Nearly four decades before Lisa Gilbert-Smith was named interim principal at Newton North High School for the 2026-2027 school year, a racial attack on a METCO bus in the same parking lot forced the district into a reckoning that reshaped its curriculum.

A new installment of Fig City News's Newton Schools history series, published Tuesday, July 28, documents the February 1987 incident in detail: a group of white students shouted racial slurs, threw snowballs, and shattered two windows of a METCO bus leaving Newton North for Boston. Reports at the time put the number of attackers between 4 and 40. The attack followed an off-campus robbery of marijuana from a white former student by Black students.

The incident made national news.

At the time, Newton North enrolled about 2,200 students. Just 113 were Black. Mayor Theodore Mann responded by forming a Blue Ribbon Commission on Race Relations in the Newton Schools. Its June 1987 report found the racial climate among North's faculty had deteriorated under budget pressure that increased class sizes and tensions over affirmative action policies, under which tenured staff with seniority could be laid off to maintain diversity targets.

Curriculum changes followed

The commission's work led directly to two additions at Newton North documented in the Fig City News series: a Holocaust curriculum for 9th graders and an annual month-long celebration of Black history, both launched in 1987.

The racial climate problems predated the bus attack. Black School Committee member Katherine Jones reported at a January 1980 meeting that the prior year had seen students dressed as Ku Klux Klan members attempting to walk Newton North's corridors, a Black student with a perfect exam score asked if he had seen the test beforehand, and a substitute teacher telling a Black student to "go back to Boston where you belong."

Newton North in 2026

Gilbert-Smith, who had led Newton's METCO program since 2019 across 21 schools, will now lead the building where that bus was attacked. Her work at METCO included supervising staff, guiding anti-racism and cultural proficiency efforts, and strengthening partnerships with Boston families, according to a district announcement.

The achievement gap the district identified in the 1980s persists. Newton's FY26 Annual Report, presented to the School Committee in April, showed 75% of students overall scored proficient in math and reading, compared with 37% of Black students and 48% of Latino students. As we reported July 10, the Black student population has held flat at 5% of enrollment for five years.

Meanwhile, the district's DEI office, created in 2020 with two full-time and one part-time staff member, has been cut to a single part-time position under the FY26 budget approved in April, according to The Hechinger Report.

Newton's METCO program, a founding partner since 1966 and the largest in Massachusetts, now buses 431 students from Boston and Springfield into Newton schools. State Rep. Christopher Worrell, who has two children in Newton schools through METCO, told the Boston Globe in August 2025 that the program "should be the main focal point of race relations and be a leader on race relations."

Newton North's current enrollment stands at about 2,096 students, down from the 2,200 enrolled in 1987.