Hartford
Social justice advocates hope that a permanent Hartford Committee on Racial Equity and Inclusion will carry on the work of an ad hoc committee that was disbanded earlier this year after completing its work of developing a plan to make the town more welcoming to people of color.
One of the key components of that plan was to create a permanent committee to continue identifying and addressing the factors that contribute to racial inequality, such as disparities in arrests and access to housing, education and employment.
The Selectboard approved the joint town and school committee about a month ago, but the School Board unveiled a significantly different version at its most recent meeting.
Allene Swienckowski, a member of the now-defunct ad hoc committee who focused on the recommendations for the school district, expressed frustrations with the pace of progress, as well as some of the School Board’s ideas.
“It’s distressing to me,” she said during a phone interview on Friday. “I know that they have a full plate … but a time period was quoted for another two months before this is actually resolved. And that means it’s not important (to them).”
Superintendent Tom DeBalsi said on Friday that the School Board is actually ahead of the six-month timeline it projected when first receiving the recommendations.
“The policy work is very intensive, as many school boards will tell you,” he said, and often involves many rounds of drafting and rewrites. “… We actually ‘fast tracked’ the recommendations because we knew there was concern on the part of the committee to get it done quickly so they could get back to work.”
The School Board’s version of the plan was drafted and presented during a May 23 meeting by member Peter Merrill, who chairs the board’s policy committee.
During the presentation, Merrill said many of his recommended changes were driven by “policy governance,” the unusual internal governance structure that the School Board adopted about 10 years ago.
“We have a number of policies that govern how we are supposed to act and what ways we can act,” Merrill said, according to CATV video of the meeting.
Policy governance, which has been embraced by a handful of Vermont school boards, is meant to provide a more clear distinction between the day-to-day responsibilities of the superintendent and the big-picture purview of the School Board.
In this case, Merrill said, it prevents the School Board from adopting one of the ad hoc committee’s recommendations — that the proposed permanent committee be allowed to make regular visits to the district’s schools under the supervision of administrators.
That would violate a policy that discourages the School Board, and its committees, from directly engaging with staff other than Superintendent DeBalsi.
“You certainly can negotiate with the superintendent on how you would interact,” Merrill told Swienckowski during the School Board meeting. “I can’t guarantee you on his behalf, but this is not a prohibition. … We can’t give abilities to others that we don’t have ourselves.”
Swienckowski said she found that to be “particularly disturbing,” and that it would prevent the committee from effectively monitoring the schools to verify recommendations are properly implemented.
“Our role is dependent on being able to walk into the schools with the administration,” she said.
“The administration is one thing. What really manifests in the schools themselves is completely different. There is a feel to any organization that you automatically know. You can feel it off the kids, and you can feel it off the teachers.”
DeBalsi said that allowing the committee to visit on a regular basis would be “very difficult.”
“Students are entitled to privacy in schools and need it to learn in a comfortable way. … Teachers have a collective bargaining agreement that governs how and when and by whom they will be observed and evaluated,” he said. School principals and administrators, he said, “also have very difficult jobs and depend on me and the school board to stay out of the way so they can get their work done.”
Swienckowski also took issue with Merrill striking a reference to “white privilege” from the list of contributing factors to racial inequality in the committee’s charge. “White privilege” is a term used to describe advantages that white people experience in society, such as the ability to walk around in a store without being suspected of theft.
During the meeting, Merrill characterized the term as a less-than-ideal way to describe a real phenomenon, and his draft omitted the first word so that it reads, simply, “privilege.”
“The concept (of white privilege) is entirely accurate,” Merrill said. “The problem I have is with the name because the ability to walk into a store and not have the detective in the store follow you around … isn’t a privilege. It’s a right that is something that every human being should have. To call it a privilege, I think, takes away from the fundamental idea that human beings need to be treated equally and fairly.”
But Swienckowski said on Friday that she was dissatisfied with both the change, and Merrill’s reasoning, which she said contradicts her experience as a black American.
“The reality is, he’s looking at his life and not people of color. He’s just looking at what should be instead of what is, for us. And it’s off-putting,” she said. “As well-meaning as he may be, he didn’t step out of his bubble to understand that what’s going on in our lives is rooted in white privilege.”
Policy governance also could prevent the School Board from approving a standing committee at all, Merrill said during his presentation, pointing out that it would violate several clauses, including one that says “committees will be used sparingly … and in an ad hoc capacity.”
“In the town government process, there are a significant number of standing committees that exist and they exist forever,” Merrill said. “We don’t do things that way in our governance process.”
Instead, Merrill said, the board re-establishes its committees every year after the March elections, and that members serve a maximum of one-year terms, shorter than the two- to three-year terms in the Selectboard version. Merrill said that, if the town and school can agree on the formation of a committee, he envisions it will have a long life.
“As long as the need is recognized, we’re going to keep doing it,” he said.
After the School Board voted unanimously to send its version of the committee to DeBalsi and Town Manager Leo Pullar for a reconciliation process, DeBalsi said he anticipated it would take one or two more School Board reviews to craft a version for final approval.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.