Busing turned a Charlestown school into a Mandarin language magnet. Now that program's closing

Two things surprised Boston school teacher Suzanne Lee in the summer of 1975.

First, parents of the bilingual Chinese students she taught at the Quincy Elementary School in Chinatown came to her with a letter they received from the district. As part of the court-ordered busing to desegregate Boston's schools, their children would no longer attend the Quincy for the coming school year. Instead, they'd be bused to either the Warren-Prescott or Harvard-Kent elementary school in Charlestown.

Then, just days before the school year started, Lee, a bilingual education teacher in her second year on the job, was reassigned to the Harvard-Kent as well — to teach fifth grade.

"People got very nervous," Lee said. "Because they don't know where Charlestown is. All they know that it’s a hostile environment for non-white folks, because there's been a lot of story of fights."

Some parents, fearing for their children's safety amid the tensions over busing, went on to organize a three-day boycott of the move to the new schools. Lee, who immigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong at age 11, helped interpret for the parents. The group eventually won several guarantees from the school system, including the addition of Chinese-speaking bus monitors and school administrative staff.

Though the busing era in Boston is largely remembered for the impact it had on Black and white families, other kids were also affected, including the city's growing bilingual Chinese population. By the expansion of court-ordered busing in 1975, roughly half of 2,000 Chinese students from Chinatown and the South End were scheduled to be sent to schools in the North End and Charlestown.

Lee said the move to the Harvard-Kent wasn't easy. Charlestown was a mostly white neighborhood, and the Quincy students didn’t feel welcome at their new school.

"There was a lot of antagonism among the staff," Lee said. "There were a lot of snide remarks about the children, about what we were doing there. And [that] we were a curiosity and strange."

Despite the initial challenges, Lee continued to work at the Harvard-Kent for the next six years.

When court mandated busing ended in 1988, the Charlestown school continued to draw large numbers of Chinese students. By the mid-2000s, more than a third of students at Harvard-Kent were Asian — higher in percentage than any other race category at the school — and mostly Chinese in ethnicity. Many were newcomers to the U.S. In 2004, the district launched an English language learner program tailored to native Chinese speakers at the school.

Parent and Charlestown resident Yang Cao chose the Harvard-Kent for his two sons because of this program. The facility is just one of two Boston public schools that offers English learner curriculum and support specifically for Mandarin-speaking students.

Cao moved to Boston with his family last summer from China. Today, Charlestown is much more diverse than it was five decades ago: in 1970, it was 95% white and less than 1% Asian. By 2020, about 9% of residents identified as Asian and 71% residents white.

"I think [my son] has quite enjoyed his life here and also in the school," Cao said of his first grader. "I think he’s tried to learn more and talk with classmates and his teachers."

But the number of Chinese students who need English language support at Harvard-Kent has declined in recent years, as more Chinese families move out of Boston and into local suburbs. Asian students comprise 14% of the school's population this year, compared to 38% for white kids and 28% for Hispanic children. There are around five or fewer native Chinese speakers per grade. Because of that, Boston school officials plan to end the school's language-specific English learner program after this year.

BPS will still offer general English learner curriculum at the school. But if a newcomer Chinese family wants a Mandarin-specific program, there's only one other option: Josiah Quincy Elementary in Chinatown — Lee's old school — which moved to a new building in 1976.

Getting a seat at the highly regarded "new Quincy" isn’t guaranteed. It almost always has a waiting list for enrollment because of its reputation and a Mandarin language elective for any student.

Lee, who later served as the principal of Quincy Elementary before retiring in 2009, said newcomer bilingual students often can’t land a seat at the school. That, she said, is unfair to students who need the language support and could benefit from going to a school with a larger population of Chinese students.

"[In 1976] the students from grade three to five, particularly the bilingual ones, were not able to go to the new Quincy School because they were bused to Charlestown. And to this day, that pattern exists," Lee said. "That makes no sense, because they’re the most vulnerable ones and they need to be in the community."

Boston school superintendent Mary Skipper said the district is aware of the situation and is trying to find a way to accommodate bilingual or multilingual students who speak languages like Mandarin, Haitian Creole and Vietnamese. There are Boston schools that offer English learner programs for these languages, but if a family lives outside the region of a particular school — or misses priority registration — it's not always possible to get a seat there under the home-based assignment system.

"We’re trying to look at that right now — not just with Mandarin (options)," Skipper said. "How do we support the 'low incident' languages where one or two sites would suffice for the volume?

"We’re firmly committed to expanding dual language access," she added.

And improving English language instruction is a high priority for the district. In a 2022 district review, state officials criticized BPS for having "inadequate" instructional services for English learners, who make up about a third of the total student population.

The Mandarin-English learner program at Harvard-Kent was a solution to a problem created 50 years ago, when Boston marched unwitting kids onto buses in the name of racial balancing. Its demise creates a new — very similar — problem for parents in the post-busing era.