BY GINTAUTAS DUMCIUS
REPORTER STAFF
Boston Public School administrators met earlier this month with a group of Irish education officials who quizzed their American counterparts about such things as closing buildings and dealing with vacant seats in Irish classrooms -- about 80,000 of them.
The Irish team, comprising officials from the public and private education sectors of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, sat down with Superintendent Carol Johnson in between meetings with state Education Secretary Paul Reville and Brookline school officials. The group also visited the Codman Academy Public Charter School before heading to the Boston School Department’s Court Street headquarters to talk with Johnson.

The visit was part of a 10-day trip to Boston and Indianapolis, which was hosted by the Irish Institute at Boston College, with help from the U.S. State Department. Johnson said BPS officials and the visiting group agreed to communicate and share best practices, through technology and exchanges.
“The truth is, I think that a lot of the challenges we face are very parallel to what they’re going through, maybe on a larger scale in some cases,” Johnson said after the meeting, pointing to 80,000 empty seats in the Irish educational system.
Johnson and other school department officials sought the closure of some schools and the merger of others in an effort to close a budget gap and cut down on 5,600 vacant seats in the school system.
“Eighty thousand seats is a lot of seats,” Johnson said. “We think we have a lot of seats. I think we’ve probably moved faster to close schools, it sounds like. I think they’re still wrestling with it.”
Added Michael O’Neill, a school committee member who helped shepherd the group, “They’re starting to look hard and they simply cannot sustain the programs that they have been used to.”
O’Neill said group members also had questions about how charter schools interact with public and parochial systems.
They were also curious about contracts with principals. “I think that they may have been a little surprised that we have one, two or three-year contracts with school leaders,” Johnson said.
The group included officials like Paul Bell, principal of the Botanic Primary School in Belfast; Malachy Crudden, education advisor at the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools, which oversees 500 Catholic primary and post-primary schools in Northern Ireland; Anna Kelly, director of access and lifelong learning at the University College Dublin, the largest university in Ireland; Pamela Crum, principal at a primary school in County Armagh; and Michael Mulvey, director of academic affairs and registrar at the Dublin Institute of Technology.
“I think it was interesting that they’re facing some of the same challenges we are, some around leadership and teacher evaluation, others around facilities and maximizing the use of facilities that they have, and, I think, figuring out how to distribute resources in equitable ways,” said Johnson.