominent Boston defense attorney representing O’Donovan, worked to inject reasonable doubt into the government’s case. The judge did not allow Weinberg to use the entrapment defense, and Weinberg is expected to appeal the conviction.

Before O’Donovan’s sentencing, the defense team plans to file a memo, looking for mercy, with letters from more than 40 people who were aided by O’Donovan when he was an alderman and pro bono lawyer. 

“That will act as testimonials to all the good he’s done in his life, for clients he’s represented pro bono, family members he’s been a lynchpin to, and for constituents that he used to work tirelessly and selflessly to help,” Weinberg said in an interview. “A man shouldn’t be defined by some unfortunate conversations on tape when he’s done so much for so many over decades.”

During the trial, Weinberg argued that O’Donovan was only requesting that Buckley ask his brother to read the Theory Wellness application, totaling more than 600 pages, one of nine proposals submitted.

There was nothing nefarious about holding that first meeting in a parking lot and not an office, said Weinberg. It took place with the pandemic still raging, and O’Donovan, who regularly spent time with his mother, who was in her 90s, wanted to be careful about his exposure to Covid. And notwithstanding all the evidence presented by the government to the contrary, Weinberg insisted O’Donovan even made clear in the meeting that he wasn’t looking for the police chief to tip the scales. “Tell Jack I want no favors,” Weinberg said, quoting O’Donovan from the FBI recording. 

O’Donovan had known Jack Buckley for 50 years, since their schoolyard days. “Why would Sean O’Donovan ever believe that he’s going to trade his reputation, betray his oath, compromise his duties as a police chief?” Weinberg said during the trial. 

The government’s case, he continued, rested on Mike Buckley telling O’Donovan that his brother decided to change his vote if he gets paid. It was a lie, “scripted by the FBI,” Weinberg said.

As for the payment, it went to Mike Buckley, a private citizen acting as an FBI informant, not Jack the public official, who was one of five members of a municipal advisory panel, Weinberg argued. The mayor held the ultimate awarding authority. O’Donovan believed that Mike would lobby and advocate for Theory Wellness, Weinberg said. 

The other leading contenders for the Medford community agreement had hired an ex-mayor and a lawyer with ties to Medford’s City Hall. “There is no meaningful difference between hiring a family member, as opposed to a friend or former aide or ally, to lobby a public official,” Weinberg added.

Prosecutors said O’Donovan, a “sophisticated attorney” and former alderman, initiated the scheme. If the defense launched into an entrapment argument, prosecutors planned to call another witness. Paul Mochi, Medford’s longtime building commissioner, was also a member of the cannabis advisory panel, and would have testified that in January 2021, just before its first meeting, O’Donovan gave him a 30 percent interest in a real estate deal, even though Mochi had not invested any money and his name had been left off paperwork for the limited liability company taking part in the deal, according to a court filing from prosecutors. Mochi, who quietly retired from city government nearly two years ago, would have also testified that O’Donovan “hounded” him about the Theory Wellness application, and he felt pressured to hand them a high score, prosecutors said.

In her closing argument to the jury, prosecutor Kristina Barclay brought up the celebratory fist bump O’Donovan offered Buckley after Buckley said his brother would change his vote for the money. “It was a bribe. Plain and simple,” she said.

‘INDEPENDENT AND INSULATED’

In the end, Theory Wellness received the highest score from the five-member panel Jack Buckley and Paul Mochi served on. The company secured its host community agreement, received its operating license from the state, and opened its store earlier this month.

If she had taken the stand in O’Donovan’s trial, Lungo-Koehn, the Medford mayor, would have testified that Theory Wellness received the host community agreement from the city on the merits of its proposal, according to prosecutors. “The fact that Mr. O’Donovan believed he could bribe our Chief of Police to influence the mayor to further his own financial standing is completely absurd,” a Lungo-Koehn spokesman told CommonWealth Beacon in an emailed statement, adding that the mayor is “glad that justice was served.” 

After he spoke with the FBI in February 2021, Jack Buckley – the real Jack Buckley, not the one portrayed to O’Donovan by Mike Buckley in their wiretapped conversations – walled himself off from O’Donovan’s push for Theory Wellness. Chief Buckley testified in court that he did not know the name of O’Donovan’s client when he scored the applicants as a member of the advisory panel. “I wanted to keep myself independent and insulated from any criminal investigation that was going on,” he testified in court.

The new Theory Wellness outlet, considered its flagship store, occupies a renovated Volkswagen dealership on Mystic Avenue. About a mile away, over the line in Somerville, sits the mixed-use building that O’Donovan owned and used to house his law office, a quick walk from the new Ball Square MBTA Station. Valued at $350,000 in 1999, it sold on January 22 to a realty trust for $1.4 million, according to publicly available records.

Posters from the pandemic, encouraging social distancing and masking up, are still around the building’s entryway. But Sean O’Donovan’s name, once displayed in big white letters on a green background, has been stripped from the sign that faces the street.

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