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Friends of Vocational Technical & Agricultural Education,
Vocational technical and agricultural administrators are pushing back against accusations that their admissions policies are discriminatory, and that they should instead be made lottery based.
Vocational school administrators such as Essex Tech superintendent Dr. Heidi Riccio, say school resources would be better spent trying to find new ways to allow students access to vocational career education even if they can’t get into a vocational school, rather than determining the efficacy of the blind lottery system.
“I think it would behoove people to dig a little deeper and ask, ‘why are 1,500 kids applying to Essex Tech?’ Let’s answer that question,” Riccio said. “Because once you do, you can then develop a plan where all kids can have some sort of access to career education. Because no matter what, at some capacity there’s going to be kids left out. So that’s what we should be planning for and working together to figure out, not the lottery.”
David
Vocational school administrators push back against blind lottery admissions
By Michael McHugh | Staff Writer Monday, February 5, 2024
The foyer near the main front entrance of the new Essex Tech.
Members of the Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators published a letter this month opposing the one-size-fits-all blind lottery system for applying to vocational technical and agricultural high schools in Massachusetts.
This comes after Gateway City Caucus sent a letter to Gov. Maura Healey asking her administration to direct the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) to prohibit vocational schools from using “selective criteria,” such as grades, attendances, disciplinary records, and guidance counselor interviews as a determinant of admission.
Some vocational schools administrators, such as Essex Tech superintendent Heidi Riccio, say changing the admissions process to a blind lottery would not change demand, but rearrange which students are excluded.
The MAVA letter claims the two schools that the Gateway City Caucus used to determine the efficacy of the blind lottery, Assabet and Worcester Tech, are not true examples of the blind lottery system working to be more equitable. They reasoned that Assabet uses a “minimum criteria” lottery that still requires students to apply with a recommendation, interview, and record of disciplinary offenses and Worcester Tech uses a “tiered” lottery system in which attendance and disciplinary records are taken into consideration.
Beyond this, the MAVA letter pushes that the two years of data collected from Worcester Tech and Assabet would not be a sufficient amount of time to determine if enrollment is actually increasing across protected classes (students of color, students with disabilities, English language learners, etc.)
“I do not believe that the lottery is the way to go,” Riccio said. “We have 17 communities that we serve and another 41 communities for our agricultural students. So that means that 350 of our kids are coming from 41 of those communities. and some of those communities already have a regional vocational school.
“So, you can have a student sitting on the Essex Tech waitlist from Haverhill, for example, and they can actually still be enrolled at Whittier Tech. So, they’re being counted twice. So, the data is kind of flawed if you don’t have all the background information.”
At Essex Tech, a school which has 1,745 total students and receives about 1,500 applications for 475 spots for incoming Grade 9 students, administrators are working to increase access on their own. This is done by increasing enrollment numbers through capacity building such as the construction of a new animal sciences building and renovation of Gallant Hall, as well as increasing the equity lens to ensure everyone has access to vocational learning.
“We took a deeper dive into our demographic data in 2018, and in that time we have increased our kids of color from 3% to almost 20% without a lottery,” Riccio said. “We simply looked at the data and did a targeted push to other school districts that have larger populations of students of color. We also hired a multilingual parent liaison, and held events targeted to Spanish and Portuguese speaking families.”
According to Essex Tech’s own admissions, waitlist, and enrollment data dashboard, enrollment data for the most part reflects the demographic makeup of sending communities with the exception of English Language Learners, which is why the school has made a concentrated effort to reach these families in the past two years.
Vocational school administrators such as Riccio say school resources would be better spent trying to find new ways to allow students access to vocational career education even if they can’t get into a vocational school, rather than determining the efficacy of the blind lottery system.
“I think it would behoove people to dig a little deeper and ask, ‘why are 1,500 kids applying to Essex Tech?’ Let’s answer that question,” Riccio said. “Because once you do, you can then develop a plan where all kids can have some sort of access to career education. Because no matter what, at some capacity there’s going to be kids left out. So that’s what we should be planning for and working together to figure out, not the lottery.”
Michael McHugh can be contacted at mmchugh or at 781-799-5202.
David J. Ferreira
MAVA Communications Coordinator
DavidFerreira
