On Friday February 13th I went to a special session of the District 201 school board in support of a teacher who had been suspended for using a teaching tool that is peer reviewed and well accepted. This is my letter back to the board which I read at the tonight. --------
In the fall of 2015 my oldest child was a freshman at Belleville West. That year the school’s “One Book, One School” program had selected the novella “A Monster Calls.” In the book the protagonist is dealing with feelings of abandonment from a parent who is not present, estrangement and betrayal from a friend, bullying from a peer, and the grief and anger of living with a parent dying of a terminal illness. In the end the protagonist must deal with the complexities of his feelings toward all these people, and more importantly the complexity of feelings toward himself. This novella could not have come into my child’s life at a more appropriate time. She was wrestling with many of the same and other similar complexities going on in our family life at home. It was from the pages of that book that my daughter and I had many real, raw, hard conversations, disagreements, and deeper understandings of ourselves and each other. I am forever grateful to the teachers who recognized that life is messy, and avoiding teaching the complexities of emotion, morality and community to their students would do them no service.
Between the fall of 2015 and Spring of 2024 I had three children pass through the halls, classrooms, and faculty of Belleville West. In that time they each brought home many assignments, books, and ideals that were designed to instruct them on lessons far more important than just facts, the lessons of identity, responsibility, moral understanding, community roles, and so much more. The lessons were taught by instructors my children adored, and instructors my children could barely tolerate. The lessons were taught by instructors who ideologically aligned with the values we were teaching at home, and instructors who ideologically challenged those ideas learned at home. It was under the direction of their English, Social Studies, Music and other teachers that they were equipped to challenge ideas critically and discover their own understandings of complex issues. I was blessed as a parent to put my kids through District 201 under the leadership of a Superintendent who encouraged their faculty to inspire and teach this way.
My experience as a parent in District 201, is not where my experience with the district begins, as I myself graduated from Belleville East in 1993. As a student at Belleville East I was very active in the theatre department, the school newspaper, the Young Republicans, and the Ecology Club. It was across these very ideologically different activities and my classroom instructors that I, like my kids, learned the tools to really think critically and find my own values and sense of identity in the world. Like my children’s experience, District 201 was a place where I was fortunate to be taught by instructors who challenged us to learn more than simply facts, rather to see the variety of perspectives each situation offers.
On Friday I sat through the special session as you considered the termination of one teacher, after already forcing the resignation of another. As I was outside the meeting a small child that I am friends with gave me a rock and told me, “Mr Kevin, I found this rock for you.” I took the stone thanking my small friend and started to think about how this entire hearing stemmed from the old idiom of casting stones. I know from the social media posts by others that this all starts over a question from the Moral Foundations Questionnaire that a student screen shotted and sent home. I, being the kind of person I am, wanted to experience the test myself before I formed any thoughts on the single question removed from its context. In the context of the full questionnaire I almost missed it. Answering and moving along without even noticing that this was the question which caused so many BIG reactions on social media, and caused a Superintendent to suspend and seek punitive damages against two instructors.
One parent cast a stone, a few others joined in on social media throwing their own, and the district administrators decided that rather than protecting their instructors they would pick these stones up themselves and beam them directly at their faculty.
This parent’s fear is not isolated to our District. Social Media has amplified the voices of panicked parents across the country. This situation, did not even seem like an angry mob, instead the concern appears to have originated with a single parent. Rather than approaching it as an opportunity for dialogue and clarification, the district’s response felt precautionary and disciplinary in nature. While I understand the desire to prevent issues from escalating, the manner in which this was handled has contributed to increased fear and anxiety among staff. That fear, which is in a battle for control across the country, is already constricting the scope of how we teach and what we teach. That fear is forcing out all the complexity and nuance. District 201 can be a place where our leaders respond to individual concerns in ways that protect the district while also reinforcing trust and stability within our faculty.
Math and science tend to be more exempt from this fear-based control as their answers are fixed and based on constants, but this is not the case with the humanities because humans are not easy- not as individuals or together. The humanities are pushed under this microscope because they teach about the messiness of being human, learning to hold the truths of multiple perspectives at one time and finding our own moral compass amidst them. In the absence of these learnings our lens shrinks in fear, allowing no more than 1 myopic truth at a time creating the black and white binary that plagues our country today. The humanities are where individuals learn to see their role in the larger systems of our communities.
We live in a world today that is more politically divided than ever before. The national debates of our day revolve around child trafficking, treatment of immigrants, rights of individuals to protest and bear arms, and so many other questions whose answers will define the identity of us as a people for 100 years.
It is now more than ever that we need our high schools to be staffed by teachers who are not only free, but empowered, to teach their students HOW to explore complex issues. We do not need administrators who use the fear of mobs to wield their power over the faculty. It is now more necessary than ever to have an administration that sees themselves as protectors of the trained professionals who are leading our classroom communities through a very complicated world.
My 3 older children have passed their time in this district, but as I think about my six year at home who will begin her time in the district nine years from now, I am forced to ask the question does District 201 want to be the place it has been for generations, a place where teachers are empowered to teach?
Like the persistent calling from the monster in that book from my daughter’s freshman year, I am here today to ask my own question of this board. Will the administrators today be the people who amplify fear and wield control or be the ones to protect the future of academic freedom within our community?
