Latest news with #Threadgill
Boston Globe
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Mass. kids struggling in school need support. Too often, they're being sent to court.
In fiscal year 2024, the state recorded 4,290 Child Requiring Assistance filings, a 6 percent increase from 2022. Petitions from parents, usually filed due to a child running away or being difficult to manage, accounted for close to 60 percent of those petitions in 2024, the report found. Advertisement In some cases, children as young as 6 years old were brought to court to address behavioral or discipline problems, including truancy , the Office of the Child Advocate reported. Petitions associated with children ages 6 to 12 increased by 17 percent from 2022 to 2024. Among the state's counties, Suffolk reported the highest rate of children subjected to the petitions, a possible sign of insufficient resources in the Boston school district, Threadgill said. Advertisement The district did not respond to a request for comment. Families at times are advised to turn to Child Requiring Assistance filings by educators, therapists, or medical providers who don't realize that they are often unnecessary and aren't aware of the power the petitions can give the court. In some cases, a petition can result in the child's removal from the home. Latino children were 3.5 times more likely than white students to have a CRA petition filed against them. Black children were referred to the court system at similar rates to Latino children, the report found. Glenn Koocher, head of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, expressed concern that Child Requiring Assistance filings, also called CRAs, were more likely to be filed for students in poverty and noted that aggressive immigration enforcement this year was likely to exacerbate existing racial disparities by encouraging children to miss school. 'If you were afraid that your parents are going to get deported, or that your uncles or aunts or cousins are going to get deported...' he said. 'I would think that would make them anxious about going to school.' A 2022 report from the Juvenile Justice Policy and Data Board, a statewide policy evaluation organization that includes representatives from organizations involved in the juvenile justice system, recommended addressing the needs of children subject to CRAs without the court's involvement. Since then, though, the opposite has happened, with petitions initiated by schools growing the most. Petitions due to chronic truancy and habitual misbehavior account for roughly 43 percent of all those filed in 2024, the report stated, an increase of almost 14 percent over two years. Advertisement Families statewide often struggle to obtain from schools the Related : 'The special education system is very complex, the procedures, the process, the regulations that need to be followed,' said Ellen Chambers, founder of SPEDWatch, a Massachusetts activist group for children. 'It is very easy for a school district to pull the wool over a family's eyes.' Related : While the latest report didn't include data on the connection between CRAs and special education needs, the The Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents did not respond to a request for comment. School absences or discipline problems, the kinds of behaviors that are often causes for school-filed CRAs, are also signs a child isn't getting needed educational supports, said Chambers, who also works with families as an adviser appointed by the court through the CRA process. The vast majority of children she connects with through CRAs are disengaged at school due to unidentified disabilities or a lack of special education supports. Advertisement 'They become very, very anxious because they can't keep up with what's going on,' she said. Karrie Conley is the parent of a teenage girl, who she asked not be named, who was the subject of a CRA petition last year in the Acton-Boxborough School District as she dealt with extreme anxiety. 'She was locking herself in the bathroom for four hours at a time,' Conley said. The school's attempts to accommodate the teenager's difficulties understanding math as well as her physical and mental health challenges were inadequate, the mother said. The district withdrew the petition shortly after it was filed, but Conley said the experience only deepened her daughter's antipathy for attending school. Now, she's attending a private school that allows her to learn at home, but she still struggles to manage a full course load, she said. 'I will be lucky if I can get this child to community college when she graduates,' she said. Peter Light, superintendent of the Acton-Boxborough School District, said he couldn't speak about a specific case involving a student but said the district turns to CRA petitions rarely, once or twice a school year. 'We typically work with parents very closely in these cases,' he said. In its report, the Office of the Child Advocate pointed to Advertisement 'A court process is just not going to be the best way to deal with complicated behavioral health situations, educational situations, or family dynamics,' Threadgill said. Jason Laughlin can be reached at
Boston Globe
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
An all-star trio unites for a rare performance at the ICA
