Editor’s note: This is the second article in a two-part series on the state’s takeover of Holyoke Public Schools. Part one, about educators’ fight for full local control of their schools, can be found here.
Holyoke’s school district has finally regained some local control after a decade of state management — something several city officials have greeted with excitement. Not everyone, however, is expecting the coming school year to be a smooth ride.
“I expect things to be quite rough,” said Anthony Zirpoli, a member of the Holyoke Teachers Association and teacher at Holyoke High School.
Between a lack of movement in contract negotiations and current working conditions, Zirpoli is expecting high turnover among Holyoke Public Schools teachers, with younger, less-experienced educators replacing those who are burnt out.
“Last year was a much more difficult year [than it] normally has been — both in terms of admin presence in the classroom [and] student behavior management,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who are leaving because they’re just overwhelmed.”
As of July 1, Holyoke’s schools are no longer officially under state control after spending 10 years in what’s known as receivership. Receivership is a status that state education officials can impose on public schools when it finds that a district is underperforming according to metrics like low scores on standardized testing.
Under receivership, a state-appointed receiver holds all of the power normally held by a democratically elected school board and its appointed superintendent. It’s a practice that not only limits input from the community, but one that critics say amounts to union-busting, because the receiver has unilateral power to open a labor union’s contract rather than have to negotiate at the bargaining table.
Massachusetts education officials have only ever placed two other districts, Lawrence and Southbridge — both predominantly Hispanic and Latino, like Holyoke — in receivership. Holyoke is the first district to leave state control.
After years of top-down management of the district, educators are looking for the improvements the state promised when it first took over. Supporters of receivership cite data like improved graduation rates and the implementation of bicultural programs as accomplishments gained from the state takeover. In a press release, Gov. Maura Healey’s administration also pointed to a reduction in the district’s out-of-school suspension rate, an increase in high schoolers — particularly Hispanic students — completing advanced coursework, and programming like the district’s dual language program.
“I believe that the district has developed a coherent set of strategies for improving teaching and learning outcomes in every classroom through its inclusive strategic planning process that regularly solicits feedback from all stakeholders,” Russell Johnston, who at the time was the state’s acting education commissioner, told Holyoke’s mayor in a letter last fall.
In an interview with Business West, Superintendent and Receiver of Holyoke Public Schools Anthony Soto said that the district has shifted its mindset, and the city officials will not give up on students. According to Soto, the district is doing everything to re-engage students at risk of dropping out through initiatives like “opportunity academies” for “over-aged and under-credited” youth.
In the past, Soto said that students that were older and had insufficient credits would drop out but are now offered an individualized plan that facilitates credit obtainment and graduation.
However, educators and students who spoke to The Shoestring are unconvinced the student experience or classroom conditions have improved significantly. They say they feel that after a decade of being “guinea pigs” of the state, they’re left to address the district’s chronic problems themselves, from testing anxiety to assaults on school grounds.
And even by the state’s own metrics, receivership hasn’t lived up to the hype.
When Gov. Deval Patrick signed the 2010 law that gave the state the power to take over districts, test scores were a big focus as lawmakers sought to close the “achievement gap” between low-income students, students of color, and wealthier white students. But when Healey’s administration announced receivership was coming to an end in Holyoke, education officials made no mention of test stores, which are themselves a deeply controversial metric for measuring student success.
That’s because test scores have hardly improved. This situation is not unique to Holyoke, either: a 2021 Brown University study of receivership nationwide found “no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits.”
“Over the past 10 years we have allowed the state to conduct an experiment on the youth of Holyoke, and it has been a complete failure,” Andrea Enright, a teacher at the Lt. Elmer J. McMahon School and basketball coach at Holyoke High School, told School Committee members in early June. “We were forced to gamble with our educational system, and now we must put it together.”
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Even some of those who initially supported the state’s takeover of Holyoke Public Schools in 2015 are now skeptical of its successes.
“I’m afraid as it exists now, receivership is an inherent overpromise,” said Michael Moriarty, a former Holyoke School Committee member and city educator who has served on the state’s education board since 2015. “It puts out the idea that there’s going to be a quick — and a comprehensive and a meaningful — sustained change in the education children receive.”
