According to Niche.com, a ranking and reviews site, the Acton-Boxborough school district is the 15th best school district in Massachusetts. The towns of Acton and Boxborough are beautifully historical towns located about 25 miles northwest of Boston. Over the years, many families have been drawn to these towns full of Revolutionary history, most notably Chinese families. According to the United States Census Bureau data, between the years 2000 and 2010, the number of Chinese residents in Acton increased by 151%. The local schools play their part in this attraction as well, as the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School (AB) reports SAT scores among the highest in the state each year.
With an enrollment of 1,837 students in grades nine through twelve, AB appears to be a popular high school for many local families. After the influx of Chinese families, the current racial makeup of AB is 56.8% White, 32.5% Asian, and significantly smaller percentages of a few other races. AB is understandably a popular high school, as it has recently reported average test scores higher than the state’s average in English Language Arts (ELA), Mathematics, and Science. Looking at more elaborate data emphasizes this idea that AB is a wonderfully successful school. The figure below shows the achievement gap between Asian and White students at AB and on the state level for the ELA section of the 10th grade MCAS in 2018 (see here for data). AB’s data follow the state-wide trend that Asian students perform better than White students with 92% of Asian students and 81% of White students at AB with test scores exceeding expectations. While an achievement gap does exist between Asian students and White students, the data reinforce the idea that AB students perform above the state’s average, independent of race.
Unfortunately, numbers on paper can and do lie, as is the case here. In the past two and a half years, six students or former students in the Acton-Boxborough community died by suicide. A graduate of the AB class of 2014, Megan was the first. She killed herself in January of 2016 during her sophomore year of college. Matthew was next; he died in September of his senior year of high school in 2016, just eight months after Megan. The very next day, Sid, a classmate of Megan’s, killed himself while at college, marking the third Acton-Boxborough death in nine months. A month later in October of 2016, Thomas, a classmate of Matthew’s, died a few days before he was supposed to start school in Maine after transferring from AB. At this point, students in the Acton-Boxborough community were walking on eggshells, knowing there would be another suicide, but not knowing when it would come. The devastating news came in January of 2017 after Tylen killed himself, when he was only ten years old. He did not even have the change to be old enough to attend AB. The sixth suicide, of 16-year-old Jacob, occurred a year and a half later, in July of 2018. (Information on all of these students can be found here)
The moral of the story is this: AB is an incredible high school that more than adequately prepares its students for standardized tests and college admissions. While there is a small gap between the achievement of students of different races, students in this school have outperformed students across the state every year for the past decade. With this intense schooling, however, pressures in the Acton-Boxborough community are high. Sometimes too high, as it turns out, and it is affecting students’ mental health. Ultimately, the choice comes down to whether to send your child to AB to excel in school or to send your child elsewhere with the goal of keeping him or her alive.