The lawn signs are in bloom, the horns are honking around the rotary and the candidates are in full meet-and-greet mode. It’s peak election season.
Following a year of tumult which cast Easthampton’s schools, city leaders and citizens in an unflattering light, the call to serve has been answered by a broad field of mayoral, City Council and School Committee hopefuls, looking to steer the city through these choppy waters and set the course for its next chapter.
Several, including a mayoral candidate, hold impressive progressive credentials and promise a bold shift in tone from what many in town view as an overly cautious, milquetoast response to racial hostilities and inequities. Within this context, these candidates have also championed the need for a new K-8 school building, outlined their hopes for our city’s schools and shared their visions for building, both literally and figuratively, a strong, diverse, inclusive school community, all while opting not to send their children to Easthampton’s public schools.
As an Easthampton parent, I’m tuned into the ongoing discussion of how to confront and change disturbing attitudes at our high school, a school my son is likely to attend someday. As a Jew, living in the shadow of a mountain where the phrase “Gas the Jews” recently appeared, I’m paying close attention to the ways our community and our society has fostered and then been forced to respond to offensive, threatening behavior.
I get that our schools and our city have a lot of work to do, and still, I feel that opting out of our public schools is a civic misstep, one that candidates who are hoping to represent this community deserve to be called out on.
Easthampton sits in the eye of the school choice movement’s perfect storm. We are sandwiched between two districts with higher incomes and better reputations. We have a charter school in town that not only siphons funding from our schools, but also resides in a building that’s been removed from the city’s tax rolls, making the cuts to our school budget that much deeper — the same school budget that’s overseen and finalized by the mayor and City Council.
In a district that lost $2 million last year to choice, I’m not sure what message a public official is sending when they choice their child out of their city’s public schools, but it certainly doesn’t seem like “I’m here to help.”
During last year’s No on Question 2 campaign, the ongoing inequities of the charter school system were brought to light, and several articles documented the economic segregation and two-tiered educational system that local charter schools have helped to design and propagate. But also, the No on 2 campaign worked to reemphasize the importance of neighborhood public schools as public resources, open to every single child in the community despite their parents’ income, work schedule, or willingness or ability to wade through an application process.
Our public schools are not just open to the community’s input, they’re dependent upon it through city elections, volunteers and school committees. They are the first line of community engagement, offering the opportunity to connect with the parents of our children’s peers, people who may look differently, sound differently and think differently from us. These candidates are asking to represent the entire city of Easthampton, but have somehow separated the city from its schools.
While we know the financial impact that school choice has had, it’s harder to quantify the social capital lost when engaged, highly educated parents take their abundant resources out of the district. Studies show that involved parents not only positively impact their own child’s educational experience, but those of other children as well. I often wonder how many more people would be at PTO events or School Committee meetings if parents applied their time and concern to the public school right down the street, instead of spending hours each week shuttling their children out of the district.
Because my son attends an Easthampton public elementary school, I know that despite the reputation that precedes them, our schools are providing an excellent educational experience. I also know our schools could and should be better, and I’ve seen enough, especially this year, to understand that the only way progress happens is if involved parents, committed staff and passionate leaders persist together to move things forward.
Supporting people who want to have power and leadership over institutions that they do not have faith in and don’t invest their personal capital in, monetarily or otherwise, just isn’t sitting right with me. If my own idealism, sense of what’s possible, and willingness to commit to a cause that includes, but also goes beyond my own child, dwarfs that of candidates who are supposed to represent me, it’s a problem.
One look at who’s in charge on Beacon Hill or — yikes — in D.C. should hammer home just how tight the relationship is between leadership and schools, and just how deeply decisions that are made at the executive level — decisions made by people who purportedly want the best for our public schools, but aren’t involved in them — can impact us all.
This problem isn’t just Easthampton’s to solve, but we can start working it on it today by forcing this conversation to happen here and now.
Melissa Weinberger, of Easthampton, is a writer, editor and Easthampton public school parent.