Moriarty was an educator at the now closed John J. Lynch Middle School and the William R. Peck School, teaching Latin and social studies. An advocate for literacy and arts education, he was on the Holyoke School Committee for over 13 years until 2013. In 2015, not long after Holyoke entered receivership, then-Gov. Charlie Baker appointed Moriarty to the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, where he has served until this year. As of this month, Healey has appointed him as a commissioner on the national Education Commission of the States.
Moriarty said that none of the accomplishments that the district has attributed to receivership were related to academic outcomes, despite that being the state’s initial promise. Looking back, he said he’d be more skeptical about receivership if he knew what he knew now. At the time, Moriarty said he was in favor of receivership because he was concerned about the city’s low literacy rates, and considered himself open-minded to whatever was of benefit for the children in the district.
However, Moriarty said that sustained change is slow and is best achieved through the professional development of teaching staff. According to him, this wasn’t the initial implication when receivership was first being proposed.
“The district has to be systematically prepared to provide the right kind of instruction and the right kind of assessment and intervention in a timely way,” he said. “But that’s expensive, that requires a high degree of skill among educators. We neither typically provide the training or resources to make that happen on a wide-scale, systematic way.”
He said receivership was never intended to be a permanent solution, but that when the Legislature wrote it into law there was no pathway for districts to exit the status.
However, Holyoke has also achieved many great things during receivership, Moriarty said. Despite voters initially rejecting, by a wide margin, a tax increase in 2019 to build two new middle schools, the city did eventually approve funding for one new middle school with financial help from the state. And Moriarty said that the district hasn’t been struggling with finances like other nearby districts such as Northampton and Belchertown, which were fraught with school budgetary issues earlier this year.
But Holyoke has been deemed a “chronically underperforming” district for the better part of the decade, based on a state formula of graduation rates, out-of-school suspensions, and, controversially, scores on standardized testing. Receivership was implemented by the state in order to improve student outcomes, and while some data point to improvements, others demonstrate stagnation, and in some cases, deterioration.
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After the state took over, Holyoke only saw substantial improvement in test scores in 2016. Since then, Holyoke has still been underperforming on standardized tests compared to state averages, with some improvement every few years. But since the pandemic, the scores have only seemed to dip, according to state data.
“Fast forward 10 years and our growth as an institution, according to even state metrics, has completely flatlined,” said Bob Williams, a member of the Holyoke Teachers Association, or HTA, and teacher at Holyoke High School’s Dean Tech Campus.
The state’s standardized test — known as the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS — used to be a graduation requirement and method of measuring student accomplishment. Supporters of MCAS say it’s the best way to measure student achievement and hold districts accountable for educating their pupils. However, a growing body of research, and a swelling social movement, have come out against high-stakes testing, deriding exams like the MCAS as racist, stressful, and ineffective.
“MCAS is not a test that actually assesses aptitude. It’s a test that assesses your ability to take the test,” Williams said. “It’s simply a test that says: ‘How well can you do on the stuff?’ So as a metric for a school’s success or failure, it’s pretty bad. It’s awful.”
Williams said that there’s also significant cultural and language bias in testing that acts as the determining factor of a student’s success on standardized testing.
Some academic research points to racial and economic disparities that influence the test scores of a particular student. One study found that white students significantly outperformed their Black peers on the test, even controlling for income levels. And just last year, Massachusetts residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of a statewide ballot question to scrap the MCAS as a graduation requirement, though students are still mandated to take the exams.
However, the state still depends on testing as a measure of aptitude and ranking of district performance.
Educators like Moriarty say that this is not a fair assessment of MCAS, which is a recent development and goes through a vetting process. He said that the assessment isn’t perfect, but it’s not “deeply flawed” either. Moriarty said that MCAS is an effective form of measuring student accomplishment, and that having no form of standardized testing would lead to poor outcomes in literacy rates.
“[MCAS] provides to parents — to school and district leaders, to policymakers across the state — a very transparent comparative measure that both has a lot of longitudinal history and has a lot of depth inside the test itself,” he said. “If used to its full effect, [it] would help a lot of people make appropriate changes to provide the best possible instruction to kids. I don’t think that outcome has happened the way it could, but I think it’s possible.”
According to Moriarty, while students may experience stress and anxiety due to testing, he attributes teachers and adults as the source.
