Editor’s note: This is the first article in a two-part series on the state’s takeover of Holyoke Public Schools. Part two, which focuses on what comes next for the Paper City’s schools and students, can be found here.
In early June, about 15 minutes before public comments are scheduled to begin in front of the Holyoke School Committee, members of the Holyoke Teachers Association are meeting in an underpass outside the school. The sky is threatening rain with its silver clouds, but the union doesn’t seem to mind.
One union member, history teacher Bob Williams, explains that the union is there because of a statement the district’s lawyer, Dave Connelly, made during their last session at the bargaining table. According to several union members, the lawyer said that the district is “satisfied with the status quo.”
Union members, Williams says, are anything but satisfied.
Educators carry poster boards filled with handwritten postcards from teachers and students asking the School Committee members to “give teachers what they deserve.” The handwriting varies from messy and large to neat and small, written in pens and crayons and markers.
“Educate, Organize, Win!” appears on the backs of several shirts, in English and Spanish, while other members don the royal purple of the Holyoke Public Schools. They cram into the space outside where the School Committee is set to meet. The air in the crowd begins as thick and anxious and thins out as teachers realize there’s a wait before the elected officials will see them. Conversation stirs and laughter erupts.
When they’re finally allowed to enter, the mood immediately shifts. In public comment after public comment, the union members ask the School Committee for greater collaboration in their contract negotiations. One educator, Brandi Bellacicco, simply repeats back a phrase that School Committee member Yadilette Rivera-Colón used, in reference to a student’s project, suggesting that the officials should follow their own advice:
“In order for us to make change, we have to have radical ideas and innovative ideas.”
The union members are organized and active because 10 years ago, the state took over their district. Putting Holyoke’s schools into a status called “receivership,” state education officials stripped away residents’ and workers’ democratic control of their own schools, including the union’s full rights to collective bargaining. So, for the last decade, a state-appointed receiver has held the powers normally given to a democratically elected school board and the superintendent it selects.
It’s something that has only ever happened to three districts statewide, all of which have teachers and student populations that are predominantly Hispanic. Holyoke has one of the largest Puerto Rican populations, per capita, in the entire United States outside of the island itself. The other two cities that have been under state receivership, Lawrence and Southbridge, also have student bodies that overwhelmingly identify as Hispanic or Latino, according to state data — 94.6% and 65.9%, respectively. All three schools have a student population that is about 80% low-income and nearly 90% have high needs.
Back when state education officials were considering receivership for Holyoke, they were concerned about some troubling trends in the city’s schools. The district had the lowest four-year graduation rate in the state and an exceedingly high dropout rate, too. Test scores, which were already low, had been in a downward spiral. And the district’s out-of-school suspension rate in the school year before the state took control was five times the state average. For Black and Hispanic students, those rates were even higher.
During a decade of receivership, current receiver Anthony Soto said the district has made progress addressing its student retention rate, increasing its graduation rate, cutting the out-of-school suspension rate in half, and bringing in more teachers of color.
“I appreciate the progress that Holyoke Public Schools has made to provide students with a high-quality education, including in graduation rates and the use of high-quality instructional materials and evidence-based early literacy practices,” Patrick Tutwiler, the state’s former education secretary, said in a statement last year.
But critics — in particular the state’s educators’ union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association — say that receivership is a tool to bust unions. They also contend that it doesn’t adequately address any of the reasons the state got involved in the first place. The union points to data showing that test scores haven’t improved and that teacher turnover rates increased immediately after receivership began.
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Last year, the state announced that it was giving back local control to Holyoke. However, union members say that isn’t entirely true.
After months of those promises, the HTA — which is composed of the district’s 400-some teachers and others like librarians, speech therapists, and psychologists — was surprised to learn that under the city’s agreement with the state to exit receivership, the superintendent still holds unilateral power over parts of their contract. That includes compensation, the ability to decide the criteria for making staff cuts, and the method of teacher evaluation. That’s different from other districts, where educators and officials negotiate over those sorts of conditions at the bargaining table.