At the ICA, they'll be performing fresh interpretations of compositions by each of them, an event that admirers of boundary-pushing jazz and creative music will not want to miss. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up They all stay busy with their own projects. Threadgill's new ensemble Ship, comprising two pianists and six guitarists, will premier his composition 'Listen Ship' with them May 2 at the Long Play Festival in Brooklyn, and record it soon afterward. His memoir ' Iyer has continued touring with his trio, whose 2024 album 'Compassion' ranked high on assorted polls of jazz critics; his second duo album with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, 'Defiant Life,' will be released March 21 on ECM. And Prieto's Sí o Sí Quartet album '3 Sides of the Coin' was released in September, and a Celebrity Series of Boston performance followed in January. With all that busyness, chances to perform together as a trio have been rare, despite their having known one another for 25 years or so. Threadgill, who turned 81 on Feb. 15, was sought out by Iyer and Prieto, now both in their early fifties, upon their separate arrivals in New York City as young men. In separate phone calls, the three described how they evolved into a sometime trio. Advertisement Iyer had moved to New York from the Bay Area after finishing an interdisciplinary PhD at UC-Berkeley. But he had kept busy playing adventurous, genre-expanding music while a student. Among the professors on Iyer's dissertation committee was George Lewis, a member of Chicago's legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), of which Threadgill was also an early member. Iyer also connected with Steve Coleman when Coleman traveled to the west coast for shows and workshops. Coleman – saxophonist, composer, bandleader, music theorist, and eventual MacArthur genius himself (receiving his grant in 2014, shorly after the younger Prieto and Iyer had been chosen for theirs) – hired Iyer for his band and brought him on Iyer's first tour of Europe. Vijay Iyer. Ebru Yildiz Iyer decided to join Coleman, Lewis, and other heroes in New York, sharing a moving van with the guitarist Liberty Ellman, who would soon be recruited for Threadgill's band Zooid, the then-new experimental band with which Threadgill would years later record his Pulitzer-winning album (with Ellman doubling as the album's producer). That inevitably led to Iyer meeting Threadgill. 'I remember him coming to hear [an early iteration of Iyer's experimental trio Fieldwork] at the Knitting Factory in like '99,' recalls Iyer. Joining Threadgill at a front table were two other legends: AACM guiding light Muhal Richard Abrams and pianist-composer Andrew Hill. Dafnis Prieto. Osmani Tellez Threadgill remembers Coleman first telling him about Prieto, whom Coleman had met on a research trip to Cuba. 'He told me there's a drummer down in Cuba that knows your music, and he's determined to meet you.' Advertisement Prieto says he knew Threadgill's music thanks to bassist Roberto Occhipinti, who played Threadgill's 'Makin' a Move' album at his home in Toronto when he and Prieto were in a band together. Prieto loved the music so much that Occhipinti had him take the CD home with him to Cuba. 'When I heard that the first time, it was almost like a music that I could hear in my dreams,' Prieto elaborates. 'And then when I wake up, it disappeared.' Prieto sought out more Threadgill music, and, after Prieto moved to New York, Threadgill showed up at a performance. 'He came out, introduced himself, and I couldn't believe that I was in front of him,' recalls Prieto. Prieto soon appeared on a pair of Threadgill albums, both released in 2001: the final project from Threadgill's Make a Move band, and the debut of Zooid. 'I got him to play with me right away,' says Threadgill, 'because he said he knew everything I'd been doing.' Flash ahead to 2012. Iyer was asked to play a benefit for the Jazz Gallery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The Gallery's artistic director, Rio Sakairi, suggested he add Threadgill to his then-trio for the performance. But Iyer's bassist and drummer had conflicts, and Prieto was the replacement on drums. (Linda May Han Oh filled in on bass.) They played one of Threadgill's pieces. Two years later, Threadgill, Iyer, and Prieto did another benefit, this time as a trio. Each of them brought a couple of their compositions. 'We got through them really fast,' says Iyer, 'and then Dafnis was like, 'Let's do an encore!'' Advertisement The result was magical, Iyer recalls. 'I just remember experiencing what Threadgill did in that moment, the choices he made. And he didn't know what chord I was playing now and what I was going to play next, but it all actually fit somehow. I asked him, 'How is it that everything you play works?' He just laughed. But it was true, because he's putting this composerly sensibility into every choice he makes. So he's not ever just playing over the music. He's actually connecting the dots with it, and he's creating, stretching.' It's that composerly quality each of them brings to the trio, says Iyer, that makes the group special and keeps them interested in playing together. Threadgill agrees. 'We've got three composers here,' he explains. 'Every time the music changes, it holds up a different world, because it's coming from a different place. Because of each one of us, [and] our different approaches to composition.' The trio has done other Jazz Galley benefits since that first night (they'll be celebrating the Gallery's 30th anniversary with shows May 30 and 31). They also reunited in Knoxville for the 2023 Big Ears Festival, one of five Threadgill ensembles featured there that year. And Saturday they'll be doing their thing in Boston, each contributing compositions that they'll reshape together onstage. 'It's not like it's [Threadgill's] band and he's cueing people and stuff,' observes Iyer. 'We're all just in it together. It has this kind of unity, this rough and tumble energy, because we make these spontaneous decisions together. 'It's a particular privilege to get to work with Henry in a context like that, because it's so rare nowadays for him to do that — to really play someone else's music, period.' Advertisement HENRY THREADGILL, VIJAY IYER, AND DAFNIS PRIETO TRIO March 8, 8 p.m., at ICA, 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston. $32 ICA members and students, $40 non-members,
