The end of the Dec. 5 School Committee meeting confirmed something we might have assumed was true: The town’s 11-day teachers strike may be over, but tensions remain.
The most conspicuous moment arguably should never have had the chance to happen. Chair Jenn Schaeffner had adjourned the meeting, only to reopen it to give resident John DiPiano a chance to speak, apparently because his request had been overlooked during the public comment period at the beginning of the meeting.
At a time when the two sides in the labor dispute have pledged to look forward and work to build support for the Proposition 2 1/2 override that will be needed to fund the teachers’ new contract, DiPiano regrettably chose to look back, demanding an apology from four union leaders.
DiPiano’s comment caused one of the co-presidents of the Marblehead Education Association, Sally Shevory, to storm out of the Marblehead High School library, but not before expressing disgust with the School Committee’s negotiating team, Schaeffner and Sarah Fox.
“Stand up for people once in your life,” she demanded of the pair.
That followed two other outbursts earlier in the meeting, in which union members shouted at the committee, and Fox’s defensible but arguably unnecessarily antagonistic position that teachers should have no say in when missed school days would be made up. Educators, too, would be provided the survey he intended to send out on Dec. 10, interim Superintendent John Robidoux said.
The lingering hard feelings would come as no surprise to stakeholders in the Newton school district, which endured an 11-day strike of its own earlier this year. Though the strike was resolved in February, the wounds have yet to heal completely, school officials told the Current.
It was interesting to hear that Newton has invested time and presumably some money in its efforts to recover from the strike, engaging in “speed-of-trust workshops” to develop a “shared vocabulary” and forthcoming training for community members on how to have civil conversations led by the consulting firm Essential Partners.
While it may seem that there is little time — or money — to spare, our town leaders might do well to research whether Marblehead can avail itself of similar opportunities.
The key word here, of course, is “trust.”
As “The Speed of Trust” author Stephen M.R. Covey explains, “The simple, often overlooked fact is this: work gets done with and through people. There’s nothing more impactful on people, their work, and their performance, than trust.”
“Trust” is the word Select Board member Dan Fox recently reached for when describing what town officials would need to do to avoid a repeat of the failure of a general override in 2023.
“We need to build trust back up throughout the town, the schools, the town,” Fox said.
Fox’s colleague Alexa Singer noted the strides that the town has made towards fiscal transparency, the launch of its ClearGov online database.
But clearly, more work needs to be done.
Trust also can be built by demonstrating a willingness to listen to feedback and adapt to changing circumstances. To that end, the School Committee is to be commended for its decision to reverse course and hand the decommissioned Coffin School over to the town so that the property can be sold.
As for the plan to convert the Eveleth School into a dedicated early education center, Fox described it as a potential “revenue driver.” We would like to know just how much revenue we are talking about, but the waitlists to get into the town’s preschools do speak to an unmet need in the community, so the idea should not be immediately discounted.
Trust can also be built by modeling the behavior we would like to see in others. On that front, the words of teacher Ashley Skeffington are worth noting.
Skeffington says that as she has confronted lingering hard feelings over the strike and the months that led up to it, she has tried to remind herself that “generally speaking, people do the things they do because they care for their students, their families and for their communities.”
She continued, “If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, I think the road back is paved with grace and empathy. If we can manage that, we can finally shift our time and energy into making our schools the best that they can be.”
That sounds like a good first step to us.
