‘We’re taking the wrong kids’: High-needs students lose out in vocational school admissions

State data shows Perkins, a Gardner resident, is one of many who are finding the vocational school door shut.

This spring, more than 8,500 middle-schoolers out of roughly 20,300 applicants were denied admission to the state’s 28 regional trade high schools, putting the schools’ collective acceptance rate — about 60 percent — on par with that of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the state’s flagship public university.

All sides agree: Capacity is an issue. With a total of about 30,000 seats, there just isn’t space for the ballooning number of students interested in the schools, which expose young people to vocational and technical training alongside traditional academics.

But, for years, civil rights advocates also have argued there’s a more insidious factor at play — cherry picking high-performing students, while discriminating against others — when the schools deny admission to students like Perkins, a special education student who, as a middle-schooler, had a mediocre academic record. A new Globe analysis of statewide admissions data appears to confirm their claims.

At the crux of the matter is a decades-old state regulation allowing the trade schools to set their own admissions policies, including the use of selective criteria — grades, attendance, discipline records, guidance counselor recommendations, and personal interviews — to winnow the field of candidates. Under a rank-ordered point system, students with poor marks drop to the bottom of schools’ admissions lists. That system, the Globe analysis found, disproportionately denies marginalized students access to vocational education — the very students who, by many accounts, stand to benefit the most.

The experience of students from low-income homes is telling. In 2023 and 2024, they were more likely to apply to a trade school than their more advantaged peers, but they were about 30 percent less likely to be accepted, according to the state data analyzed by the Globe. Similar disparities hold for special education students and students still learning English.

“It’s just not something anybody in the Commonwealth should or can defend,” state Senator John Cronin, an outspoken advocate for admissions reform, said of the data.

Presented with the Globe’s findings, Governor Maura Healey said in a statement that the state’s trade schools “are a ticket to economic mobility for students and help us meet the workforce needs of our employers.”

“Our administration has spent the past few months engaging with stakeholders and reviewing admissions data, and we intend to make changes in the coming months that will better ensure all Massachusetts students have equal access to career and technical education,” she said.

Perkins’s local trade school, Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical High School, is one of the worst offenders, data show.

Located in Fitchburg, a blue-collar city roughly 50 miles northwest of Boston, “Monty Tech,” as it’s known locally, offers area students access to state-of-the-art trade facilities in its sprawling 360,000-square-foot building, including a full autobody shop and a 115-seat restaurant, staffed by student trainees and open to the public during the school year. The school’s website boasts splashy videos of its nearly two dozen trade programs, showcasing pricey technology and expert instructors.

But access to that wellspring of opportunity is decidedly uneven. Whereas the school admitted 64 percent of applicants from relatively advantaged households for this fall’s freshman class, it accepted just 34 percent of those who came from low-income homes.

“Right now, the way it’s going — because they’re only taking top kids for attendance and grades — they have basically a private school,” said Gardner Public Schools Superintendent Mark Pellegrino, whose district is among the 18 communities that feed into Monty Tech.

The findings accompany a marked shift in regional trade school graduates’ postsecondary paths over the past two decades. The number opting to go on to college increased from about 37 percent to 47 percent from 2003 to 2019. What types of schools they’re attending is shifting, too. At Monty Tech, two in three of its college-bound graduates in the class of 2022 chose to attend four-year universities, not the local community college, as had been the typical path in the past.

Matthew Ehrenworth, superintendent of the Athol-Royalston Regional School District, another Monty Tech feeder community, didn’t mince words.

“The whole [vocational education] program is a failure,” Ehrenworth said. “We’re taking the wrong kids.”

The Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators sees things differently.

In fact, the association prides itself on Massachusetts’ selective vocational and technical schools’ being hailed as a national model, with one school, Worcester Technical High, earning visits from both former secretary of state Colin Powell and President Barack Obama in 2014.

“Kids are flocking to our schools,” said Steven Sharek, the association’s executive director. “Parents are demanding what we offer.”

What they’re offering is impressive. On the whole, the schools post higher graduation rates, lower dropout rates, and similar MCAS scores compared to their regular high school peers.

It wasn’t always so, recalled Mary Barclay, who served on the Monty Tech School Committee, representing the hamlet of Royalston, from 1999 to 2022.

When she first joined the committee, community members viewed the school as a place for “bad” students she said, using air quotes. But things started to change around the turn of the millennium, as trade schools across the state were forced to meet demanding new academic standards, including a requirement that their graduates pass the 10th grade MCAS exams.

A new focus on academic rigor drove achievement higher, making the schools more desirable to families who might not have previously considered a vocational education, said Wilfrid Savoie, superintendent of Blue Hills Regional Technical School in Canton from 1985 to 2001.

As the schools gained in popularity, selective criteria — which the state’s trade schools have used, in some form, since their inception in 1906 — became more consequential to enrollment. Over time, the schools’ share of high-needs students shrank.

Trade school administrators aren’t being discriminatory; they aren’t told whether a child belongs to a marginalized group, association members noted.

Rather they are trying as best they can to meet the charge issued to them in the state’s 1993 education reform law, said Savoie, author of a new book on the history of Massachusetts vocational and technical schools. Trade school graduates are going on to college for myriad reasons, advocates said, especially as careers require more technical training.

