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At the start, Evelyn McMullen didn’t realize how important Sharon METCO would be to her.
She had just moved from Virginia and was looking for a job, and for someone who had worked both as an elementary school teacher and later in special education, working with the kids from Boston was a natural next step for her. So she applied and started working in 1979. She ended up staying until 2009, an astonishing 30 years later.
Now, Sharon’s METCO office has been renamed in honor of Ms. McMullen to recognize her many years of dedication and service.
When Ms. McMullen started working at SHS, METCO was a far cry from what it is today. There were no late buses back to Boston, the parents had no way to meet each other, and the METCO awards ceremony was yet to be created. In fact, Ms. McMullen’s work was instrumental in the creation of these programs. She built her programs based on what came before her: for example, the Host Family Program (now the Family Friends Program), where a family would provide extra support for a METCO student outside of school by allowing them to stay over on early release days and attending school events on behalf of them. “It was a growing process,” she said. “We spent a lot of time building new things.”
Ms. McMullen fought hard against discrimination. For example, there were no METCO students in the National Honor Society – nobody had ever been invited. To combat this, she joined the NHS board to see how it was being run, and soon enough, the first METCO kids were admitted. She also worked hard to create a METCO awards program for the students because of the lack of representation in Sharon awards ceremonies. “Boston kids did not receive awards Sharon kids would receive, so we developed our own awards with input from teachers,” Ms. McMullen said. After all, she never wanted the kids to feel like they were considered an afterthought.
On a peer level, too, she made sure the Boston students felt equal. She often encouraged the young girls to make friends with Sharon students and socialize, and it worked. Ms. McMullen noted that as elementary schoolers became middle schoolers and then became high schoolers, the divides between students from Sharon and Boston became less and less noticeable until they barely existed at all: the “METCO” label was replaced with “football player,” “tennis player,” “swimmer,” “artist,” “actor/actress”– the list goes on.
However, one of her proudest achievements was connecting parents together. Sharon parents were always willing to let students from Boston stay at their houses, but in the beginning, many were wary over the prospect of letting their children go to Boston to see their friends. Boston didn’t have a very good reputation as a city, but Ms. McMullen remedied that feeling. She helped create an exchange program between the cities for parents, allowing them to foster relationships and trust and to see that Boston was safer than they thought. This program not only strengthened the bonds between parents, but also gave the kids the ability to create close, meaningful friendships despite living in completely different environments and anywhere between 40 minutes to 2 hours away from each other–depending on the traffic, of course.
When asked why she ended up staying at METCO for so long, Ms. McMullen responded that she got attached to the kids. “At a certain point, they become more like family than students,” she said. One of her main priorities was always to be a support system for the students, and they made it hard for her to leave as she saw them grow up.
Even now, having been disconnected from the program for 15 years, Ms. McMullen still has hopes for METCO to make the experience for the students as best as possible. She spoke about how the COVID-19 pandemic caused the program to be halted for a long period of time. METCO had to effectively start over. As a result, many of the relationships between Boston and Sharon families deteriorated. Many Sharon parents are once again afraid to send their children to Boston. Ms. McMullen’s greatest hope is that the current program can rebuild the connection between the two cities.
Ms. McMullen will now be forever remembered with the renaming of the METCO office in addition to an existing scholarship that already bears her name. Earlier this month, a special event celebrating Ms. McMullen’s dedication and service was held at the high school, organized by current SHS METCO director Carla Hands. Many SHS Boston alum attended the event, and dozens of others who were unable to attend posted comments on social media in praise of Ms. McMullen and the influence she had on their lives.
SHS graduate Mrs. Lisa Jolicoeur remembers the positive influence Ms. McMullen had on her students.
“I played basketball with several Boston students who often stayed overnight with Sharon families and depended on Ms. McMullen for so many things, such as transportation. But they also admired the role she played in their education,” Mrs. Jolicoeur said. “At a reunion about ten years ago, Boston students were thrilled to learn that I still had contact with Ms. McMullen and reached out to her, praising the difference both she and the program had made in their lives.”
Ms. McMullen, with her admirable contributions and genuine devotion to all of the METCO students, more than deserves this honor.
