Email to a Worcester parent

 While I was on the Worcester School Committee for six years, it's this pandemic that has really brought home (no pun intended) the reality that we have over 25,000 students in over 16,000 families and 4500 employees in Worcester. That can be a lot of email.
I read them all; I respond to those that aren't petition generated (aka: you wrote something yourself), though that sometimes takes awhile. Because we do have the next steps of the move towards buildings up now for a meeting this week, I found myself writing the same thing a number of times today in response to parents, so I thought I would post it here, as well.

brook crossing, Moreland Hill

Thank you very much for your email, and I appreciate your concerns for your children. For our youngest and our highest need students, I am particularly concerned.

While the shape of the pandemic continues to shift, that has not changed in any way the realities of our student enrollment and our buildings and our buses. Districts that are going back full time--even those that are going back on two day a week swings--have significantly lesser concentration of students in buildings. We have noted for some years now that we have more students attending WPS than we did fifteen years ago when we closed eight school buildings. That has the results we are seeing.
Likewise, having both the programs we run citywide, from WAMS to Tech, and serving the student population we do, in a city in which a significant number of our families lack private transportation, makes any transportation shifts both an equity and an access issue.
The COVID relief has gone for the technology to have our students accessing education now and does not run to rental space, and even if it did, those additional spaces, as the administration noted back in August, would need staffing (and furniture and equipment). Far from having funding for that, we instead only avoided laying off teachers this fall because we could cut the transportation budget. And I should add, that August cut was based on the projection of the state at least carrying through the inflationary increase of our budget, something less secure with no additional aid coming from Washington. 
None of this is to argue, as I said, with your concerns. I know that from a parental perspective this can sound like naysaying. As someone deeply engaged with the finances of schools, though, the disparities you and your family note are the consequences of the decades-old funding disparities that brought Worcester to the verge of a lawsuit last year.
The timing of the pandemic, in this year in which the state was to finally begin to implement better funding, would be ironic were it not also so deeply painful.