Striving to Adapt to Our Greatest Challenge

This post was originally published as the Superintendent's Corner column in the Fall 2020 edition of the Shrewsbury School Journal

As I write this in mid-November, we are all continuing to experience a momentous time in history, as our nation grapples with several crises simultaneously: the resurgent COVID-19 pandemic; ongoing calls for racial justice and equity; an economy that has created difficulties for many and uncertainty for all; and a great political division exacerbated by the national election and its aftermath. All of these crises are affecting our public schools in the U.S., Massachusetts, and right here in Shrewsbury.

While public education has always been a crucial component of society, it hasn’t typically received the attention or support it deserves. The pandemic has reminded us all that schools are critically important not only for the academic development of our youth, but also for their social, emotional, and physical well-being. The forced closure of schools last spring also made clear the importance of schools to the functioning of families and communities, including the ability of parents to work.

Navigating these challenging times has not been easy for anyone. Families are struggling to balance working and caring for and helping to educate their children who cannot be in school full time, due to limited school capacity because of physical distancing for safety. Educators are performing the most difficult work they have ever done, as our school district is juggling the education of four distinct groups of students simultaneously: two cohorts of students who alternate coming to school in person for part of the week who then must be provided with learning opportunities at home when they aren’t in school; a cohort of students with significant needs who are in school almost all week and require highly specialized programming; and a group of students whose families opted to have them learn entirely remotely from home.

On top of the complexity of the educational program, there continues to be disagreements across countries, states, and communities regarding how schools should be operating during the pandemic. As stated in a recent New York Times article, the decision-making process that school districts have been faced with regarding whether and how to reopen schools “reflects a divisive debate raging in almost every country over the importance of reopening schools while the outbreak grinds on. That fight has sometimes seen parents, teachers, politicians and epidemiologists stake out conflicting positions and has raised difficult questions about the health threats of returning schoolchildren to classrooms — and the educational and economic risks of keeping them out.” Disagreements about what schools should be doing are amplified by the fact that people’s tolerance for risk varies greatly, and have a range of opinions regarding which of the risks concern them the most.

Since the virus emerged last March, our school district has focused on how we can best provide a safe and healthy environment for all of our students and staff while pursuing our mission to promote the well-being of everyone in our school community and enabling high levels of learning. We have sought the best and most recent medical and public health guidance from experts, which naturally continues to evolve. We have empowered our staff – whose dedication and expertise are unsurpassed in my eyes – to essentially reinvent many aspects of how to best educate children given the conditions we face. We have reached out to our families to determine what is working and what is challenging so that we can try to provide the best support possible. And all of this has required extraordinary effort that has challenged all of us like never before.

I am proud of how our schools have adapted to the formidable challenges that we have experienced and continue to face. I am worried that the level of effort required to do this work well is becoming difficult to sustain, and so we must be clear about our priorities and realistic about our limits. I am confident that our students will get the best of which our schools are capable, and I ask everyone in the Shrewsbury community for your continued support as we strive to meet the demands placed upon us during this unprecedented time.

Refusing to Lose

These were my graduation remarks to the Shrewsbury High School Class of 2020, which were recorded on May 20, 2020 and broadcast on June 4, 2020.

Members of the School Committee; administrators, faculty, and staff; parents, family, and friends; and, most importantly, members of the Class of 2020 – it is an honor and a privilege to address you this evening.

I truly wish I were looking out at you in person right now. While graduation is always a very special event for me as superintendent, this year it is doubly so. As many of you know, my oldest daughter, Sheila, is a senior, and so I feel twice the pride I typically have for a graduating class. As your superintendent, I am very proud of all that you have accomplished as students. As a Class of 2020 parent who has watched you grow up, my pride and affection for you run very deep. Like my fellow parents, and like you, I have imagined this particular graduation ceremony many times with great anticipation, and it is disappointing that what we assumed we would all experience together cannot be.

But, like many things in life, we cannot choose our circumstances. We can, however, choose our response to those circumstances. Stephen Covey wrote that our ability to choose our response is extremely powerful, as “in our response lies our growth and our freedom.” The requirements to stay at home during this pandemic have made us feel an acute loss of one kind of freedom, but it is important to remember that nothing can take away our freedom to choose how we react to the challenges we face.

