 families she knew, it seemed too many students had been given IEPs, specialized plans for learning challenges. She worried that race might play a factor in their placements.
Levy Sarpy, 5, is in kindergarten at Brooke Mattapan, one of the Brooke Charter Schools. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
But the BPS school in her neighborhood did not impress her either. Her friends told her to chill out: “Everybody was like, ‘It’s just kindergarten, Tasha – it’s no big deal.’” But Sarpy’s field was education. She had done the research, and she knew better.. She was apprehensive about charter schools, and the strict discipline she’d heard that some imposed. Her mind changed on her first charter tour, as she watched students laughing and learning math as they played a game of “Duck, Duck, Goose.” This was the joyful place she’d searched for, and she knew it was the right place for her son.
Sarpy and her husband — who is also Black, and attended public schools in New Orleans until his mother grew fearful of school violence and chose to homeschool him — made the same decision as thousands of other Black parents. Statewide, Black enrollment at charter schools has more than doubled since 2003, from 5,000 to 12,000, and would almost certainly be larger still if not for a state cap that has limited Boston’s charter enrollment since 2018.
Now a professor of behavioral science at Bunker Hill Community College, Sarpy has three children at Brooke Charter School in Boston, where 52 percent of students are Black, and she is a member of the board of directors. As a sixth-grader, her eldest son took and passed the entrance exam for Boston Latin School — the crown jewel of the BPS system — yet chose to stay at Brooke for high school.
Her youngest went to pre-kindergarten at Beethoven Elementary, a Boston public school, and Sarpy loved it, enough to consider braving the BPS lottery. In the end, though, she stuck with the option she knows best.
“I always say, I don’t want a school that’s improving, I want a school that’s proven,” Sarpy said. “I don’t want my kids to be the guinea pigs.”
Liam Sarpy, 15, walked to class at Brooke High School, one of the Brooke Charter Schools, in October. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
Wilkinson and her husband loved Roslindale, and planned to stay there, even with their daughter in private school in Brookline. But as their second child approached school age, and the couple again weighed their options, they felt a crushing reality sink in.
They could not imagine taking a third gamble on the BPS lottery — but stretching their budget to cover two private school tuitions was equally unthinkable.
Reluctantly, they turned their gaze outside the city, to nearby suburbs, seeking a diverse, reliable public system where they could control what school their child would attend, and where they could afford to buy a home. Last year they moved to Milton, where their son is a second-grader at a school with equal numbers of white and Black students. Their daughter, now a sophomore, enrolled at a different private school for high school.
In the years since her daughter started kindergarten, Wilkinson has grown more knowledgeable about Boston’s public schools, and more outraged by their history of neglect. In her job at SchoolFacts Boston, she empowers Boston families with information about education and helps them advocate for better options.
Meanwhile, her daughter’s private education presents its own challenges, different from those she might have faced in BPS. Now, instead of worrying about broken bathrooms or a lack of music classes, Wilkinson laments the stubborn gaps in cultural sensitivity on campuses with few students of color.
When she talks with Black friends who are also parents, they circle back again and again to education — the options they are weighing for their children; the options they wish they had.
Vernée Wilkinson hugged her son, Eliah, on the first day of school this year in Milton. The family moved from Boston to Milton last year. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
Ask her what she thinks it would have taken for her to send her kids to Boston Public Schools, and she pauses, thinking of the generations of Black families whose needs went unmet.
How many more, she wonders, are yet to lose out, too?
“A time machine,” she says at last, invoking the district’s long inaction. “So many lost decades when they should have, could have been vigilant. … But you can’t get that time back. And you can’t fully restore what those families lost.”
Back in Dorchester, Emily Centeio reads her 3-year-old his favorite book, a Richard Scarry classic crammed with illustrations of zooming cars and trucks. She imagines a day not far into the future when he will learn to read himself, sounding out the letters one by one in a classroom somewhere yet to be determined.
She remembers how comfortable she felt as a child at Edward Everett Elementary, a public school in Dorchester, and how she longed to return there after her parents, immigrants from Cape Verde, pulled her from BPS for middle school and sent her to the private, nonprofit Epiphany School in Dorchester, where low-income students receive full scholarships. Overnight, her class sizes shrank by half, and teachers pushed her harder. “I couldn’t get by in the same way,” she said.
She recalls, a few years later, how she refused to get out of the car when her mother took her to an open house at a private high school in Weston, and how she longed, again, for the familiarity of BPS. “It was beautiful,” she said of the suburban campus, “but I was so intimidated.” She ended up graduating from the private Rivers School, but struggling with a sense of disconnection, because so few students there were Black like her.
“I was hiding in the library,” she said. “I didn’t want to be seen.”
The memory returns as she ponders her son’s future. On visits to some private schools, she feels a thrill when she sees classes of 10 students — but uneasy when she notices how few are Black. “I’m trying to focus on where he is now,” she said, “but I also have to think about the long term. … If I make decision A, what will it mean later?”
Now a staff member at Epiphany, where she attended middle school, Centeio counsels other Boston parents as they make their own school choices. Many opt for BPS, and flourish there.
She tells herself there is more than one right choice, and more than one place where her son can thrive. Her own journey ended well, at Smith College, where she felt safe and confident enough to soar.
Someday, she hopes, her son will feel that, too. But for now, she holds him close a little longer, in the lull before it all begins.
Jenna Russell can be reached at jenna.russell@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @jrussglobe. Christopher Huffaker can be reached at christopher.huffaker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @huffakingit.HARRISBURG, PENN. — The principals of Skelly and Loy announced that Skelly and Loy is expanding its operations into Wise, Va., located in the southwestern portion of Virginia in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains and Central Appalachian Coal Region.
This office location will allow Skelly and Loy the opportunity to more effectively offer its engineering and environmental services to the central Appalachian region. Skelly and Loy has been providing mining engineering services throughout the United States and around the world for the last 41 years. The firm’s Mining Services Group is staffed with experienced mining engineers (surface and underground), geologists, and scientists that can guide proposed and active mining operations from a pre-feasibility stage through geologic investigations, detailed design, permitting (state and federal), and reclamation. Its mining engineering services are offered to mining companies, electric utilities relying on coal as a boiler fuel, financial institutions, and support industries. The company is recognized globally for its experience and expertise.
One of the other driving forces behind this expansion is the addition of Phillip C. Mullins, P.E., a long-time resident of Wise and veteran of the coal industry. Mullins grew up in the coalfields of southwest Virginia, working at his father’s surface mining operations during summer breaks from high school. After graduating from high school, he attended Virginia Tech where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mining engineering. While at Virginia Tech, Mullins received a partial scholarship from Massey Coal Co. and worked underground at their Pike County, Ky., operations. Upon graduation from Virginia Tech in 1983, Mullins took a job as chief engineer with Ambrose Branch Coal Co. in Pound, Va. He joined Maxim Engineering in 1987, was promoted to vice president of Maxim in 1988, and held that position until 1995 when he founded Appalachian Technical Services (ATS). Under his leadership from 1995 until 2004, ATS grew to a regional, multidisciplinary consulting firm with more than 50 employees. Seeking a new challenge, Mullins sold his interest in ATS to its current owners and took a position as senior mining engineer for Cumberland Resources, where he worked until recently joining Skelly and Loy.
Mullins is