Dorchester High School renamed for segregation-era activist

Boston school officials have 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 merged 7-12 school currently split between the Hyde Park and Dorchester campuses – will be renamed 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.

“It really shows … how you can take two really different communities and use something like a name change both as a symbol and as a concrete way to bring these 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 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 board of trustees voted last summer on the name Ruth Batson Academy.

“At first we were trying to merge part of the BCLA and the McCormick School to form one name,” Johnston said. “And then finally, the students decided that we just needed a whole new identity.”

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

“We could not ask for a more important person and essential to the history of Boston and Boston Public Schools to name the school,” Robinson said in March. “His vision was better opportunities for all students, but particularly for our black students at the time, who were not getting what they needed.”

The city recently announced that BCLA-McCormack will be Boston’s first academic community school, in partnership with the neighboring University of Massachusetts, Boston.

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