That’s not to say that choosing is easy, especially when the right choice is a difficult one to make. An author you are more familiar with, J.K. Rowling, once wrote: “Dark times lie ahead of us, and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.” Those words, spoken by Headmaster Albus Dumbledore to the students of Hogwarts about a fictional challenge, apply to you as well. We are living in an extremely challenging time, and over the course of your lives there inevitably will be others, some that affect all of society and some that will be personal to you. I am confident and proud that your education in Shrewsbury has equipped you well to make not only smart choices, but wise ones. Smart choices require using your head, but wise ones mostly require your heart.

As a class, I believe that you have shown tremendous heart in how you have achieved, competed, performed, and – most importantly – how you have supported and served others. Your class motto, “Refuse to lose,” represents the choices you have made to persevere, especially now. As I shared with the community recently, I believe that while it is true that you did lose celebrating your graduation in the traditional way because of this terrible pandemic, I hope and believe that you will refuse to allow these circumstances to define your class and yourselves. I urge you to choose to use this experience to become stronger, more resilient people who go through life with a greater appreciation for what so many of us take for granted – family and friends, health, the security of a home and a job, the opportunity to be educated and the many other opportunities that we all have living in this time and place – then you will not have lost, but gained.

Speaking from my heart, with great pride, I wish you all the very best. On behalf of everyone in the Shrewsbury Public Schools, congratulations on your graduation from Shrewsbury High School.

The Time is Right to Do What Is Right

June 3, 2020

Dear Shrewsbury Families, Colleagues, & Community Members,

I write to you because I feel it is important that I share my perspective, as your superintendent, regarding the crisis our nation is experiencing and how I believe our school community should respond.

Like you, I am deeply disturbed by the killing of George Floyd, and I am angered by the tragedies and injustices that have been suffered – in recent weeks and historically – by so many Black Americans and their families because of racism. 

I greatly respect those who have been exercising their constitutional right to peacefully assemble to protest George Floyd’s killing and racism in our country, and I am angered by those who have compromised their message through looting and violence.  I greatly respect the law enforcement officers who honorably serve and safeguard our communities, and I am angered by those who have abused their power and authority in ways that have harmed – and even unjustifiably killed – those whom they were sworn to protect.  It is my hope that we, as a society, will have the wisdom to protect the rights of all who act within the law and support the officers who respectfully enforce the law, while ensuring that all those who violate the law are fairly brought to justice. 

   

I am disappointed and disillusioned that the virus of racism continues to infect our country in insidious ways.  Any progress our nation has made to address racism over the past decades feels very fragile at this moment, and it is critical that we take collective action toward eradicating this disease that contaminates America’s soul.

As a young boy growing up in Massachusetts, I saw on the news the terrible convulsions Boston underwent during the busing era.  As an American history major in college, I learned about the tragic saga of African Americans throughout our republic’s history.   As a new teacher in Houston, Texas, I worked with veteran Black faculty members who had grown up going to segregated schools, which made the Jim Crow era much more tangible than what I had learned from books or films; and I taught many Black students and learned much more about their real lives, and the challenges they and their families faced, than I did from the media or popular culture.  Like so many of you, as a baseball fan and a history buff, I have been inspired by Jackie Robinson’s heroism.  Like so many of you, as a U2 fan, I have sung along with Bono about Martin Luther King’s pride in the name of love.

But none of those things mean that I truly understand what it is like to be Black in America.  And none of those things mean that I am doing enough, as a citizen and in my role as an educational leader, to address the problem of racism and prejudice in America that affects African Americans, as well as Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and other minority groups.  I need to do more and I need to do better.

There are many things that we already do in our schools to teach our students about racism.  In addition to what is taught in the classroom, there are also ongoing efforts, such as the annual Black History Month initiative at Shrewsbury High School, that address this difficult and complex topic.  But, if as a school community we want to truly live up to our stated core values of respect and equity, and prepare our students so that they can move our society to a better place, we need to do more and we need to do better. 

As educators, we need to do the work to become better informed about issues of race so that we can better model for and teach all of our students, and so that our school communities are not only inclusive but are actively anti-racist. As your superintendent, this starts with me, and I will be sharing my efforts as I seek to become better equipped to do this work.   

