Carol Wolfe was an administrator for the Community District Advisory Council (CDAC) of District 1. CDAC was a group made up of ten elected members and ten appointees that dealt with individual school district issues, supported the Racial Ethnic Parent Councils of individual schools, and monitored school environments.

Louise Bonar was a community activist who participated in many parent groups, both at her daughters’ schools and in the larger Boston context. She held graduate degrees from local institutions Simmons College and Boston University. In addition to serving on the League of Women Voters (LWV), Bonar was one of forty-two original members of the Citywide Coordinating Council (CCC) from 1975-1976 and was a member of CCC subcommittees from 1976-1977. She was the chair of the Parents Advisory Council (PAC) of the Model Demonstration Subsystem (MDS), the experimental arm of the Boston Public Schools that encompassed the Trotter, Copley Square, Horace Mann, and Lewis schools. Bonar also served on various home and school associations and Copley Square High School's Racial Ethnic Parent Council.

Dr. Laurence (Larry) Bonar, Louise Bonar's husband and a scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, was likewise a parent activist and involved in many of the same parent organizations. Dr. Bonar also served as chair of the MDS PAC after Louise. His notes appear frequently alongside hers, particularly in the MDS materials. For a time he was involved with Massachusetts Project Equality, an organization gathering funds from local religious groups to benefit equal employment opportunities.

Sources

Citywide Coordinating Council. Annual report, 1975-1976.

Jones, Arthur. "Phase 2 Council Named by Garrity." Boston Globe, May 31, 1975, 1.

Weidmann, Gerard. “Laymen Continue Vigil at St. John's Seminary." Boston Globe, April 8, 1966, 13.

Following the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional, in 1965 Massachusetts became the first state to legally prohibit racially imbalanced schools. On March 15, 1972, the class action suit Morgan v. Hennigan was filed against the Boston School Committee on behalf of fifteen parents and forty-three children, alleging that Boston schools were segregated. Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled against the city and for the parents on June 21, 1974, ordering the BSC to come up with a plan for implementing desegregation. When they failed to come up with an appropriate plan by the deadline in January 1975, the courts took a more active role. Garrity appointed advisors to formulate the desegregation plan, which he approved in April. On May 10, 1975 Garrity issued a comprehensive desegregation order that included provisions for citizen participation, monitoring, and reporting. The order created the Citywide Coordinating Council (CCC) as an independent, autonomous oversight body to monitor the implementation of desegregation in Boston Public Schools. Initially, the CCC was composed of forty-two court-appointed volunteers, two members of the Citywide Parents Advisory Council, and two students from Racial-Ethnic Student Councils. Though the Citywide Coordinating Council was officially disbanded on September 1, 1978, a permanent Department of Implementation, established in 1977, continued to coordinate monitoring in schools after the Council's demise.

The active monitoring arms of the CCC, and later of the Department of Implementation, were the Community District Advisory Councils, or CDACs. Composed of ten parents, two students, and eight court appointees, these groups reported to a subcommittee within the Citywide Coordinating Council, the District Council Liaison. Boston’s nine school districts were overseen by a CDAC body specific to each district. CDAC 1, the Council to which Bonar and Wolfe belonged, encompassed the schools of Allston, Brighton, Mission Hill, and the Fenway area. The CDACs evaluated schools in eight areas that most challenged effective learning in Boston’s school districts: repair and construction of facilities; transportation and safety; vocational education; bilingual education; special needs; desegregation of students, faculty and administrative staff; student government and discipline; and school/university educational pairings.

Prior to the court-mandated appearance of the CCC, parents participated in their children’s schools through parent-teacher and home and school associations. Louise and Laurence Bonar were members of multiple home and school associations prior to the 1970s. These parent councils were a forum for parents to discuss their concerns about many of the issues that were later monitored by CDACs. Councils held meetings, sent materials home, maintained communication with school administrators and other government bodies, and received reports related to the school system.

The Model Demonstration Sub-system (MDS) Parent Advisory Council (PAC) fell into this category of parent advisory council. The MDS oversaw all the schools in the sub-system, which included elementary, middle, and high schools. The schools were designated as magnet schools, developing new methods of teaching that might later be implemented across the school system. Trotter School, an MDS elementary school, was the first desegregated public school in Boston when it opened in 1969. MDS schools participated in programs associated with desegregation-related funding, such the Chapter 636 school/university pairing programs. The MDS schools and Parent Advisory Council were associated with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965's Title I and were sometimes referred to as Title I entities.

Bonar's long-term interest in experimental education led to her involvement with the Store-Front Learning Center in the 1970s. Established in July 1968 by affiliates of the New School for Children, including education theorist Jonathan Kozol, the Store-Front Learning Center was located on 90 West Brookline Street in Boston’s South End. The Center sought to create a free and interactive learning environment that was relevant to the children and teens of the surrounding inner city neighborhood, increase parent and community involvement in the classroom, and establish a community-based teacher preparatory and in-service workshop training program. The school primarily catered to students ranging from pre-school to sixth grade, and had a strong Spanish bilingual education program.

Sources

Cohen, Muriel. “Trotter to Open, Board Heeds Pleas.” Boston Herald Traveler, September 3, 1969.

Citywide Coordinating Council Records, 1966-1979 (bulk 1975-1978). Boston College. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/2936.

Louise Bonar and Carol Wolfe Collection of Boston Education Materials, 1952-1984 (bulk 1966-1978). Boston College.