Newton has had quite a year. Striking teachers, climate change-related disasters, a shooting and more combined to give the city one of its most intense trips around the sun in recent memory.
Now that the year nearly is over, let’s have a look back at the big stories that shaped Newton in 2024.
The strike
The year started off with a contract dispute—the Newton Teachers Association on one side and the Mayor and School Committee on the other—from 2023 that only got worse in the new year.
School Committee leadership and Superintendent Anna Nolin made the rounds to talk with parents and other members of the community in January, and the City Council urged the NTA not to go on strike. The mayor also cautioned against a strike. But it was all to no avail, and on Jan. 19, 98 percent of Newton teachers voted to go on strike.
That strike would last two weeks, dividing the city and community and sending the district into chaos in the dead of winter. City Councilor Bill Humphrey joined the protests for the NTA while the rest of the Council published letters decrying the strike. Some parents gathered daily to support the NTA, while others gathered to push for teachers to end the strike.
Teachers had gone more than a year without a contract and had lost countless teacher support staff members and social workers and were committed to seeing the strike through.
At one point the police got involved. And in another incident, parents took over a press conference and there was a physical altercation. And at another point, the chair of the School Committee broke down in tears on live TV.
It was all very surreal.
On Feb. 2, though, the NTA and the School Committee reached a deal and ended the strike after two weeks. Teachers got raises and, more importantly, support staff. And they got a contract through 2029, so presumably there won’t be a strike in 2025.
The school choices
The School Committee had a long talk this year about possibly entering the state’s School Choice Program, which allows kids to go to schools in other districts if their home district pays the receiving district.
Every school committee in the state has to vote on School Choice each year, and although Newton has always voted to opt out, this year Superintendent Anna Nolin floated School Choice as a way to bring in more revenue.
But parents and some teachers spoke out against the idea, and the School Committee voted not to join.
At the same time, Newton Community Education (which hosts classes and activities for adults and kids) was going through financial difficulty and was looking at having to shut down.
The School Committee voted to help out NCE with finances while it implements a turnaround plan for the remainder of the fiscal year.
And Newton’s high schools are trying out multilevel classrooms, which put advanced college prep students together with honors students instead of the standard system of separating by course difficulty, and teachers have started showing up at School Committee meetings to express frustration about it. There’s even a petition to reverse it.
As a dialogue continues on that, multi-level classrooms are sure to impact the district as 2025 gets started. Teachers calling for it to be reversed point out that a reversal would have to happen now, before schools commit to another full school year of multilevel classrooms many say are a disaster.
These decisions sit against a backdrop of a concerning trend: Newton schools seeing declining enrollment.
The hate crimes
Newton saw a spike in bias-related crimes in 2024, with most of the increase related to antisemitism.
After Israel launched its military operation in Gaza in response to the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks carried out by Hamas, tensions mounted in the United States, including in Newton, with around 30 percent of its population identifying as Jewish.
In March, police reported that a large display on Homer Street honoring the hostages taken from Israel during that terror attack had been spray-painted black and ripped down.
The Homer Street vandalism was one of many crimes reported against homes displaying support for Israel, and that spring residents on Homer Street held a re-dedication ceremony for a new tribute to the hostages and a rally against antisemitism that drew a crowd of more than 2,000 people.
Hate crimes, mostly property crimes and not violence, continued against Jewish homes and organizations throughout the spring. One man, a musician from Boston, allegedly vandalized the Jewish Community Center of Greater Boston and is also accused of harassing and threatened a group of Jewish students.
Tensions continued, and at one point a group of pro-Israel demonstrators protested at a library Palestinian art exhibit and the scene got so heated the police had to calm things down.
The shooting
Throughout the summer, small groups showed up around Greater Boston protesting in support of Israel, while others rallied in support of Palestinians.
In September, that powder keg of tension ignited and a pro-Israel protester from Framingham shot a Newton man who had physically attacked him as he walked by.
Outside groups have called for a boycott of Newton businesses until charges are dropped against the shooter, Scott Hayes. Hayes had made a name for himself in recent months as a pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian agitator, posting photos of a gun he claimed to have with him.
Hayes had shown up at another rally in Newton, a Newton Teachers Assocation rally in support of City Councilor Bill Humphrey’s state representative campaign, a couple weeks earlier with pro-Israel protesters from Framingham.
The kidnapping
Also in September, a bus driver was charged with kidnapping after he disappeared with three special needs children for short periods of time.
The alleged incident was from May.
Justin Vose, 42, of Bedford, was a contracted bus driver for the Newton Early Childhood Program. One morning, school staff noticed a child come in late. The child said Vose had taken them to a secluded part of the school parking lot and then took two other kids there.
An investigation showed Vose had driven three kids, between ages 3 and 5, to that part of the parking lot individually for 20 minutes at a time and shut off the camera in his bus.
The kids have trouble communicating, so the investigation took months.
A lawyer representing the family of one of the children spoke out at a School Committee meeting on what she said is lack of proper vetting when it comes to bus driver contracting.
The fire, the flood and the BERDO
Climate change shaped Newton in 2024, as the region dealt with both a rising water table and a drought.
It rained a lot in the spring, and the water table along the Charles River was already so high that, this summer, areas started swamping.
Of note was one neighborhood in Waban. After the city relined sewers in that area, the ground water (now unable to leak into the sewer pipes) had nowhere to go. So backyards became swamps, and that’s when the rats and water snakes took over.
A couple of months later, we were in such a severe drought that Newton was choking on smoke from brush fires as far away as Middleton.
By October, Newton’s drought danger level was raised as fallen leaves became potential kindling.
Newton stepped up its efforts against climate change with a ban on plastic utensils and plastic bags at businesses and a fine system for cutting down trees. Both of those policies took effect in March.
In June, Newton’s City Council passed an ordinance requiring all new construction and large renovations to use electric power, not fossil fuels.
And this month, after more than a year of changes and deliberations, the City Council passed a BERDO (building emissions reductions and disclosures ordinance) requiring all large building owners to report energy consumption and, for commercial businesses, reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The campaigns
2024 had a lot to say about democracy. There was a presidential election, and Newton had two open state representative seats after both Kay Khan and Ruth Balser announced their retirements.
The Middlesex 11th seat race had former City Councilor Amy Sangiolo against newcomer Alex Jablon in the primary and then, after she won that race, Sangiolo against Republic Vladislav Yanovsky.
Sangiolo defeated Yanovsky and will be sworn in as state representative next week.
For the Middlesex 12th, the Democratic primary was the whole race because there were no Republicans running.
Former City Councilor Greg Schwartz and current city councilors Rick Lipof and Bill Humphrey ran for the nomination, which Schwartz ultimately won.
That race saw some trouble of its own when pro-Israel protesters, many of them from Framingham, showed up at a Newton Teachers Association rally in support of Humphrey, largely due to the Massachusetts Teachers Association’s controversial stance on the Israel military operation in Gaza.
Schwartz won that contest and will be sworn in as a legislator alongside Sangiolo next week.
