Josiah Quincy Celebrates 179 Years
Chinatown's elementary school marks two big birthdays – and decades of serving families
When people think of the Josiah Quincy School, they often think of its current beige stone mid-century modern-style headquarters located at Washington Street in Boston’s Chinatown with its new and old vibrant murals in yellow, purple, blue, violet and red.
But the history of the school goes back much further. In fact, well over a century further. And the school, from its beginning to its renewal on Washington Street, has played pivotal roles in key chapters in public education in the United States.
These two converging histories will be celebrated when the Boston school marks two major milestones. Starting Nov. 19, the Josiah Quincy School will celebrate the 179th anniversary of its creation with a Dragons F.I.R.E. Fundraiser at Empire Garden Restaurant. It will also celebrate its 50th Golden Jubilee and Family Reunion Home-coming Weekend for the current location’s half century of operation. The occasion marks a turning point for JQES, a cornerstone of the community.
In its modern iteration, the Josiah Quincy Elementary School has served as a kind of sanctuary for students, according to interviews with current and past educators and students. Immigrants – especially from China – and their children have found a safe and welcoming place at the school, and so have their non-immigrant Bostonian classmates who attend and have attended the school.
“It is registered as a historical site as the first school in the nation to have separate classrooms by age and grade level. We are now in the modern site at 85 Washington Street. This building opened its doors in 1976, 50 years ago,” said JQES principal Cynthia Soo Hoo, in an interview with Sampan. “It has really served as a place that many immigrant families sent their (children) to.”
The school originally began on Tyler Street in the mid-1800s and was named after Josiah Quincy, a Mayor of Boston during the 1820s. It moved to its current location to much fanfare in the 1970s — after Boston's population grew, and the building had setbacks such as suffering damage from a hurricane in 1938, and after the turbulence created from highway construction nearby.
“I attended the Quincy School from kindergarten to third grade from 1953 - 1957 when we were forced out, because the school was bulging with children,” Cynthia Yee, a long-time educator, told Sampan. Yee said many of her classmates were either from Chinese immigrant families like hers or from Syria. The school population grew and other disruptions occurred around the time of the highway construction that cut through much of Chinatown near Hudson and Tyler Streets. Yee was forced to attend the Holy Trinity School on Shawmut Avenue, which was torn down shortly after to build the Castle Square housing project.
“Displaced again!” she said, underscoring the uncertainty many families and their children faced during that period. “We loved that little school but they closed it with one year to graduation.”
Yee would return to teach fourth grade at the old Quincy School after she got her Masters degree in Education in 1972.
“I was the first Chinese American teacher hired ever to teach in Chinatown but my wonderful Chinese American colleagues taught English as a Second Language,” she said. Her educator colleagues from her generation, she said, would become influenced by the busing crisis that shaped that decade’s students, families and teachers who were plagued by a persistent history of institutional racism.
“Busing is significant in that it created the present day JQES population,” she said. “It was a travesty of justice against Chinatown children to be used as the ‘preferred model minority’ in desegregating resistant white-dominated neighborhoods like the North End and Charlestown. Another case where the ‘Model Minority Myth’ worked against us!”
Even a half century later, the scar created from that period is still felt by many in the community. It’s been the topic of recent exhibits and a play by local theater artist Christinia R. Chan, called “Busing the Buffer Zone,” that focuses on the history of Chinese American mothers whose children in Chinatown were bused to Charlestown schools as a part of a desegregation effort for Boston Public Schools.
Yee noted the pivotal role of longtime Quincy School principal Suzanne Lee, who started her work at the Quincy School in that period.
“She founded the Chinese Progressive Association, and was the revolutionary advocate for immigrant voting, labor, and education rights in Chinatown,” said Yee.
Lee would tell the Sampan in a profile last year, “I was a first year teacher when the Boston Busing crisis began. Through that, I saw firsthand how the Chinese were being treated in this country.”
It’s also not lost on many of these educators that during the life of the Quincy School, it was in operation both during the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its repeal in 1943.
Modern Quincy School
In the 1970s when the school opened at its Chinatown location, the building, constructed by The Architects Collaborative, was widely praised.
“Josiah Quincy School … is far more than a school. It is the virtual nucleus of Boston's multiethnic South Cove neighborhood and a kind of minicity in itself: In addition to a K-5 school for 820 pupils it contains ‘subschools’ for children with various disabilities, and a battery of community facilities including a ‘little city hall,’ and there is a housing tower on one corner of the site. A brilliant physical expression of its role in the neighborhood, and a gift of space to this dense city, is the use of the roof for recreation facilities for pupils and residents alike,” wrote Progressive Architecture magazine two years after its opening.
Today, JQES boasts two programs that represent important achievements for the school. Since September 2022, JQES has been an accredited International Baccalaureate World School, offering students an “inquiry-based, transdisciplinary curriculum framework for Kindergarten through 5th grade, designed by the International Baccalaureate Organization.” While the school experienced barriers to bilingual education in the past, due in part to the English-only initiative that was approved in 2002, JQES was able to begin implementing a Mandarin Bilingual Education Program starting in K1 in September 2025.
More Than a Celebration
The anniversaries are not just to celebrate the history of the school, say organizers. They are to raise money for the current and future students. Soo Hoo said that because of budget cuts at the federal, state, and municipal levels, the school is holding the Dragons F.I.R.E. Fundraiser to support its enrichment programs for over 725 students. Funds raised through the event will ensure that STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) programs, art events, swim classes, technology instruction, field trips, and more can continue to be provided to students.
“We’re a public school. We get money from the city and federal grants. ... BPS is in a financial strain right now, going through some changes with cuts in some of the federal grants that we’ve received as a whole district in the past,” said Soo Hoo. “It has affected (us). Our fundraiser will ensure that we’re able to maintain supplemental things, like enrichment.”
Former JQES principal Bak-Fun Wong, who would later move on to become the founding headmaster of the Josiah Quincy Upper School before retiring, pioneered what he calls the “One Dragon” philosophy. His vision was to have students be able to move continuously from grades K-12 together as a cohort, believing that the bonds they formed with each other were a critical part of their learning and growth. Before the Upper School was established in 1999, students would often graduate from 5th grade and leave for (mostly) exam schools. For Wong, fostering connections with peers beyond the classroom was essential.
“We believed that it’s not about intelligence,” said Wong. “It’s opportunities, resources, support, and time. We want to be able to have a school that brings every single child (a chance to) grow up together as brothers and sisters for 12 or 13 years.”
This story was funded in part by Boston 250, a public-private partnership between the City of Boston and private sector partners, including Meet Boston, State Street, The Boston Foundation, John Hancock, Eastern Bank, Liberty Mutual, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and PNC Bank. Learn more at boston250.org
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