Like San Diego and Los Angeles County did in 2024, city leaders in Boston are hoping to attract an HBCU satellite campus to a location that has historically lacked an HBCU presence, in the hope that it will have a positive influence on the city’s Black students.
According to The Boston Herald, Boston City Council Vice President Brian Worrell recently called for a hearing to focus on creating an HBCU campus in Boston, in hopes that it can help the city educate more Black students as it did in the 19th century.
“An HBCU presence would provide role models for current Black students by showing them a tangible pathway to success,” Worrell said at a recent council meeting. “Boston led the way in educating Black students in the first half of the 19th century, with the opening of the Abiel Smith School, and we need to discover that trailblazing spirit once again.”
According to Worrell’s hearing order, his efforts with Boston’s Building Bridges HBCU program are also a response to the attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion by the Trump administration.
“There are more than 100 historically Black colleges and universities in the country, with the vast majority of them located in southern states as a response to Jim Crow laws,” the Council order says. “The need for more culturally sensitive schools, such as HBCUs, has grown in the past decade based upon current rulings and the actions of the current federal administration.”
Worrell’s office told the Herald that the program will share more updates this fall as it works toward attracting an HBCU partner. In addition, Boston Public Schools Chief of Student Support Cory McCarthy noted that “the appetite for an HBCU has grown immensely within the last five years.”
He continued, “An opportunity to bring an HBCU to Boston would further highlight the commitment and dedication of our city to create an educational ecosystem that values, elevates and develops opportunities for Black students to be successful.”
Worrell noted that despite integration, and the status of HBCUs composing 3% of higher education institutions nationwide, they still produce 40% of the country’s Black engineers and Black congresspeople, 50% of Black lawyers and doctors, and 70% of Black dentists.
In California, although the Austin, Texas-based Huston-Tillotson University agreed to operate a satellite campus in 2024, it is not expected to open until August 2025, as the university must meet the accreditation requirements of the State of California.
According to the university’s website, “Our efforts to provide an Off-Site presence in California include beginning to offer coursework towards degrees offered by the University starting August 2025. We will begin by providing curriculum and co-curriculum experiences to students who enroll at the Off-site campus as part of their Liberal Studies Requirements. As we work through the requirements of our accrediting agencies and California state regulations, we plan to have approval for a branch campus in California by August 2025.”
RELATED CONTENT: HBCU Huston-Tillotson Tackles Black Male Teacher Shortage
from Black Enterprise https://ift.tt/XM4LNiS
via FWG
No comments:
Post a Comment