I attended a local school board meeting on Monday evening out of curiosity and loyalty, this the District that gave me the opportunity to teach kids for a long time, and any school district now a venue where the polarizing forces at play in this country find an expression on an intimate level.
Monthly school board meetings, like small town councils and township supervisor meetings have become the equivalent of old style New England town gatherings where many of the faces who rise to speak are familiar to the elected officials, and the local nature of the setting gives some insight into how the larger issues boiling up in this vast nation play out among neighbors.
I counted somewhere between 160 to 180 people in attendance in the LGI of the High School, a standing room crowd.
The policies under discussion at this meeting had to do with the idea of ‘equity’ and procedures for dealing with COVID for both staff and children.
First, the discussion of COVID.
A District Rep made clear, before any public comments, that the schools would not require vaccinations for children before they returned in the fall and that masks would be optional.
As best as I could tell, 8 people spoke on COVID, 6 who attacked the District and 2 who spoke of the dangers of COVID. Some of the remarks were so packed with purported scientific statistics and were delivered at such speed as to be incoherent.
The 6 who attacked the District accused the Board of “ceding local control [for decision making] to the CDC”. Another used terms like ‘injection coercion”, “450 thousand vaccine injuries”, and referenced the “Nuremberg Code” in an obscure allusion to … I have no idea. Another mother made reference to “religious and medical freedom” and that “vaccination talks and posters [promoting] vaccination should not be allowed”. She wondered if her children were “going to be harassed to become vaccinated”. Another, restraining tears, spoke of parents not allowing their children to play with hers because of her refusal to become vaccinated and implied they were making a judgment that “her natural immunity [was] not good enough”. She then made reference to this: “If we choose to get the virus naturally ….” I don’t know how she finished that sentence. The opening clause stopped my note taking.
A nurse spoke, a woman who had seen “COVID horrors” in person, who had watched patients die. She thanked the Board for doing a good job with their management of the crisis in the schools.
Now, the discussion on ‘equity’.
The District uses the State’s definition of ‘equity’: “The just and fair distribution of resources based upon each individual student’s needs. Equitable resources include funding, programs, policies, initiatives and supports that target each student’s unique background and school context to guarantee that all students have equal access to a high-quality education.”*
The language of the definition is thick, even turgid, the language of a bureaucracy. The policy seems to boil down to stating that each child will be given the help he or she needs to do well. Fair enough. On the same page is a logo that shows a balance scale whose pans are exactly even and beneath the scale the words “Anti-Racism. Diversity. Inclusion.”
As soon as the term ’anti-racism” appears, the word ‘equity’ and thus the Board policy itself becomes bound to the American experience with race in all its confusion and nuance and stark divisions and the ugliness of our history of slavery and bigotry.
The implication of the use of the word “anti-racism” is that racism is an active force in American life which should be opposed, an active force in Pennsylvania and in the 100 square miles of this District.
While I was still teaching there, the District was 95% white.** Fifteen years later, it is 85% white,*** still an overwhelming number but enough to signal a conscious shift in attitudes and policy. The Board in 2021 has roughly 250 children to care for who are not white. They must now think in terms of how race affects learning within their schools. Their first step in doing so is to do their best to ensure that those children are treated ‘equitably’, that is “in a fair and impartial manner”.
But ‘race’ is also the explosive at the heart of the Republic, and that continuing struggle to either detonate the explosive, deny its existence or defuse it was on full display when residents began to speak to the Equity Policy during the meeting’s open forum.
First, I want to emphasize that this was not a MAGA gathering. I saw no MAGA hats or t-shirts. No one referenced Trump. Also, this was a calm meeting. No one issued direct threats to Board members or administrators or teachers (one speaker said of teachers “we see you” and one wanted teachers fired if they violated some policy he had set up in his own head). The crowd remained generally polite. There was no outward show of aggression, no chants, no rage.
As near as I could tell, since some of the comments ran on at high speed in dense prose in an attempt to get everything the speaker had to say under the Board stipulated 3 minute mark, 31 of the 48 individuals who spoke addressed the Equity Policy and 19 of those voiced support for the policy, 11 spoke against it and 1 took a neutral stance.
A few of those who spoke against the policy referenced CRT or Critical Race Theory# and made the assertion that ‘equity’ had “nothing to do with equality”, that it “required discrimination”, that it was “Marxist” in nature, that there was at least 1 “Marxist messenger” teacher at work in the schools, that CRT, by even investigating how race operates in terms of power, creates “an ugly, racist divide”, that CRT is intent on ‘destroying our institutions and country”, that reading lists must be examined for books that promote CRT (and presumably those books should be removed from the lists or schools). One individual said the Board is “either lying [to the residents] or is naive” to believe that CRT is not being taught in the schools. One man proposed to “terminate teachers” who do not observe a ban on CRT as well as remove Board members who do not vote a straight conservative line. The same individual stated that “the District does not have a racial problem.”##
A general sentiment among those who opposed the Equity Policy is that by even setting up race in American life as a discussion point in policy or in classrooms, the District and its teachers are creating division where there is none. These speakers seemed to embrace the American ideal of a color-blind society. Two of them referenced Dr. King’s line about believing in a judgment based on the content of one’s character, not the color of one’s skin.
However, probably 6 of the 11 who voiced concerns about the Policy were more circumspect, less angry, who took pains to imply or declare that they were not racists and that they were worried about the power of teachers to voice their opinions to their children as contrasted with simply presenting facts.
