Dorchester high school renamed to honor segregation-era activist

Boston school officials approved a new name for a Dorchester high school after it merged with a Hyde Park middle school.

The Boston Community Leadership Academy-McCormack School — a 7-12 merged school currently split between a Hyde Park and Dorchester campus — will be renamed to Ruth Batson Academy. The new name will honor Batson, a Boston Public Schools alumnus, education advocate, and one of the creators of the Metco initiative. 

“This really shows … how you can take two really different communities and use something like a renaming as both a symbol and a concrete way of bringing those communities together,” Superintendent Mary Skipper said.

Batson is remembered for being the first Black candidate for the Boston School Committee in 1951, chairwoman of the NAACP’s education committee, and the first Black woman on the Democratic National Committee.

The Boston School Committee approved the name change last Wednesday after school leaders presented the plan in March. BCLA-McCormack Principal Ondrea Johnston said the school’s governing board voted last summer on the name Ruth Batson Academy.

“At first, we were trying to pick a piece of both BCLA and the McCormick school to merge together into a name,” Johnston said. “And then finally, students decided we just needed a completely new identity.”

Boston School Committee Chair Jeri Robinson personally knew Batson, who died in 2003. As chairwoman of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination in the 1960s, Batson helped launch Metco, a voluntary school desegregation program still used today. 

“We couldn’t ask for a more important person that is critical to the history of Boston and Boston public schools to be naming the school after,” Robinson said in March. “Her vision was about better opportunities for all students, but particularly our black students at that time, who were not getting what they needed.”

The city recently announced that BCLA-McCormack will be Boston’s first university-assisted community school, partnering with nearby University of Massachusetts, Boston.  

Next steps for the name change will include Batson’s grandson and family, school leaders said. Then, internal committees will help transition BCLA-McCormack to Ruth Batson Academy.