WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — A member of the Mount Greylock School Committee this month pushed the administration to be more transparent about incidents of bias in the classroom.

 

"Just this very term, this quarter, there were a number of incidents in which our teachers, with apparently good intention, have made decisions in the classroom either with students or in the curriculum that have caused serious harm," Jose Constantine said at the committee's monthly meeting.

 

"What I'm curious about is how are we sharing those incidents with the community, who, I think, should know what's happened in our classrooms? How are we supporting our teachers to prevent these incidents from happening, which I think seems like a good metric for success: How many times our teachers, whether they intend to or not, cause harm? And where are we headed as a district with regard to supporting our teachers and, most importantly, supporting our students in the classroom?"

 

Constantine asked his question during a quarterly update on the district's efforts in the area of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, a point of emphasis throughout the tenure of Superintendent Jason McCandless.

 

Although the administration last year pulled back, for budgetary reasons, on plans to fill a DEIB director position in the central office, McCandless has laid out a multi-pronged strategy for making the district's three schools more welcoming for all students and their families.

 

Two elements of that plan related directly to Constantine's question: a new bias incident reporting form that is available on each school's website and professional development opportunities for teachers and staff.

 

"The majority of incidents are being reported directly to the principal or the superintendent," Assistant Superintendent Joe Bergeron said in giving the quarterly update. "We are in the process of developing teams at the building level and district level to be part and parcel of any response. We want to make sure we line up the proper professional development and training for those teams."

 

Bergeron said that based on feedback from staff, the district has shifted its professional development work to focus on, "real-life scenarios and case-based type work."

 

That led to Constantine's questions about the real-life incidents that have happened at the school and whether the district should be providing information about them to the public. McCandless replied that the district has constraints when it comes to sharing such information.

 

"When something like that happens, there are guardrails in almost 360 degrees, starting with federal labor law and working down through state regulations regarding what we're allowed to speak about down to contractual obligations we make between ourselves and our staff," McCandless said.

 

"So alerting the community of those is just often, quite frankly … illegal is a strong word, but I think that's the word I'll use. And occasionally, it's immoral because all the facts are not always available."

 

McCandless said the district had consulted with experts in the diversity field about the value of "public pronouncements." And he shared that administrators spend, in some cases, hours addressing individual incidents.

 

But he said the best the district can do is work to minimize such events.

 

"If I knew the way to absolutely control people, be they young people or grown-up people to not say and do things that were, at best, not compassionate or well thought and, at worst, downright harmful … we would do that," McCandless said. "As it stands, we put a lot of time and effort into professionally developing our staff — as a whole, at grade levels, as individuals — and working to put our energies to supporting students when that happens."

 

Constantine followed up with McCandless, asking why the district cannot release anonymous data about incidents so that the public can track its progress in reducing them.

 

"This seems like a straight-forward metric," Constantine said. "Are we doing a better job of minimizing the number of times, and it should be zero times, ideally, that incidents happen in our classrooms, whether they are intended or not, that cause harm?"

 

That last comment sparked a discussion about whether "zero incidents" is an appropriate goal.

 

"I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice," Carolyn Greene said. "It would be lovely if zero incidents occurred. But we live in a world where racism exists and unconscious bias creeps in and people make mistakes. I think a lot of what happens is people making mistakes and not thinking through situations and maybe not getting the right mentorship.

 

"I would like to see the metric we measure be our response to those situations when they occur, because they will occur."

 

Bergeron agreed.

 

"One of the slides from last spring that I didn't repeat [in the Dec. 14 presentation] was one that said this is work we need to do without becoming paralyzed, without just refusing to address it," he said. "If I were a staff member hearing some portion of this conversation tonight, I would potentially go to bed tonight saying, ‘I can't mess up. I'm going to avoid that subject material with my students, because I want to get the number of times I'm going to be in a situation like that down to zero.' Because that's the most sure fire way to get it to zero — to just run away from it.

 

"I think we have more good situations happening right now where staff members are reaching out to their principal or the director of curriculum or the superintendent saying, ‘I really want to do this, but I need your help,' or, ‘Can I do this?' or, ‘This happened. What can I do now?' "

 

Julia Bowen sided with Constantine, while acknowledging that the "zero incidents" goal is aspirational.

 

"I think to say we aspire to anything other than zero means we're giving up," Bowen said. "We can aspire to zero, but that doesn't mean when we don't get to zero, heads will roll. To me, each year, that number should go down."

 

Constantine said he could not agree more with Bowen's argument.

 

"I think it's important to say that many marginalized families don't feel safe in our district," he said. "I appreciate that we care and we all acknowledge how difficult the role of teacher is. But I'm here to second Julia's point that if we are not aspiring to ensure that the people we pay to work in our district do not harm our children, ever, that's a problem. If that's not our aspiration, that's a problem, however difficult that may be.

 

"I would hope we'd be brave enough to be able to share, in even generic terms, our progress on this front."