08/21/2023
Four years ago, today, I decided to run for school committee for the second time (I lost by like 50 votes the first time). I believed in our district and, more importantly, in our town and it’s potential. Almost immediately after being sworn into office the spread of a virus took center stage in every aspect of life and disrupted everything, including and especially the education of our students.
As you can imagine, this was a very difficult time to a) work in the facilities department of a school district and b) serve on a school board, especially once we shut down…and I was in both positions.
The “COVID phase” of my service on the school committee taught me a lot about the people in this town. For good, for bad and otherwise, I saw this town in a far more clear light. Despite the very real safety obstacles and the, at times, hyperbolic public discourse, we pushed ahead and reopened schools after what was clearly far too long of a period of isolation for many of our students. After getting kids back into our schools, there was a period where I actually believed that we were doing important work and that we as a community had started to forge ahead in a positive direction. That feeling did not last long for me.
Negotiations had started with multiple unions representing the broad swath of people employed in our district. My task was to negotiate with the UFCW, the union representing our food service workers. Around the same time, the first round of negotiations with our teachers began. The major talking point in our community was the income of para educators and increasing their salaries, which I believed was the right thing to do. What started as a clearly logical perspective started to spiral out of the realm of reality and the worst part for me was, I understood how and why. I saw and heard a lot about raising the income of the “lowest paid” workers in our district while the people I was negotiating with were trying to get their salaries above the pending minimum wage increase. Their pay scale, at that time, was about $3 an hour under the pending state minimum wage increase. No one was talking about them, at all. A hot button issue for the workers in my department was getting reimbursed for shoes (which are a seriously important part of maintenance and custodial work) but the public conversation didn’t include those people. They were invisible and so was their cause.
At the start of the next election cycle, I was certain that I was done serving on the school committee. It was the folks who felt like no one would speak for them who convinced me to run again. I did and I won the right to continue to serve on the school committee and even was elected to chair the regional school committee.
I’m going to refrain from reliving every last moment where my humility was challenged and where I had to remind myself that my faith in humanity was nonnegotiable. I will say that I was able to see this town in HD realness… I am not now nor was I naive when I moved here. I have always understood that the folks who feel the need to tell you that they’re your allies the most are the ones you need to watch the most and that Amherst was not immune to this phenomenon. I’ve even shared, jokingly, the story about how when I ran the first time, I knocked on the door of a house with a Black Lives Matter sign on the lawn, as the only black candidate for any public office (look it up, 100 percent true story) and was told (because we were on the opposite side of an issue that had nothing to do with school committee) to get the f@%k off of their lawn… Like, I saw the humor and also wasn’t shocked by it. I recall telling this story to someone who said that it shouldn’t have happened here because “we are better than that.” Realistically, we are no better than anyone else and not enough people here are honest enough with themselves to admit that.
When the most recent controversy broke at the middle school (reminder: the previous year’s controversial activity was mostly located in that same building) I watched to see if folks would believe that we were truly “better than this” or if we would all do some soul searching. Were we going to address all of the cultural issues playing out in that building? If so, we could probably start to unpack a great deal of what I (and pretty much anyone on the outside looking in) have seen as our biggest problem: this town believes it’s own hype and that, in and of itself, is why we will never actually become the “woketopia” we sell ourselves as. In other words, we aren’t woke, we’re sleep walking and calling it reality.
At the end of the school year, I started to think about where I have been most successful at maintaining my hope and faith in humanity. It turns out that actually interacting with the kids, that adults in our community like to use as fodder for their various beefs with each other, actually was far more fulfilling than any of my public service had been. The single greatest thing I did on school committee was giving a two minute speech before certifying the ARHS graduation and I already had the privilege of interacting with young folks on a day to day basis. I can’t count how many times our students have allowed me to be a bright light in their life and can’t begin to quantify how meaningful that has been for me.
I have had many endings throughout my life and most, if not all, have had some degree of sadness attached to them. Perhaps it’s a matter of age and experience or maybe it’s the details of this experience, but walking away from service to this town has not saddened me at all. I resigned from the Human Rights Commission last month and have been waiting to feel a sense of loss, but it hasn’t come yet. When I decided to end my service on the Amherst School Committee and on the Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee, I dug deep down to the bottom of my heart…and I felt nothing (if you get the reference, you get cool points lol). Seriously though, I don’t feel any sense of loss or sorrow, I feel joy in letting it all go.
As of August 21, 2023, I am no longer a member of the Amherst School Committee or the Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee… and I could not be happier about that fact.
Deuces,
Ben
