Boston Public Schools Will Expand More Elementary Schools To Serve 6th Graders

Six more Boston elementary schools will soon include sixth grade classes.

Boston Public Schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius announced that the schools will expand from serving grades Kindergarten through fifth grade to Kindergarten through sixth grade in the fall of 2020.

The impacted schools are all in East Boston:

Elementary school expansion is part of a larger facilities master plan called BuildBPS. The district hopes to eventually phase out stand-alone middle schools in favor of a K-6 and 7-12 structure as many middle schools face declining enrollment and academic performance issues.

The move followed months of conversation with parents, teachers, community leaders and other stakeholders, Cassellius said in a press release. School officials hope these additions will result in the need to bus fewer East Boston middle-school-aged students outside of the area.

"These changes will provide families with more predictability from Kindergarten to high school graduation and better position our schools to serve our students,” Cassellius said in the statement.

The school expansions set for East Boston will add to a list of 12 elementary schools that were already slated to become K-6 schools. Those include:

District officials said they will move forward with other BuildBPS plans, such as finding new homes for the Jackson/Mann School and the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. The building that currently houses those schools is set to close at the end of the 2020-2021 school year. The district plans to host community meetings to discuss relocating the schools beginning in January.