One mother, who supported the Equity Policy, said let’s teach the facts of American History and went on to describe Thomas Jefferson, “who wrote the Declaration of Independence” and “who took Sally Hemmings into his bed when she was 14”. She asked if they could “imagine your own 14 year old daughter” in that circumstance, and that Jefferson also “kept 600 people enslaved.” The room was very quiet when she finished except for a man standing close to me who said, “That’s CRT.”
Another mother of mixed race children spoke of the “rampant racism unchecked at OJR” and another man told of a conversation with a teacher who spoke of his daughter making friends with “the darker skinned ones” among other students.
A mother spoke of her “white privilege” and that she never had to have a conversation with her children about “what to do when a policeman stops your car.”
The 47th speaker, a call in, sent out a “plea for [her] Christian brothers and sisters to reach into [their] souls” and examine them for their own faults before accusing others.
The public comment portion of the meeting ended with a woman admonishing the Board for not following Roberts’ Rules of Order. With the exception of a moderator reminding individuals of the 3 minute rule and of another Board rep warning speakers not to speak of individuals by name, the Board listened. They practiced restraint.
I wanted to keep my own conclusions about the meeting separate from what I saw and heard. I am left with more questions than answers.
My first impression is that the COVID Pandemic has exacerbated the process of isolation and atomization already moving through society like a plague. I had the impression again and again of individuals insinuating that they were the absolute authority over their own lives and the lives of their children, and often the only authority worth listening to. How does such a proclamation, one that declares the supremacy of “I alone”, work cooperatively within a civic structure, a Board of School Directors, in creating policies and curriculums and rules of governance that apply collectively to as complex an organism as 1650 students and seven schools, and several hundred teachers, administrators and support personnel?
An absence of trust in the Board (and in teachers) was apparent in roughly half the speakers. They don’t trust that they are being told the truth about ‘equity’ or about COVID policies or about curriculum or that teachers are not intent on persuading their children to adopt all manner of ideas antithetical to their own beliefs. They seemed to want absolutely iron-clad rules applied to what goes on in classrooms.
I’m not sure either this atomization or distrust is open to reasonable, patient explanations. The undercurrent among many of these speakers was of a kind of defiance, that there was nothing a Board member could say to them in response that would have been acceptable other than, “Yes, you are right. We’ll do as you say. Would you like to write the policy?”
Three or 4 of these speakers had all the arrogance, blustery threat and suppressed aggression of real tyrants, but only that handful.
About half the speakers seemed to believe that if the Board adopted a policy on race, no matter how innocuous, or a teacher spoke of race in the classroom or the country’s racial history, they were being divisive because talk of race causes problems and therefore the word ‘race’ itself becomes that which must not be spoken: say the word, see the color, see the color, cause a problem.
Every time I am exposed to this attitude, I wonder at its deep, abiding lack of imagination, its inability to pause, step outside of its white skin and acknowledge that being a black man or woman or a black child (or Mexican, Indian, etc) in this country or this District isn’t more difficult than being white. I wonder what they thought when they listened to the mother speak of not having to have ‘the Conversation’ with her white children — the one that says here are the do’s and don’ts of how to stay safe if you are stopped by a police officer. I wonder why they cannot get past their own experience to try to look into the lives of others with some degree of compassion and understanding. They seemed to wear their allegiance to color-blindness like a shield they held in front of their eyes so that they could see nothing.
As a former teacher I kept thinking how radically the world of the school and classroom has changed in the ten years since I retired — the internet’s baleful influence was everywhere this evening — in the wild pseudo-scientific statistics thrown about, in the implications of conspiracy, in the terms spread by social media and on certain channels, terms thrown out as truth without any real understanding of them (or as my friend said, “They speak in TV words.”), and perhaps most disturbingly, in the suggestion that teachers’ actions and words in the classroom now, especially now, must be tracked, controlled, suppressed.
This may be the most challenging atmosphere in which to step inside a classroom since the dark times of the Cold War when Communism was the all pervading threat.
Teachers have always had to be very careful in their exercise of power within their classrooms. As a matter of what is right, they have had to set up guidelines for their behavior that stops them from treating their students like an audience captive to their whims and to opinions presented as if they were fact and law. Good teachers do not go on rants. All of those self-imposed guidelines are an expression of an ethical regard for kids and a code of behavior. But now, when seemingly every topic has become politicized, with one subtle click a student can record every word of a teacher’s presentation or off-hand conversation and then, with an ease that is awful, manipulate such a recording to attack that teacher, destroy a reputation, smash a life.
At the end of the evening I wondered about how we will find ways to talk about race or to teach history and literature and biology and health without those discussions erupting in conflict.
However, I also came away with a renewed respect for those people of integrity who teach, who serve on school boards, as frontline administrators, as township supervisors, county commissioners, on city councils, as police officers, firemen, EMT’s, as the ones in charge of voting sites, any person who puts him or herself out there to serve the public good in any kind of governance capacity. They are out there on the edge of these terrible national ruptures. They are the ones who directly face the aggressive unreason, the paranoia, the panic, the threats and the insidious fear that seems to hold millions in its grip, including some percentage of residents within this District. We owe them our thanks for bearing that weight for us.
##All quoted words or lines are taken from my 5 pages of notes taken during a 3+ hour meeting.
*Student Services / Equity Work (ojrsd.com)
**Owen J Roberts School District – Diversity in the Classroom – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
***Owen J Roberts High School in Pottstown, PA – US News Best High Schools
# A term whose definition is very hard to pin down. CRT has essentially become a term used by some to create fear that children will be/are being brainwashed to accept ‘anti-American ideas’ (a whole other realm of discussion).
