Supt. Karen Maguire's Seeks Public Help to Preserve Tri-County Voc

Following Observer's coverage of the state's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE)'s radical new admission requirements for vocational schools (What Could Possibly Go Wrong?), Tri-County Regional Vocational Technical School Superintendent, Dr. Karen Maguire reached out. 

She wrote, as follows:

The problem I have is the State attempting to usurp local control by taking away the rights of the school committee to set policy. Tri-County exceeds the proportionality in all subgroups- in each member town. There is no reason to regulate this admission process statewide. DESE should work with districts that are disproportionate- once they decide how to measure that- and not interfere with the rights of the school committees in the rest.

Anyone wishing to weigh in on the proposed regulation change can do so until April 18, 2025. The Press Release from DESE says 60 days but that is not accurate. It's about 30.

https://www.doe.mass.edu/bese/regs-comments/default.html?utm_source=DESE+Press+Releases&utm_campaign=89cd053f47-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_03_10_11_18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-89cd053f47-40531496

[Tri-County serves Franklin, Medway, as well as Medfield, Millis, Norfolk, North Attleboro, Plainville, Seekonk, Sherborn, Walpole, and Wrentham.]

Maguire's testimony to DESE, delivered Monday night, is reproduced below.

Public Comment, March 10, 2025 Dr. Karen Maguire, Tri-County RVTHS

To date we still have not seen the process the Department will be using to identify disproportionality in our school admissions. There have been at least 4 different explanations of what disproportionality is- none of which make sense when applied to our systems- and it keeps changing. We looked at state wide data and compared it to the students at our vocational schools, only to realize that you shouldn’t compare state wide data to regional systems. We looked at regional systems, and realized that many of our schools have long standing agreements in place with seat allocations- so that won’t work…and the list goes on and on.

The vocational education coalition has made damning statements over the past few years that have accused our schools collectively as being discriminatory to students of protected classes: students of color, english language learners, special education students and socioeconomically disadvantaged students. They routinely claim that 26 of the 28 regional vocational schools have disproportionality in these sub-groups. Including mine. I want to make clear that this accusation which is continuously shared with the Department of Education, the Executive office of Education, the Governor’s Office, the Boston Globe and numerous other media outlets -is false. There is no disproportionality in any of these subgroups at Tri-County. The alliance points to the english language learner data indicator from DESE’s website on admissions & waitlist- which reflects that Tri-County accepted 100% of the ELL students who applied in 2023. But only 50% accepted offer to attend. Apparently, this choice by the students and their family- which is completely out of my control, has landed me on the list, shared all over the commonwealth, of schools who discriminate against kids. -A side note- using percentages in this scenario- grossly misleads people to the conclusion that “I must be doing something wrong-- These schools must be doing something wrong” when in actuality- with regard to the ELL applicants at Tri Countywe are talking about 2 students. Yes- that’s right. 2. Not 200. But 2. This is similar to a tactic that the Department used in the first presentation to your working group. You remember- the one where they ended the meeting on what we call the “Mike drop slide”- while seemingly clever at the moment, it was really meant to mislead you.

When there is no clear process identified to measure disproportionality, this is what happensand unfortunately will continue to happen. We need a clear process in place. Currently the process of establishing disproportionality is whimsical at best. The story of Tri-County is one of many. It seems to me that everyone just believed what they were told and that no one cared enough to check… We have pointed out, over and over, the flaws in the approach to interpreting the data, and with the publication of data that is inconsistent, not reliable and inaccurate.

For some of our schools listed in the aforementioned report- the group used the report that included out of district applications, while for others only in district. And for some, we simply cannot reproduce the results that are published in this report.

I ask that as part of any regulatory change that you include a prescribed measure that will be used to identify disproportionality and that the MAVA is included in drafting such. It is important to understand our unique systems and that a one size fits all approach will lead to more issues than soloutions.