But the city’s educators aren’t sitting idly. A decade ago, they organized opposition to the takeover, but it wasn’t enough to prevent receivership. Now, a new generation of union organizers has taken the torch. A slate of rank-and-file organizers won election to leadership positions last year on a campaign of fighting for a just first contract upon exiting receivership.
And now, educators are showing up to protest.
***
Gus Morales fought “tooth and nail” against receivership, and he doesn’t regret it. Even if it cost him his job.
A longtime educator and Holyoke resident, Morales now drives to eastern Massachusetts to teach English at a middle school. But in 2015, he was at the eye of the storm in Holyoke.
Morales was elected as the HTA president while the state was considering taking over the district more than a decade ago. Before running for office, he considered himself a quiet and private person, someone who minded his own business. But as he started to hear about how unhappy his coworkers were, Morales decided that their struggle was his, too.
“I would feel complicit if I just sat there and let things happen, so I started to get more involved, and the more involved I got, the more things I saw,” he said.
What he saw was that the district was being run “like a company,” with students who were struggling in the classroom being treated the same as an employee underperforming at their job. That didn’t sit right with him, so he successfully ran for union president on a campaign focused on taking teaching back from administrators “who had no business in teaching.”
He said students came into the classroom from a variety of difficult circumstances — homelessness, abusive homes, or caregivers struggling with addiction, for example. The education system is not built to handle those circumstances, he said.
Instead, Morales said data was “weaponized” against his students for punitive purposes.
He described what he called the “gold star system” in his classroom, where students would be publicly ranked by their scores on standardized tests — something he believed was humiliating, damaging to their self-esteem, and counter-productive to the goal of improving students’ learning experience. Critics of state standardized testing also feel that it is rooted in and reinforces systematic racism. Some academic research shows racial and economic disparities that impact the test scores of students.
The manner in which the district approached attempting to improve student outcomes “attacked” and placed blame on Black and brown students, he said, as well as teachers.
Morales and others said that the state’s data didn’t tell the full story and still doesn’t. In particular, he pushed back against the use of standardized testing to measure student success.
“The hyperfocus on testing has ruined teaching,” he said. He’s seen students even throw up from anxiety before taking standardized tests. “We’re causing harm.”
The period of time shortly before receivership was officially implemented was a nerve-wracking and scary time for Holyoke teachers, according to Morales. As the state made it increasingly obvious that it intended to take over the district, he and his fellow union members began to organize.
And the initial opposition was fierce.
Elected officials across the city, and across the political spectrum, urged the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to vote against receivership. There was also grassroots opposition and organizing. Morales had on his side Barbara Madeloni, who had just stunned the state’s political class when she won election as the president of the MTA after running on a campaign to empower rank-and-file members to more aggressively advocate for themselves.
Students across the district held a walkout to oppose the takeover. The HTA and community members held a rally before the state education board’s vote on receivership. Morales said that the room was packed.
But it wasn’t enough. On April 15, 2015, the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted to put Holyoke Public Schools into receivership. Morales said he felt like state officials had already made up their mind and organizers couldn’t have done more to convince them otherwise.
“We just weren’t ready,” Madeloni, who is now an organizer with Labor Notes, told The Shoestring. “We organized a good fight.”
(Disclosure: Madeloni sits on The Shoestring’s advisory board, which does not have any editorial role in our independent newsroom.)
The consequences were immediate. Madeloni said that receivership drives out teachers as well as families who opt into charter schools. To her, receivership is about “narrowing the possibilities for what education can mean for Black and brown students” and “driving towards privatization.”
The consequences went beyond the walls of the city’s schools, too.
Madeloni said schools and their school committees are one of the most local ways that someone can get engaged in their community. They can be someone’s first interaction with participating in local democratic structures. But under receivership, in which school committees have little power, that isn’t the case.
