Project Pages
The following projects examine monitor reports from the Citywide Coordinating Council:
"Law & Order BPS: Police Presence in High Schools During the Desegregation of Boston Public Schools, 1976" - This project examines how school surveillance changed during the desegregation period in the 1970s and how it impacted student behavior. Students in newly-integrated high schools found themselves observed by police officers and court-appointed monitors on a regular basis. This project uses data about police presence and student behavior from monitor reports from three high schools considered at high risk for violence, Charlestown High School, Hyde Park High School, and L Street Annex in South Boston during the Spring 1976 semester. The visualizations created with this data consider how surveillance may have exacerbated social and political tensions related to desegregation. This project provides historical context for the still contentious issue of police presence in schools.
"Monitor Report Timeline" — In the wake of Boston’s decision to desegregate their public schools, students were forced to navigate a new, uncertain, and often hostile, social landscape. No longer subject to the typical oversight encountered in schools, the new integrated student body was under observation from a number of different organizations and groups, including students, police, and a group of monitors brought in by the Boston City Council. Drawing on monitor reports from the time, this project will construct a timeline of incidents to better understand the situation in both Hyde Park High School and the L Street Annex. In viewing the information in a chronological manner, different trends, spikes or dips in incidents may be revealed, as well as how and what measures were taken by the city, parents, police, school administrations, and the students themselves in the face of the new integrated school system. Doing so will reveal which methods were successful, which were not, and also shed light on common issues and responses used both then and now to deal with violence and racism in the school system.