Community Meeting Addresses Prejudice in Pittsfield Schools
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Around 60 community members gathered at Conte Community School on Monday night to discuss issues with prejudice in the district.
The event was hosted by the Pittsfield Public Schools in partnership with the Berkshire NAACP and the Westside Legends. It began with breaking bread in the school's cafeteria, and caregivers then expressed fears about children's safety due to bullying, a lack of support for children who need it the most, and teachers using discriminatory and racist language.
"One thing I've learned is that as we try to improve, things look really bad because we're being open about ways that we're trying to improve, and I think it's really important that we acknowledge that," interim Superintendent Latifah Phillips said, reflecting on her work in several other districts before coming to PPS last summer.
"It is very easy to stay at the surface and try to look really good, and it may look like others are better than us, when they're really just doing a better job of just kind of maintaining the status quo and sweeping things under the carpet."
Brett Random, the executive director of Berkshire County Head Start, wrote on her personal Facebook page that her daughter reported her math teacher, "used extremely offensive language including both a racial slur (n-word) and a homophobic slur (f-word) and then reportedly tried to push other students to repeat those words later in the day when students were questioning her on her behavior."
The school department confirmed that an eighth-grade teacher at the middle school was placed on leave.
The Berkshire Eagle, which first reported on the incident, identified the teacher as Rebecca Nitsche, and the teacher told the paper over the phone, "All I can tell you is it's not how it appears." Nitsche told the paper she repeated the words a student used while reporting the incident to another teacher because officials needed to know it happened.
Johanna Lenski, speaking as a special education surrogate parent and parent advocate, on Monday said there is a "deeply troubling" professional culture at Herberg that has allowed discriminatory, racist, non-inclusive, and ableist treatment of students.
She said a Black transgender student was called a "piss poor, punk, puke of a kid," and repeatedly and intentionally misgendered by one of the school's teachers, and then wrongfully accused of physically assaulting that teacher, which resulted in a 10-day suspension.
Another Herberg student with disabilities said the same staff member disclosed to an entire classroom that they lived in a group home and were in state Department of Children and Families' custody. When the teacher was asked to come to an individualized education program meeting for that student, Lenski said he "spent approximately 20 minutes attacking this child's character and portraying her as a problem, rather than a student in need of services and protection and support."
"This student was physically assaulted by two large groups of students on two different occasions. One incident reportedly was never documented at all, or was not documented. I asked for the documentation, and it was not there," she added.
"In another incident, despite the student sustaining head injuries and being outnumbered, administrators portrayed the disabled student as the aggressor instead of the victim."
A different attendee's child was reportedly told he "fits the profile of a criminal" and wasn't going anywhere by a Herberg administrator about four years ago, and after filing a complaint with the former superintendent, was advised to switch to Reid Middle School.
"You got soft, sweet kids that we're turning into hard individuals because people either don't want to do their job, they're frustrated with their job, they're understaffed, they're not trained," another caregiver said.
The parents of a Taconic High School student reported an issue last year with a teacher who was making racist remarks and centering education around President Donald Trump. While at the school representing Tapestry Health, she said the staff member at a parent-teacher conference asked if she was worried about losing her job.
"My older kids, who are now 22 and 25, also had the same teacher, where he evidently sent porn through a Zoom link, and he also used the n-word."
There were also reports of colorism between students of different races and cultural backgrounds, with no intervention from staff. Community members spoke about the importance of educating young people about the origins of hate speech so that they aren't hearing it from other people, in music, or on the internet, without context.
Erica Shrader, who has a child in high school, feels it will take a village to turn this around, and was saddened by the things she heard from district families.
"I want to repeat that we have to understand that we are broken, and the only thing that we can do at this point is to take the band aid off, is for us to get noisy, create good trouble, any cliches you can come up with," she said.
"It's time. It's past time to do it."
While she was disappointed with the way three incidents involving her child were handled over the past four years, Shrader is hopeful about the new district leadership and largely new School Committee.
Pittsfield High School teacher Janae Holloway offered the group some hope.
She and the school's assistant principal runs a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) group for students to gather support for one another.
"We talk a lot about racism and racism that happens both in our school and out in our community," she explained.
"I also have to have very hard conversations about colorism with them, because they don't necessarily know that Black and brown people can also be racist, so we have to have that hard discussion, and we talk about how we can fix it."
The first BIPOC listening session was held during the Student Voice Summit in December, and this month, the group will have a field trip to the NAACP. Holloway said it is important for all people to build community, but in particular, Black and brown students in primarily white institutions.
"I'm learning how to be a better teacher for them, but I also learn how to be a better black person in my community. So those groups are happening. We're trying our best," she said.
"Change takes time. I don't see every student, but I can tell you that I have not had lunch alone or with adults since I started working at PHS."
Shirley Edgerton, of the NAACP, pointed out that people can learn at any age. She hopes that PPS comes together as a community and learns from each other and our children, as well as reflecting on the last few decades and how the district can move forward to meet all children's needs equitably.
"We know what world we're living in right now, and I'm not going to get on my political bandwagon, so given where we are nationally, that does not mean that we're not impacted locally, so we need to have these genuine conversations," she said.
"We need to talk about change."
The hope is for Monday's meeting not to be a one-time session, Phillips said, but to open the dialogue about what students are experiencing in school, and what needs to be done to give them a better educational opportunity and educational space.
"We're really looking underneath and seeing what can we do differently so that our students are developing into young adults, young people who have a sense of themselves, have a sense of respect for themselves, for each other, and are leaving to transition into the community," she explained.
"As it also speaks to who we are as a community."
The district is going to use information gathered at this meeting to inform next steps. Attendees also filled out a survey at the end of the event.
Tags: community forum, herberg middle school, Pittsfield Public Schools, racism,
