Letter: A call for compassion in our schools, with each other

Posted 12/23/21

To the editor:

I attended the Dec. 13 School Committee meeting prepared to speak about compassion, but the meeting ended abruptly when a couple of audience members would not comply with the mask …

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Letter: A call for compassion in our schools, with each other

Posted

To the editor:

I attended the Dec. 13 School Committee meeting prepared to speak about compassion, but the meeting ended abruptly when a couple of audience members would not comply with the mask rule and chaos erupted. I offer the remarks I had prepared and hope we can rise to meet the challenges of this difficult moment.

Last week I called the school nurse with a complicated covid question. She wasn’t able to answer it and referred me to our pediatrician. I said “Ok, no problem, I’ll call him now.” She paused for a moment and then said, “Thank you so much for not yelling at me.”

Those words stuck with me, and the message behind them: My job is unbearable right now. I shared this story with parents who have kids in other schools in our district, and two of them had heard similar things from their own school nurses.

I started thinking about compassion, and wondering when we stopped feeling it for one another. I’m just as guilty. At the end of a recent School Committee meeting I approached Chairperson Marjorie McBride with a list of concerns, later realizing that she had been on crutches and I had missed the opportunity to express concern.

Many members of our community have been trying to express how deeply hurt they feel by statements and decisions made by School Committee members, words and actions that make minority students/families, faculty and staff feel like second-class citizens and which are out of touch with their firsthand experiences. What a missed opportunity to simply acknowledge the pain of that experience.

Instead, this message of “I feel hurt, I feel ostracized, I feel under attack, I feel discriminated against,” and the call to examine biases perpetuating the problem, is dismissed as a waste of time. It’s not surprising things have escalated. The ACLU has notified our School Committee that indeed we do have a problem. How will we choose to respond?

Bringing it back to our School Nurses, who are also saying “this hurts,” these incredibly hard working people are responsible for the wellbeing of 250 to 900 students during a pandemic, and carry the burden of communicating and overseeing guidelines on masking, testing, social distancing, and cleaning so that our school community and our greater community (from young children, to our elderly relatives in the nursing home) experience as little sickness and death as possible. Meanwhile, they are constantly being challenged, undermined, and apparently, berated by parts of our community.

I would like to call for our pandemic-weary community to dig deeper and practice patience, understanding and respect for these first responders. Let’s express gratitude for them this holiday season and honor them by masking up for the greater good of our community.

As we witness the School Committee climate becoming increasingly hostile and chaotic, we must be guided by common values. By having compassion for one another we will rise above any thoughts, beliefs, fears and resentments that divide us.

Sheila Dobbyn
15 Cottage St.

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