It is my hope that in our schools our students will not only learn about the history of racism and understand its impact on our society, but that they will also develop the character and will to do what is right, both now and when they become adults.  It is my hope that whatever their future roles may be – business people, doctors, construction workers, lawyers, counselors, accountants, soldiers, politicians, computer programmers, social workers, firefighters, nurses, teachers, police officers, and, most importantly, parents – they act in ways that create a more equitable society for everyone, one that lives up to our American aspirations for liberty and justice for all.

I’m sure that there will be many disagreements and much discomfort as we do this work, but that is no excuse to avoid it.  I am certain that some will feel we are not doing enough and some will feel that we shouldn’t do this work at all.  I am not going to worry about whether we will be judged for not being sufficiently “politically correct” – or criticized for being too much so.  What I am going to worry about is how we can improve in order to do what is right for our students and our community.  In order to do this I will need to find ways to listen to all of the diverse voices of our students, families, staff, and community, and to help us all collectively hear each other.

As I write this, when I look up I see a piece of artwork hung on my office wall, a photo of which is at the top of this message.  It is a graphic design by Layla Nayfeh, SHS Class of 2019, that was the winning entry in the SHS Black History Month art competition a few years ago.  It is an image of Ruby Bridges from the iconic Norman Rockwell painting, The Problem We All Live With, walking into her newly integrated school, silhouetted over the text of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, with another MLK quote layered over in script: “The time is always right to do what is right.”  

The time is right.  I hope that, together, we will find the wisdom – and the will – to do what is right.

Respectfully,

Joe Sawyer
Superintendent of Schools

Rising to an Unprecedented Challenge

This post was originally published as the Superintendent's Corner column in the Winter 2020 edition of the Shrewsbury School Journal

This Superintendent’s Corner would have been on a much different topic, but the COVID-19 pandemic became an emergency just prior to the time this edition of the School Journal would have gone to print. So, instead, I will share with the larger community some of what I have been communicating with our families and staff now that all of our schools are closed by order of Governor Baker until at least April 7, and all town buildings are closed to the public with business being conducted via phone and electronic communication. Please see our website at schools.shrewsburyma.gov for up-to-date information on our school district’s response to the pandemic.

I hope all of you reading this continue to be well. When I write this, there are still no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Shrewsbury, but with expanded testing beginning to happen I assume it is a matter of time until we have the first confirmed case within our community. I ask that you help protect our older family and friends, those with health conditions, first responders, and medical professionals by practicing social distancing.

Closing schools is a major interruption to our educational program that creates difficulties for our students, who rely on our schools not only for education but also for many aspects of their well-being, including social and emotional support and meals. This decision also places a significant burden on many families with regard to childcare. However, I believe that this has been the right thing to do with regard to the health and safety of our community.

I shared three key messages with the school community regarding how we are responding to this unprecedented and rapidly evolving crisis:

The health & well-being of students, families, & staff is priority #1.

This is an extraordinary time in history, and everyone in our community has a collective responsibility to respond to this challenge.

Even though our schools are closed, we will continue to support our students, families, and staff from a distance and empower our students with opportunities for learning.

With our schools closed for an extended period of time, we immediately began providing grab-and-go meals to needy families since school breakfasts and lunches are not available, and we are also partnering with St. Anne’s Human Services to ensure our students and their families have access to the food they need. To address students’ educational needs, our curriculum leaders and educators continue to work on determining ways to best provide learning opportunities while students are at home. I am grateful to our parents for helping their children stay engaged with learning activities at home, and I am grateful to our educators for connecting with students and families through technology and providing various learning options. This process will continue to evolve, and I appreciate everyone's patience as we work to do this effectively during a time when many students' families and staff's families are undergoing a significant amount of upheaval.

This crisis is creating health and financial difficulties for so many, and the unpredictability and fear regarding what might happen naturally can create stress, anxiety, and emotional and physical exhaustion. These are trying times, so it is important for us all to show empathy, patience, kindness, and goodwill toward one another, and to model these things for our children. If we do, courage, fortitude, and perseverance will follow.

This is an unprecedented and extraordinary time for all of us. I have always been proud to be a member of the Shrewsbury community, and I am confident that our collective response to this very challenging situation will be characterized by respect and support for one another. We will rise to this challenge, together.