“Receivers say you, as a community, cannot run your own school,” she said. “We, as the state, will run that. So they’re profoundly anti-democratic, and it’s not an accident that that profound anti-democratic impulse is enacted in Black and brown and poor communities.”
Meanwhile, Morales said his bosses started coming after him for ruffling the feathers of those who wanted the union to “shut up.”
“They tried everything they could to get rid of me,” he said. “When you speak truth to power, it makes people uncomfortable.”
At the time, Morales was an at-will, probationary employee in the first three years of his teaching contract, and the district was under no legal obligation to provide a reason for the termination of his contract. Just after Morales had been elected as the union’s president, and as he approached the end of his third year of teaching, district administrators told him they weren’t renewing his contract.
The Holyoke Teachers Association sued the city on Morales’ behalf for alleged retaliation for his work in the union. Eventually, in 2016, MassLive reported that Morales and administrators agreed to a $40,000 settlement that saw him leave the district.
It was a lonely and isolating experience, but Morales said it was what he signed up for.
“This is my home. Holyoke will always be my home,” he said. “I will never speak negatively about this city because it’s the city that absorbed me when I moved here from Puerto Rico … To champion a cause and to champion for a change does not mean you’re being negative towards the city. It just means you want to see the city in its best place possible.”
***
Early in 2024, there began to be rumblings that the state would release its control over Holyoke’s schools. And it was then that a new group of organizers ran for leadership positions in the HTA.
One of those new leaders was Nick Cream, who is in his fifth year of teaching ethnic studies and history at Holyoke High School’s Dean Tech Campus. He said that fighting for a better world begins in the classroom.
“If we can think about classrooms as laboratories for liberation, then we can do that on a grander scale,” he said.
Cream says the union’s new leadership is working to move the HTA in an “active, engaged, and inclusive” direction.
Maria Perez is a long-time union member and pre-kindergarten teacher at Marcella R. Kelly Elementary School. She was a paraprofessional in the district before she became a teacher six years ago and joined HTA. Amid the change in union leadership, Perez said she feels more involved in union activity than before. She said this is the first time that she’s been knowledgeable about her contract and that the union’s leadership has activated rank-and-file members more than ever before.
“This is the first time I find out that we’re negotiating, as a teacher,” Perez said. “I think this is the most transparency we’ve had from the union in many years.”
To Cream, that commitment to transparency means more than holding monthly meetings. It means taking action like expanding the bargaining team and hosting more events, which Cream feels is critical in the current political conditions.
And quickly after the HTA’s election, political conditions changed in Holyoke.
In October, Gov. Maura Healey and her administration announced that the state was making a “provisional decision to remove Holyoke Public Schools from receivership.”
But as union members would soon learn, that didn’t come without conditions.
The state, with the backing of the city’s School Committee, would implement what officials call “exit assurances.” Throughout the summer, the School Committee had worked with then-acting education commissioner Russell Johnston to create an exit plan to transition the district out of receivership.
Among those exit conditions were several provisions that gave the state-appointed receiver Anthony Soto, who is becoming the district’s superintendent, powers over union contracts not seen in other districts that aren’t under receivership. The state’s education department will still measure the district’s progress using data from benchmark testing, classroom observations, and more — something all School Committee members voted in favor of.
Union members who spoke with The Shoestring said they are disappointed in the exit assurances and view them as a lighter form of receivership.
In an email to The Shoestring, Soto — himself a Holyoke Public Schools graduate — sent over a list of accomplishments he said the district has achieved during its time in receivership. Among them is building a “bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural” student community, a new program aimed at addressing retention rates in the district, increased graduation rates, and a significant increase of teachers of color.
Soto said the district and state believe that Holyoke teachers deserve a fair and equitable contract “regardless of governance structure,” and that there is a continuous spirit of collaboration. He said he “gathered input” from the union and elected officials before crafting the exit plan — a process that union leaders have stressed is different from negotiations among equal parties.
