Mayor for a New America by Thomas M. Menino

decade. In just four years, salaries for bus drivers had shot up 433 percent. Administrators were generous to themselves, too, taking half the department’s fifty-two-car fleet home with them every night. Here, I told Mooney, was proof that “the dollar we give them isn’t precious to them. The school budget is like a hole you can’t get to the bottom of.”
    The elected school committee could not plug it. Instead, while planting their feet on the ladder of office, members argued over trivialities like whether the ad for a new superintendent should read “earned doctorate” or “earned doctorate preferred.”
    Ray Flynn had had enough. He held an advisory referendum on replacing the elected committee with a seven-member appointed one. The voters passed it, but by less than 1 percent. On that thread of support, in 1991 Flynn lobbied the state legislature to pass home-rule legislation creating an appointed school committee. The legislature attached a condition: The measure must pass a second referendum to be held in five years. The elected school committee was history.
    Going out the door, in virtually their final act, the members signed a new school superintendent to a four-year contract. Flynn had wanted to appoint his own person. But he was stuck with the committee’s choice. So was I.
    Before the struggle for the schools could be joined, I had to clear three hurdles.
    I had to settle the touchy issue of whether to renew Superintendent Lois Harrison-Jones’s contract, which had nearly two years to run when I became mayor.
    I had to find a superintendent who shared my sense of urgency about the schools. Boston, I feared, would turn into a city of the rich and the poor unless the middle class could be persuaded to trust their kids to the public schools. The 1990 census revealed a doubling in the number of residents in the upper income brackets since 1980
and
an exodus of middle-income families of all races. Boston risked becoming Manhattan.
    I wanted the Boston of the 90s and beyond to be a multiracial, multicultural version of my beloved Hyde Park of the 50s, a city of stable middle-class neighborhoods. Instead, it was increasingly a city of transients. Young couples moved in, stayed for five years, and when their kids reached first grade moved to the suburbs.
    Finally, I had to persuade the voters not to restore the elected school committee, something polls showed 7 in 10 of them ready to do in a referendum scheduled for November 1996.
    Â 
It was torture every day to stay on top of my homework. I was sobbing every time I was doing math. The frustration was like a nightmare. My friend supported me by cheering me up in my desperate times. . . . I passed fourth grade, but I wasn’t on my feet the next year. I got better, but still not enough to feel successful. I didn’t pass fifth grade, but I was making progress in math. I no longer felt like an inept person. . . . At the end of fifth grade I got an award for the most improved in math. It felt like a dream. Obstacles are walls that can be broken.
    Â 
—Every year, as part of the Max Warburg Courage Curriculum honoring an eleven-year-old Boston boy who died of leukemia in 1991, students submit essays on the meaning of courage. This passage is taken from an essay by Claudia Amador, a sixth-grader at the Patrick Lyndon Pilot School in 2007. It won a prize and was reprinted in the Boston Globe.
    Â 
    In my 1994 inaugural address I noted that “for the first time since 1977 no African American holds a city-wide post.” I pledged to “be especially responsive” to minority concerns. It was the least I could do. Blacks supported me in the election by nearly 4 to 1.
    In 1990, when all but one of the white members of the School Committee voted to fire Boston’s first African American superintendent of schools, Dr. Laval Wilson, the four black members walked out in protest. A prime minority