For many educators, it’s true that they experience anxiety related to MCAS, largely stemming from a fear of job loss and the district’s judgement on their performance, since scores on standardized testing are a metric of evaluating a teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom. According to Gus Morales, the former president of the HTA when the district entered receivership, many teachers quit in the period when receivership was being proposed because of that very same anxiety.
Nick Cream, the current president of the HTA and a history teacher at Dean Tech, told The Shoestring in an email that the focus on “teaching to the test” affects teachers, but impacts students the most.
According to Cream, over 10% of the school year is spent with 10th grade students taking MCAS tests, which doesn’t account for test preparation, reteaching lessons on the test material, and other days dedicated to MCAS that aren’t to take the test itself. That percentage is higher if it takes into account multi-lingual learners.
For teachers, Cream said this means little autonomy over curriculum. He’s heard from math teachers that every single lesson they teach is scripted, with no flexibility built in to support a student who isn’t understanding the material.
“I know several teachers have left Holyoke because of the scrutiny they are under. There are multiple people coming into their classrooms to observe them every week,” he said. “This leads to teachers feeling a lack of autonomy and trust from administrators and district-level workers as they are not treated as professionals who know their craft, but rather as workers who need to be constantly surveilled and criticized.”
Despite being a common trend in education, he said that receivership puts an even greater emphasis on the punitive conditions that come with standardized testing and has pushed teachers out of the district by creating unsustainable working conditions in their classrooms.
Zirpoli, the fellow teacher and union member, has been digging deep into state education data and alleges that the data that the district and state point to in order to show improvement under receivership is misleading. He said that the district’s increased graduation rate, for example, is relative to the overall increase due to changes in graduation requirements occurring across Massachusetts.
“We have consistently dropped. Our MCAS data has been in a death spiral since receivership started,” he said.
When it comes to analyzing Holyoke student’s test scores, Zirpoli said a decision-making model that he made, controlled for aspects of student’s backgrounds like family income and other factors, showed that Holyoke students were performing as if they were making random choices on tests.
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Low test scores, some educators say, may be exacerbated by Holyoke’s high educator turnover.
On average, 30% of teachers leave Holyoke every year, according to state data. Other nearby districts, like Springfield and Northampton lose about 19% and 13%, respectively. This past year, the teacher retention rates in Holyoke are worse than the state’s average.
Data on teacher retention rate doesn’t include paraeducators, either, making it unclear how many of them enter and leave a district every year.
Paraeducators and paraprofessionals support teachers in the classroom. Maria Perez, a pre-kindergarten teacher at Dr. Marcella R. Kelly Elementary School, is a longtime former paraeducator who began working in the district in 2001. She was a paraprofessional at several different locations in the district prior to receivership. And while Perez was working as a paraeducator, she said that outside of lesson planning, she did everything a teacher did.
She said that prior to receivership, she knew 90% of the teachers. Now, she barely knows anyone.
Williams believes that there is much more turnover for paraprofessionals than there is for teachers. Some teachers during June’s School Committee meeting said that there have been inconsistent classroom support, particularly for special education .
Several union members said that teachers often collect a few years of experience teaching in the district and then leave, resulting in what they call a “revolving door.” The fresh set of teachers at the beginning of each school year and unequal distribution of experience has a negative impact on the quality of students’ education, they said.
“So many of the experienced teachers are gonna be gone that it’s gonna be nothing but a bunch of newbies trying to run the show,” Zirpoli said. “I think we’re gonna hit a point where we’re not gonna be able to open buildings here at the high school. There were days where, I honestly am not 100% sure if we were legally allowed to be opened. We’ve been running with a skeleton crew. We have days where we have 15,16, 17 teachers out.”
And it’s not getting better. Bigger class sizes mean less time spent with each individual student and more students falling through the cracks, resulting in even worse data, educators told The Shoestring. This data is then used to “crack down” on teachers so they leave, according to Zirpoli.
The Shoestring made multiple requests for comment to district Superintendent Anthony Soto, who asked for the questions to be sent as soon as possible, but did not respond for comment. Likewise, Dr. Rivera-Colon did not respond.
But educators and students alike are fighting against more than test scores and teacher turnovers. They’re fighting for safer schools and classroom conditions, too.
