Opinion: Some People In Amherst Are Uncomfortable. Here’s Why That’s OK

On Friday we held an action in support of LGBTQ+ youth, beginning at the Middle School with a rally to show solidarity and support, building to a Speak Out where people whose voices have been silenced spoke out and were heard, culminating in a car parade through commercial streets and neighborhoods and past the homes of the Amherst School Committee members. Our message was clear: 1.) We want LGBTQ+ children to feel like they are not alone. 2.) We want a process of accountability, transparency and equity, one that we can trust to put leaders in place who will support our kids. 3.) This conversation is not going away. 

These messages are making some people are uncomfortable but we can’t allow that discomfort to stand in the way of progress. 

The cars in our car parade were covered in signs that said things like “Call a meeting/ call a vote!” To be clear, the meeting we are asking for is an emergency Regional School Committee meeting to address the community’s concerns over School Superintendent Morris’s return to work. Morris’ return to work following a self-imposed leave is a major development, and one causing pain to children and families who have already been harmed. We would like the opportunity to make our concerns  heard by our representatives in an open meeting. We would also like the School Committee to vote on putting Morris on administrative leave, pending the results of ongoing investigations. This seems like the obvious and appropriate step, especially considering that Assistant School Superintendent Doreen Cunningham is already on leave. How can that not be a double standard when Morris held more power than she did at the time of the alleged incidents and also failed to protect queer and trans kids?  And how can it not be a conflict of interest that the person who will receive the results of the Title IX investigation is the superintendent himself?

You would think that requesting a meeting (accessing a democratic process) would be an easy ask. And though the vast majority of people who saw our car parade today expressed support and solidarity, we did have a couple of people express disapproval of the tactic. One neighbor later expressed that he felt we should not have driven past the School Committee member’s homes – we should send letters or emails instead. We have sent emails and made phone calls. So many of us have written, some of us repeatedly, and we have either received no response or a one line response thanking us for our message and offering nothing. We only brought our message into the community when we were unheard by the committee. It is uncomfortable that the School Committee won’t respond to public outcries of concern. It is ok for the community to feel that discomfort because that is what will move people to work toward change. 

One resident was so upset when we drove through their neighborhood that he stopped several cars to yell at the people inside them, claiming that we were just like those trying to intimidate people from voting. It was surprising for a couple of reasons; first because if people were driving past my house with signs I didn’t like I would simply wait for them to pass. It might have taken us a minute to drive by, unbothered, and then we’d have been gone. The idea that that one minute of discomfort was too much for them to endure felt surprising. It seems that our middle schoolers are being asked to tolerate a lot more discomfort than the school committee members experienced by having people drive past their homes.

That resident’s actual complaint was far more surprising though. The thing is that we are the complete opposite of the people trying to suppress the vote. Those people are trying to block a democratic process and stop people from being heard. We are simply asking to be heard by our representatives, the very definition of democracy. And we keep asking because we have not yet been heard. It might feel uncomfortable to some, to hear us asking in so many ways in so many places, but if we stop then we are failing trans and queer children and we are unwilling to do that. 

It might be uncomfortable for some community members to see their town in the media coverage of our action. We were the opening story on 22 News tonite (7/28), and the Boston Globe, Daily Hampshire Gazette, and MassLive all covered it. In a town that prides itself on being progressive, I can understand the discomfort of having the public see the tension building between community members trying to protect queer and trans kids, and an unresponsive administration. What I don’t understand is why we are the ones blamed for the discomfort. This is a conversation we would have loved to have had at an emergency School Committee meeting. It was the committee’s unwillingness to create a public forum for this conversation that lead us to the actions we’ve organized.

More importantly though, this is actually an important conversation to be having out in the open! What has happened to LGBTQ+ youth in our community is an injustice and in order to address that injustice we need to expose it. Injustice thrives in silence and secrecy. A school committee that won’t hear concerned citizens, that moves to executive session to avoid transparency and accountability, that has expressed contempt for the very notion of bending to the will of the people cannot be trusted to address injustice. If we are truly committed to confronting the systemic issues that caused harm to children in this district then we have to be willing to have the hard conversations out in the open. 

I think we can all agree that we need to make some changes in order to protect our kids. In order to get the change we need we have to make peace with being uncomfortable. The bottom line is that nobody changes when they are comfortable and if nothing changes vulnerable people are unsafe. People change when it becomes uncomfortable to keep doing what they’re doing. And for this reason, discomfort is OK. It is better than ok, it’s where change is born. Being willing to be uncomfortable needs to be part of our path forward because this conversation is not going away. 

Ali Wicks-Lim is a former Amherst Regional Public Schools parent.