“Negotiations with the Holyoke Teachers Association are ongoing,” he said. “While a component of the exit assurances focus on four key areas of collective bargaining, they do not limit the union’s ability to bring forward full proposals. The School Committee and I remain committed to reviewing all proposals in good faith, with students’ best interests at the center of every decision.”
But union members say there’s no real “negotiations” on topics that the superintendent only has to consult them about, per the exit plan. Cream shared a bargaining document that he said shows minimal effort from management: 16 proposals from the union since February, but only one counter-proposal from the district.
Mayor Joshua Garcia, the city’s first Latino mayor and a graduate of the city’s schools, won election in 2021 on a platform that included getting the district out of receivership. It’s an issue that talked about with Healey, too, when she was running for governor in 2022. Last year, expressed frustration with the state for not having a concrete plan about giving back local control to Holyoke, according to MassLive.
Garcia, who as mayor chairs the School Committee, pushed back against the idea that the union doesn’t have bargaining power.
“Negotiations with the Holyoke Teachers Association are happening right now and are ongoing,” Garcia said in a statement to The Shoestring. “The idea of unions not being able to bargain or have never been able to bargain is just simply not true.”
Garcia said that he feels the MTA has found it convenient to use Holyoke “to help support their greater cause.” Though parts of the exit assurances focus on collective bargaining, he said that it does not impede the union’s ability to make more proposals. He also said that under receivership, the district “negotiated three contracts with teachers through collective bargaining or impact bargaining.”
Cream said that negotiations with the district and state under receivership “were not truly negotiations.” Under state control, the receiver had the ability to unilaterally open collective bargaining agreements to alter working conditions. Collective bargaining, by contrast, requires both management and the union to negotiate and come to an agreement that both parties then sign.
“I was on the bargaining team in 2022 and can say with absolute certainty that there were no actual negotiations,” Cream said. He called Garcia’s statement “disingenuous.”
Cream said if the union had made proposals regarding the exit plan, the district could have simply chosen not to bargain over those proposals. He also said he took issue with Garcia using the MTA as a “boogeyman.” He said it “underlies what he thinks about the HTA: namely that we cannot and do not think for ourselves or talk to our members about the schools they would like to see and that our students deserve.”
“These words are possibly the most harmful to us as a union,” Cream said. “To be told over and over again that we have had our voices heard and for our very reasonable demands and feedback to be almost completely ignored is demeaning, insulting, and disrespectful.”
***
At the School Committee’s June meeting, Cream is the last to go up for public comment. The first thing he does is thank his fellow union members for the work they’ve been doing. He calls attention to the current political moment, when rights are under attack on a national level — from free speech to labor.
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Cream said. “History does not happen to us, we the people make history. And we’re making it right now.”
As he ends his comment, Cream begins a union chant — seemingly a promise from Holyoke’s educators to keep mobilizing in the city’s name.
“By Holyoke, for Holyoke.”
The rest of the members join in, and they exit the small meeting space in a trail of applause. It’s one of many acts of solidarity and collaboration that the union initiated this spring, from walk-outs and rallies to bargaining sessions open to all union members. For those like Cream, it was never simply about working conditions, but the community of Holyoke and a commitment to conserving democracy at large.
“The reality is we owe it to these young people,” Cream told The Shoestring. “We’re making this kind of tacit agreement with their families that we’re going to not only keep them safe, but we’re gonna develop their minds, their spirits, their interpersonal skills … their ability to navigate for themselves.”
Creams said that if he doesn’t set a good example of that in his classroom, he’s letting his students down.
“If I put up with things that I believe are unfair and exploitative and unjust, then I’m setting an example for them right to see that, and to put up with the same things,” he said.
divina cordeiro is a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They are a summer 2025 intern at The Shoestring with support from the Nonprofit Newsroom Internship Program created by The Scripps Howard Fund and the Institute for Nonprofit News.