Two white members resigned from the Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee following the departure of Superintendent Maria Geryk, who left clutching a bone-of-contention golden parachute.
All claimed fatigue from coping with the stress induced by differences within the committee.
A Gazette editorial Sept. 17 lamented the committee’s dysfunction as articulated at an earlier point by five white members in a letter to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, asking the department to step in and set things right. The department replied that such an action was outside its jurisdiction.
Since state Rep. Ellen Story had been copied in the letter, the newspaper asked for her thoughts on the situation. Story is quoted as follows: “Hopefully, when you are elected your goal is to work toward benefiting the schools, not to wreak havoc as a member of the School Committee.”
Funny thing: race is not mentioned in Story’s remarks or in the editorial. But the “wreak havoc” accusation is being leveled at two people of color who, though not identified by name, are suggested to be at fault in the letter to the department.
The past speaks to us now.
From 1986 until 1989, Story was a member of an all-white Amherst School Committee. In 1988, a white parent, who was joined later on by other parents and concerned community members, asked the committee to remove a racist, sexist and classist history textbook being used in the middle school.
A university professor also found that this text contained over a hundred factual errors. It gave short shrift to the historic struggles of blacks, Native Americans, women, mill and factory workers in their attempts to achieve equality and justice in the political and economic life of this nation.
For months, this School Committee stubbornly refused to address this reasonable request that would have meant students would no longer be required to absorb a distorted record of our past.
In 1991, after months of preparation, the local NAACP chapter filed suit against the Amherst School System. Having gained the support of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that wanted to make Amherst a test case on the tracking of students, four of us drove to the U.S. District Court in Springfield to file the papers.
But the suit was withdrawn under pressure from an unknown quarter in favor of a 14-member committee, seven to be appointed by the superintendent and seven by the chapter, that was charged with resolving the problems contained in the suit.
It soon took an entirely different shape.
All the issues that are being brought before this present School Committee as well as the superintendent whom the white majority has steadfastly supported, existed during Story’s tenure: children of color being disciplined more harshly than whites; the hiring of too few black teachers and administrators; the tracking of white students into advanced classes, leaving other students to handle the stigma of lower-track assignments.
A new issue has also been added: the use of intimidation to get rid of justifiable complaints.
On another level, there is difference now. As we have read in the papers and in the Gazette editorial, it is more difficult, in fact, it is exhausting for white members to hold the line in the face of not one, but two, non-white members, democratically elected in the same fashion as their colleagues, who are persistent in trying to pierce the armor of a recalcitrant white majority.
Now there appears to be a chorus, a chorus that Story has joined, to admonish certain members, who are being told, in effect, to stop rocking the boat of white privilege and, in Story’s words, “to work toward benefiting the schools.”
This advice is addressed to the wrong faction for if they accede to this demand, then the status quo stays in place. Nothing will change.
Unless an agreement is reached before a new superintendent is brought on board that stipulates that the step-by-step process already in the works must be acted on for the benefit of all the students.
Mary L. Wentworth of Amherst is a writer, activist and blogger.