Nicole Koffman, an adjustment counselor at Lawrence Elementary, said during a recent School Committee meeting that she had been assaulted multiple times by one of her students. Just in January, Koffman said she received three stitches, two black eyes, a swollen nose, and numbness in the face that she was still struggling with in June. She was out for nearly four weeks, and said she’ll have a scar from the assault for the rest of her life. And after she returned to the classroom, Koffman said that nothing changed and she continued to get hurt by the student.
“Just today, I was punched in the stomach and tomorrow I’ll go back and do it all over again,” Koffman said.
During a School Committee meeting in early June, educators expressed the deep care they have for their students and coworkers. However, many of them say that although they want to give their best to the classroom, current contract conditions are not sufficiently protecting and supporting teachers or students.
“It’s a cry for help from him. It’s a cry for help for all of our students. Our children and our educators need help,” Koffman said. “I’m not okay with this being the status quo. We have a great opportunity now to make necessary changes.”
Administrators in Holyoke have denied assault leaves to some teachers and staff in the public schools, according to the HTA. Cream, the president of the union, said that two union members are currently in arbitration — a process a union member can undergo through which they challenge an action that their employer has made that they feel breaks their contract — with the administration because of denied assault leave. Due to concern for privacy and rules around arbitration, Cream did not identify the teachers involved in this process.
Williams has also experienced a similar case at his high school.
“Our schools aren’t safe. I’ll tell you that right now,” he said
Williams said that he’s had experienced teachers, even those he considers veterans of teaching in urban environments, be shaken by their time in schools. In one case, he recounted a time that he had a teacher come into his room “sobbing because they almost got trampled when there was a fight in the hallway.”
“She’s been a special educator forever. This woman, she’s got the eyes of somebody that stormed the beaches in Normandy,” he said. “She’s seen it all. She’s seen it all, and she was in my room crying, ‘I can’t keep doing this. It’s killing me.’”
Williams and other educators stressed that these issues are not unique to Holyoke, but indicative of a larger issue impacting schools both statewide and nationally. Zirpoli said that the administration has characterized Holyoke negatively and that teachers in other districts assume that the city is a “hard, rough place to work,” which discourages teachers from coming to teach in Holyoke.
Educators are not the only ones who have felt the district is not keeping them safe. Over the course of several years, current and former students have sued the district twice over what they have alleged is inaction and retaliation in addressing sexual assault.
One student at Holyoke High School filed a lawsuit early last year, alleging that the district and city had failed to “investigate, take seriously, implement remedial measures, and/or respond to the sexual assault” that the student had experienced. The suit also alleges that the district had retaliated against her use of free speech after the publication of a story about her harassment in the high school’s newspaper and her involvement in protest against the school’s response in another alleged assault case.
In January, the judge on the case allowed the suit to move forward on the allegations that the district retaliated against the student for expressing her free speech rights, but dismissed the claim that the district was in violation of Title IX, or sex-based harassment.
Another lawsuit, originally filed in October 2022, originally included four anonymous female students who had allegedly been assaulted or harassed by students and staff at various schools in Holyoke. They collectively sought $4 million in damages.
According to court documents, one student in the lawsuit said that she had been violently assaulted by a male peer, impacting her mental health to such a degree that she attempted suicide after struggling with depression and anxiety in the aftermath of the assault. In the same case, another student was sexually harassed by a male paraprofessional who was 40 years older than her — someone who had multiple reports made against him for similar behavior. The young girl left Holyoke High School.
Both cases are ongoing. But for educators like Koffman, the way the school administration responds will define whether they stay in the district or not.
“I love Holyoke. I want to stay in Holyoke. But I can’t do another year like this,” Koffman said. “Please help us improve things.”
Mikayala Esquilin has lived in Holyoke all of her life. She grew up going through the Holyoke Public Schools and now she’s just a few months from graduating from Mount Holyoke College. As a student whose time in the Holyoke Public Schools happened largely under receivership, she said standardized testing played a big role in her education.
“MCAS was a big deal,” she said. “It kind of felt like life or death.”
Esquilin said that she has deep ties within her community, from her work at various nonprofits like OneHolyoke CDC and the Latino Scholarship Fund to her attendance at the local church, the Restoration Center.
