Newly Elected School Committee Members Reflect on Past Wrongs, Future Goals

The following article appeared originally in The Graphic on November 29, 2023 and is reposted here with permission.

On November 7, Amherst residents elected three brand new Amherst School Committee members: Sarah Marshall, Bridget Hynes, and Deborah Lee Leonard, who join incumbent members Irv Rhodes and Jennifer Shiao.  Marshall and Hynes spoke to The Graphic, while Leonard did not respond to interview requests in time for publication.

The new members will take their positions at a pivotal time in the district; they will be tasked with hiring a new superintendent and with repairing the wounds left by the recently published Title IX report confirming wrongdoing on behalf of the district. 

Their election also comes on the heels of public resignations of former superintendent Michael Morris and former School Committee members Peter Demling, Ben Herrington, and Allison McDonald, as well as the terminations or placements “on leave” of other staff members implicated in the report.

Marshall, a former high school teacher and environmental toxicology consultant who has been active in local government in Amherst for the past seven years, said that in addition to learning some incumbents would not seek another term, she had other reasons for running.

“I’ve become more and more disturbed with attacks on public education in different parts of this country, and trans kids are targets of not just harassment in schools but of discriminatory state laws,” Marshall said. “I wanted to stand up.”

Bridget Hynes, director of Upward Bound—a UMass-run program that supports low-income and first generation students in their academic development and college-readiness—first considered running for school committee when her son brought her to a meeting last spring. She said she witnessed “unforced errors” and felt that the committee was not always listening as well as it could to the community. 

“It occurred to me that a lot of the work I’ve done in education is built around helping people listen to and include perspectives that are different than their own. I didn’t think some people on the committee at the time had the skills to do that. I took out papers to run at that point,” Hynes said. 

Marshall and Hynes, while both frustrated with the district’s recent turmoil, did not always agree about who or what was to blame. 

Marshall looked at supervision and enforcement of policy surrounding bullying and harassment as a potential cause for the district’s failure to protect trans students. She suggested that while the district may have the right guidelines in place, there may be inconsistencies in “supervision and enforcement.” 

Marshall emphasized the school committee’s need to ask questions of the administration and principals to better understand the implementation of school policies and how students are made aware of them.

“We seem to have all the right policies. I believe it is the case that they were not uniformly followed,” Marshall said. “We need to make sure the policies are working, not just that they’re spelled out and available on a website.”

Marshall said she is friendly with some of the departed school committee members and that she sympathized with elected officials having to manage “outrage” on behalf of community members. 

“My impression is that people didn’t believe that the school committee members were horrified and upset and wanted to change the situation, so it was just exhausting for them to be yelled at all the time,” she said.

Hynes felt differently, noting that she was one of the people this past spring concerned with the committee and the lack of action she perceived.

“We saw the limitations of a certain mindset of ‘just trust us’, when we were past the point of having trust in the community,” Hynes said. 

Hynes acknowledged that it might be hard to be a public official, and to hear feedback on your performance or on shortcomings, but when community members feel “they aren’t being heard, they raise their voices louder.” She said she sees herself as someone who will “stick with it” when things get hard, “for the good of the community.”

Hynes also questioned the policies themselves and said she supports the development of a subcommittee on improving school policy to be more inclusive and welcoming.

Additionally, she thinks the district should have “a rapid response team to handle bullying, bias incidents, and harassment reports,” believing it would “prevent some of the issues that arise with one staff member not taking an incident or pattern of incidents seriously.” 

“My guess is if this group of students faced this, they’re not the only group of students who’s faced this, so I want us to be looking at the policies and procedures [more closely to interrupt] bias and harassment,” Hynes said. 

The new members also shared priorities for action they wanted the school committee to take, centering around approving budgets for the regional and elementary school systems and hiring a new superintendent. 

In addition to typical agenda items, they shared synergistic goals including building positive relationships with each other and reestablishing trust, both within the committee and between the committee and town. 

“People are coming and going, there are a lot of transitions. I’m pretty sure we share the goals of working together as a new committee and demonstrating to the public our commitment to our values,” Marshall said. “We should do as much of the work in the public eye as possible.”

Hynes echoed this sentiment, calling for the committee to better involve students and families with the committee’s work; she also believed the committee should be active in repairing the trust of the public.

“We have amazing teachers, we have amazing families and young people. It’s really a beautiful community,” Hynes said. “I want all those voices to feel welcomed at the table.”