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SouthwickSchools respond to parent complaints about lessons, tests

Date: 1/19/2022

SOUTHWICK – School administrators responded on Jan. 11 to parent complaints about biased and inappropriate content in lessons and tests in Southwick schools.

Jenny Sullivan, director of curriculum and instruction for the Southwick-Tolland-Granville Regional School District, answered questions from the School Committee about the materials being taught in the district and the process of forming a curriculum.

School Committee members had first addressed the issue at their Dec. 21 meeting, after complaints were received over an “implicit bias” quiz from Harvard University that was used in an English class in December. A parent of three district students said during that meeting that she had brought the quiz to the attention of Southwick Regional School Principal Joseph Turmel, who she said assured her it had subsequently been removed from the curriculum.

The parent said that there were also school assignments she found among her children’s work that asked about their sexual orientation, which she found inappropriate for the lower grades of high school.

School Committee Chair Robert Stevenson and other members of the committee raised questions to Superintendent Jennifer Willard and Sullivan over how such a quiz wound up in the curriculum for the English class in the first place. Sullivan was watching the Dec. 21 meeting from home, and returned to the Jan. 11 committee meeting with a presentation on how a curriculum is decided and how specific materials are chosen.

Sullivan detailed the general process of deciding a new curriculum or updating an existing one. All new curricula are reviewed by the Curricular Council, all texts and textbooks are approved by the school’s principal, and daily instructional materials are the sole responsibility of the teacher.

“We are not going around and giving teachers every text they will read and video they will watch,” said Sullivan, “But it isn’t [the] Wild West, these are highly educated people.”

She also went over the process for parents to make a complaint about materials being used in their child’s classroom, which begins with parents submitting a form explaining what they found offensive. If the school cannot resolve the complaint to the parent’s satisfaction, it can then be brought to the superintendent’s office to be reviewed.

Sullivan pointed out that one policy in place for the district when it comes to developing curricula is that they contribute to “providing safe learning environments for all members of the district community.” Southwick Regional School Assistant Principal Michael Pescitelli had just given a presentation to the committee on the Connections Program, in which he cited examples of bullying and bias among students in the district in recent years. Sullivan said that Pescitelli’s examples of bullying within the district provided the context for why such a policy is part of curriculum development in the first place.

“I wanted to call out the elephant in the room. I think a lot of the concerns that are being raised are because some of this work is now being evident in the schools,” said Sullivan on Jan. 11. “I think it is scaring some community members who are afraid we are indoctrinating students with Critical Race Theory, and we are not. We are just trying to make our schools a safe place for students, as we promised to do in our policy.”

Willard said after Sullivan’s presentation that she typically prefers to resolve any curriculum issues through conversations between the concerned parent and the teacher before needing to go through the formal process.

“In my six years here, nobody has ever asked me for a [complaint] form to fill out, because we have always been able to resolve any curricular issues through conversation,” said Willard.