One of the reasons she advocates for higher education in her community is because of the negative impact she said the school system had on her peers and her desire to fight back against stereotypes and biases against Holyoke. For her, that impact can be traced back to middle school.
Esquilin said that her middle school experience, right at the beginning of receivership, was fraught with constant and confusing curriculum changes, making it difficult to grasp what she was supposed to know and what she was supposed to learn.
“A lot of times, people felt like guinea pigs,” Esquilin said.
To Esquilin, the pressure to perform well under the gaze of the state was apparent. Weeks before a state official would come into the classroom, Esquilin said that teachers would notify her and her peers, telling them to be on their best behavior or they couldn’t go out to recess. She felt that her teachers were trying to challenge her class, but that it came off as disciplinary and shameful rather than uplifting and motivating. And Esquilin said she observed a lot of her peers internalize that narrative and take it with them into high school and beyond.
“What I did know growing up was that teachers would remind us that our school system was bad and that it was our fault. It was the student’s fault,” she said. “It was due to our behavior, our test scores, due to just our overall performance.”
In reflection on her school experience and the academic outcomes of her peers during receivership, Esquilin doesn’t feel like she personally saw benefits, even though she understands why the district was taken over by the state.
She said that she felt that students needed more personalized education plans, or at least different ones for each school, and that receivership could’ve been more beneficial if the Holyoke community had been more informed about the state’s takeover. Instead, all she feels receivership created is a narrative that Holyoke’s school system was “bad” and “failing.”
That narrative may have also had an impact on students leaving the district through school choice, the system that allows families to “choice” into another district and bring education funding with them. State data show that in fiscal year 2016, 337 students left the district through school choice and 53 students “choiced into” the district. The number of students leaving has steadily climbed up to 445 students in fiscal year 2025, when 110 students choiced into Holyoke. The $3.5 million Holyoke pays in net “spending tuition” is the fourth highest in the entire state, eclipsed only by Springfield, Pittsfield, and Worcester.
Suddenly, Esquilin said, the narrative shifted when she entered high school: she felt like MCAS wasn’t as big of a deal. But she and her peers were tasked with unlearning how to detach their identities from test performances and grades at a time where they’re trying to figure themselves out, academically and socially, especially in a school system they felt was set up against them.
Even years after graduating, Esquilin said that she and her friends felt that the Holyoke school system “sucked” while she was growing up — something she’s sad to say.
“I know many of my friends that graduated high school, but then didn’t even go to college because they carry with them the stigma that they will never do good in school,” Esquilin said. “They feel like they’re just a percentage, a test score, like they just can’t perform the way that they feel like the system is telling them to.”
According to Esquilin, it wasn’t until high school that she started asking questions and understood what receivership was. But a lot of her peers didn’t, she said, or didn’t know where to find information.
“How are we able to support our school system if students don’t know what’s going on?” she asked.
If Esquilin could change anything about her experience going through Holyoke Public Schools, it’d be the power and support that teachers are given. According to her, teachers can make or break a student’s career — they’re the ones that know students best, the face of the Holyoke community. If teachers were better supported and given more power, Esquilin said they’d have more ability to uplift their students and keep dedicated teachers in the district.
It’s a sentiment shared by many HTA members, who are still fighting for a seat at the bargaining table. That’s because as the district exits receivership, the state’s plan still keeps some powers over the teachers union’s contract in the superintendent’s hands.
The district is facing high teacher turnover — particularly of retiring teachers — and a lack of experienced educators with connections to the students, Williams said.
Holyoke schools have a big problem, he said, and he doesn’t feel the administration is aware of “the disaster that is coming.” Competent staffing is an acute issue that has to be addressed now, rather than the year before a significant portion of teachers in Holyoke retire, Williams explained. It’s a challenge that is compounded by the lengthy amount of time it takes for teachers to get experience and build relationships within the school building to replace the expertise being lost.
“We don’t have any more time,” Williams said.
Correction: This story has been updated to offer correct information about Anthony Zirpoli’s place of employment, which is Holyoke High School.
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.
divina is an independent reporter covering labor and social movements, pursuing a degree in journalism and social thought & political economy at UMass Amherst. They have worked for three years in legislation, policy, and research on education, child welfare, and race equity. Reach them at divina.cordeiro@proton.me or on Instagram and Twitter @divi_cordeiro
