There is continued fallout from a police investigation into a book about growing up gender queer at a Great Barrington, Massachusetts middle school. The intervention, approved by Berkshire Hills Regional School District Superintendent Peter Dillon, has been condemned by national LGBTQIA+ advocacy groups as well as district parents, students, and staff. Dillon, plus the town’s police chief and other Great Barrington leaders, have apologized for the episode and the district has approved an independent investigation. On Thursday, the Berkshire Hills Regional School District committee passed two resolutions calling for both a second investigation into the incident as well as managing the district’s relationship with law enforcement and academic freedom. WAMC spoke with Dillon Monday morning to find out more.
DILLON: I think it's sort of looking at the role of the school district and the school district administration in what happened, and then looking at the role of the Great Barrington police department in what happened, and which organization or which individuals followed which guidelines, and then, where are there guidelines that are unclear that we can refine and make better going forward?
WAMC: And what are your hopes for this potential second investigation that the town itself would launch alongside the district's own investigation?
Yeah, it's really more the school committee's hopes for it than mine. I think what they're hoping to do is understand the context, to reaffirm the partnership with a police department, but also set some clear guardrails around that partnership.
Now, what are your thoughts on this? You alluded to a moment ago that maybe you don't share quite the same goals as the committee.
No, I think I do, but they were really their resolutions. As I've shared in many previous meetings, I made a decision based on the information I had at the time, and I've apologized for that. I think the sort of the goal of policies is to articulate goals and processes, and what has a tendency to happen is, you can't anticipate all the nuances. What was particularly difficult about this one was typically, if a parent had a complaint about a text or a book, it will come to the school district, and the person who complained about this – we still don't know who that is – circumvented that process and that was inappropriate.
Let's talk about the second resolution around academic freedom- Break that down for us. What does it sound like, and what is the committee hoping it will accomplish for the district?
Yeah, I think their intention there is to reaffirm the rights and obligations of professional staff, teachers, librarians, and administrators to select high-quality, engaging materials for young people, and then to also reaffirm the process, if people question that, to go back to our existing process, which is to file a complaint, and then form a committee and review that. But I think their big intention was that we want to afford students lots of opportunities to engage in interesting and challenging and thought-provoking materials, and the resolution supports that.
Earlier this month, we heard from students currently at W.E.B Du Bois Middle School talk about experiencing homophobic bullying in the wake of all of this- I'm sure a lot of folks are interested to hear what the district did in response to that testimony at a district meeting earlier this month.
Yeah. So that was shared at the meeting, and it apparently had happened that day. We followed up on it very quickly, they found out who was involved in it, and while we don't talk about specific actions taken, they went through a process to address that. I think it's sort of common when there's a big community wide conversation about things like the book, or whatever it is, that there would be a little bit or maybe quite a bit of a backlash, and we're working through that. Different schools have approached it different ways. We're doing work with our own staff, and we're bringing in folks to support training, and we do a lot of work to support students.
Now one of the parallel conversations to this is about the core of the law itself that led to the book being examined or investigated by police, claims that it was counted as essentially harmful material to children versus arguments from national groups like GLAAD and the ACLU saying that, in fact, those are protected under law as educational materials. At this point, at the end of all of this, has the district or has your office sort of come down on an official ruling about how it's going to move forward with all of this back and forth about what exactly the law covers?
Yeah, I mean, I think the person that was making the complaint made an allegation that the book was obscene, and the ACLU and GLAAD have made a quite a compelling complaint that that the standards for literature are different and that the obscenity claim was a specious one.
And yeah, from your perspective, how does that sit?
I support it, and I think our challenge going forward is to look – and I don't think this is necessarily the case for this book, but – look at sort of the age appropriateness of a particular text, and that's a good conversation to have, right, and we have a process to form an appoint an ad hoc committee to review texts if and when parent or family member raises a concern about something.
We've heard a lot from parents in the district wanting to see this very clearly and transparently laid out accountability process as the community moves forward from this- What do you say to those folks? Do you feel like you're currently living up to those expectations of transparency?
I think we've worked very hard to try to correct and make amends for what happened on December 8th. I think we've got a ways to go. Part of that will be sharing updated and revised policies for public feedback and eventually adoption, and I think part of it will be continuing our ongoing work to do our best to support all students, particularly students who have historically been marginalized.
Moving forward, what's the next chapter in this? What should folks look forward to as the district continues to move forward in this?
I think the conclusion and sharing of the findings of the investigation, I think the updated policy, and then I think ongoing, embedded training and professional development for staff, and also opportunities, continued opportunities and supports for students and families.
Moving forward from this episode as well, there's the question of the safety of staff members in the district. Groups like Moms For Liberty who have pushed for this kind of political and legal action against the teaching of books like “Gender Queer” have often been described as extremists, and have been accused of threatening and harassing staff members. Knowing that Great Barrington now has played into some of that national narrative, is there anything in place to protect members of the district moving forward?
Yeah, that's a real concern, right, for staff, and one of our core beliefs that we talk about a lot in trainings and other meetings is around presuming positive intentions, and presuming positive intentions works really well when people actually have positive intentions. People don't always have positive intentions. So, I think over time we’ll be, we will try to uphold that value and be a little more sophisticated and skeptical as well.