“It’s ironic that, today, some of the criticisms that we get are that our kids go on to further education, whereas in the ‘90s, we were pressured and pushed in that direction,” he said. “So it’s sort of like, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

A trade school education, which allows students to earn industry-recognized credentials before they graduate, can make a real difference to students who come from working-class homes. By 2022, for example, the class of 2014 from Monty Tech was, on average, annually out-earning regular high school peers from Gardner by $8,500, from Fitchburg by $13,650, and from Athol-Royalston by $18,441, state data show.

Now 18, Perkins, who recently graduated from an alternative high school, finds it hard not to feel bitter each time he hears of another Monty Tech graduate headed to college in the fall.

“That could have been my spot, and I would have been benefiting from that,” said Perkins, whose goal is to become a welder, a career that boasts entry-level pay comparable to that of a college graduate. “I would be out there in the field right away.”

Perkins is now spending his summer toiling under a blazing sun, pulling weeds and spreading mulch for a local landscaping company and making barely more than minimum wage. After paying his bills, he plans to set aside savings from each of his paychecks to fund Monty Tech night classes — an expense he could have avoided had he been admitted there to begin with.

“Now that I’ve got 1,500 bucks to give you, I’m good enough?” said Perkins, early one summer morning at his family’s Gardner home, dirt caked under his fingernails.

His mother, Jessica Perkins, listened nearby, feeling helpless. A hairdresser, she moved her family from Leominster to Gardner when Perkins started middle school specifically so he would be in Monty Tech’s catchment zone. As a student, Perkins, who has ADHD, had a special education plan for social and emotional needs and was suspended once after a shoving match with other boys.

“He was looked at as a bad student,” Jessica Perkins said.

Ehrenworth and Pellegrino are among a coalition of 20 district leaders, in addition to other activists, now calling upon Healey to direct the state board of education to strip local districts of their power to control admissions and instead institute a blind lottery requirement.

Under a blind lottery, applicants would be chosen at random until a school’s seats are filled.

That proposal has the support of the Center for Law and Education, a nonprofit based in Boston and Washington, D.C., that advocates for children from low-income communities and last year co-filed a federal civil rights complaint against Massachusetts for its admissions policies.

“It’s not that the problem is kids wanting to go to college,” said center director Paul Weckstein. “It’s that the schools end up wanting to fix the game,” stacking their rolls with top achievers, he said.

The vocational association vehemently denies that claim, pointing to data showing the schools’ populations are largely representative of their sending communities — the standard by which the state education department has judged admissions policies for discriminatory impact.

But that appears to be because the higher-needs groups — English learners, students with disabilities, and low-income students — all apply to attend the schools at higher rates than their classmates, and then are admitted at lower rates. The school populations are representative of their sending communities, but not of the applicant pool. That means a low-income student has less of a chance of getting in than a higher-income classmate, creating the disparity.

Things were supposed to be different by now.

In 2021, the state, facing mounting pressure to do something about these enrollment disparities, passed what were supposed to be sweeping trade school admissions changes. Among the changes was an amended regulation requiring the schools, beginning in 2022, to certify their policies comply with federal civil rights law.

But the state left the door open for the schools to continue using criteria-based point systems, rather than blind lotteries, and nearly all have, including Monty Tech. (One regional trade school, Assabet Valley Regional Vocational Technical High, instituted a conditional lottery following the 2021 regulation change. The admissions gap between marginalized students and their peers at the school is very small, data show.)

Monty Tech Superintendent Thomas Browne said a change to how the state classifies low-income students made his school’s admissions data appear more inequitable than it actually is. He added, though, that the school has had made several equity-minded changes to its admissions policies since Perkins applied there in 2020. Applicants now get full scholastic achievement points for grade point averages between 80 and 100, compared to the previous bar of 90 and above, and full points for attendance are now awarded for up to 10 unexcused absences instead of five.

Monty Tech also increased the weight of the personal interview, during which students can express their interest in a trade — an opportunity that would not exist under a blind lottery, in which luck would determine a student’s fate.

Still, a focus on application policies misses the larger point, said Sharek, with the vocational administrators association.

“No matter what process we use — we could throw darts against a dartboard, cut cards, we could arm wrestle, we could have a blind lottery, a modified lottery, or the current system — none of those will actually satisfy the underlying problem, which is lack of seats,” he said.

Back in Gardner, Perkins ends most his workdays in his family’s shady driveway, plunked in the driver’s seat of his 2004 Ford F-350, sweat-soaked and bone-tired. With the windows down and rock music blaring, his mind barrels through a series of “what ifs.”

What if he’d gotten into Monty Tech? What if he’d already earned his welding certification? What if his dream — to head south and work on an oil pipeline — was treated with the same respect as those of his college-bound peers?

What if?

“I think about it all the time,” he said.

Correspondent Natalie La Roche Pietri contributed to this report.

The Great Divide team explores educational inequality in Boston and statewide. Sign up to receive our newsletter, and send ideas and tips to [email protected].

Mandy McLaren can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @mandy_mclaren. Christopher Huffaker can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @huffakingit.