Dear Editor:
Mark Twain once quipped that when God was creating the world, He first made school boards and then went on to create everything else. Keeping with the tradition, Chelsea’s school board election started early this year.
I blundered into it one Thursday night in July at Sounds & Sights when my kids spotted cotton candy being hand-spun in front of the Common Grill. They got their treat and I got Ross Greenstein, school board candidate. Not knowing anything about anyone, I asked about his platform. He explained it involved “educating the kids, promoting the trades,” and “getting back to basics.”
I wasn’t sure what most of this meant and the kids were moving on to face-painting at the library. I remembered a hot-button school issue centered on a selection used in an AP English class from Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye last school year which caused a kerfuffle on the school board where one member threatened book-burning and other behaviors we don’t typically associate with life in this country. I wondered, if Greenstein had his druthers, would we be reading Toni Morrison? No, he said, we would not be.
I’ve never read The Bluest Eye but have examined the excerpt in question: Percola Breedlove feels ostracized at school because of body image issues tied to her racial make-up. It contains a blasphemous epithet, a possible sexual assault, a possible racial slur, and uses Mary Jane candies symbolically. I’m sure I’m missing something, but the general hysteria was that fourth graders were taking a deep dive into the Toni Morrison canon, while really, the only students scrutinizing one small part of it were practically, if not already, legal adults poised on the precipice of higher education.
These are old stories and I apologize if you sat through them again. Some undoubtedly feel talking about our differences or experiences is unnecessary, though I have yet to hear the restriction crowd talk about the beneficial demographic changes that have occurred since Chelsea was settled in the early 1800s, and which most of us should count ourselves as part of. Without looking at any official numbers, I can think of African- and Asian- and Indian- and Latin- and Native American and European families living here today, as well as those with parents and sons and daughters who belong to the LGBTQ+ community, though there are others I am forgetting.
So it follows that any school board candidate seriously wanting to “educate the kids” would prioritize exposure to resources that contextualize the change Chelsea’s experienced. Literature is one way to do that, and I truly don’t understand how involving a perspective different from one’s own is a bad thing. Nor can I think of any successful professional adults who haven’t had to consider someone of a different background. Why would we want our children’s education to preclude the challenge of trying get along with someone different than themselves? It usually ends up as interesting and enriching.
I’m always a little slow to catch on but I’ve gotten the feeling that Mr. Greenstein remains uninterested in this. In many ways, he’s the most active and outward face of a cadre of school board candidates—including Julianne Mallie, Tom Golding and John Piatt—who propose extensively limiting literature, and maintain that parents need to exert control over a district making political decisions “for” them rather than “with” them, a sleight of hand that supposedly allows school personnel to neglect their duties as mandatory reporters.
Their slogan, or at least the one they printed on a recent mailer, punctuation and all, is “Don’t Just Hope For Change Vote For Change”. This contrasts with the picture they’ve given us in autobiographical sketches that make them sound like reasonable, somewhat aloof, do-no-harm, almost milquetoast aspirants. They claim “Political neutrality” and “Positive leadership and transparency,” just the sort of people, I suppose, one wants on a school board.
But I’m not real sure what we would be changing by electing them, and if we even need to change what they say we do. I worry they’re offering a false choice and being rather disingenuous about it, particularly regarding their stance on literature, which they don’t seem to really want to discuss. I also don’t feel their conduct has been politically neutral, or overwhelmingly positive, or transparent.
They aren’t even aloof. In opposing the school’s “political” agenda, they’re making a political statement. “Improving student outcomes…For all students” isn’t exactly a neutral proposition either, not if we’re approaching each student in a developmentally appropriate way that accounts for their unique preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. I am further unsure how we would do this by limiting the resources that may be used to do it.
After my cotton candy encounter, I began following the Facebook page that represents these candidates, “Chelsea Supports Return to Learn.” While the Toni Morrison passage doesn’t make me squeamish, this page does. It has the usual stuff about the candidate forum and meet and greets, but there are also articles about why diversity training never works, books banned by other districts, opting out of social-emotional screening and opposition to Sue Shink.
One video involves the “horrible” amendments we’re voting on to either guarantee or constrain voting rights and women’s health care. I know how I feel about those issues—and you do too, I bet—but what’ve they to do with our kids’ education? Maybe someone can also explain why, on the same page, posters from Wayne and Oakland Counties have been attacking Chelsea candidates.
There is an alternative explanation that these out-of-area accounts are fake, not created and held by Russian hackers, but rather, politically motivated folks in Chelsea. Either local control is out the window, or transparency is. I can’t tell which, but it’s all unpalatable.
Things only got worse with that lewd and ludicrous notice appeared accusing candidates Henson, Fox, Craig and Moore of supporting “transexual” teachers. Behind the scenes, the Return to Learn folks got blamed for posting it, though one droned the opposition had set them up. Ms. Mallie called the flyer “disgusting and completely unacceptable,” but then suggested that her candidates were the prank’s real victims, not kids or teachers.
While there’s more backstory here, I don’t care to hear it. I’ve heard too much already. Nothing just described is positive, and the only thing transparent about it is that you can get on Facebook and Sun Times and see it all yourself. But the weirdness continues: Greenstein was cited by the county for not putting the proper information on his yard signs, and I felt bad for him until I remembered he had plenty of time to get his signs right and simply neglected to do so, and is acting rather above the rules.
If this is what “Tom, Ross, Juli & John,” as they signed their mailer, are bringing, I’m out.
If they want us to accept the narrative that CSD isn’t giving us our best education—which at least one of these candidates feels strongly about, since their kids attend private school—then they need to give us their best, which starts at getting “back to basics” on their own campaign, including honesty, integrity, compassion, timeliness, and due diligence.
I don’t appreciate their ridiculous charge of school district duplicity—there’s no evidence for it—and I suspect that my family’s Chelsea school experience is like most others’: we’ve been happy with our teachers and principals and counselors. We’ve felt listened to and supported. When things needed to be adjusted, they were, and quickly. It’s not a perfect world, but it’s better than they say, and none of the murky solutions they’ve proposed will fix any of our problems.
The Facebook group that supports Kate Henson, Dr. Glenn Fox, Michelle Craig and Dr. Scott Moore is creating the positive community experience. With the elaborate title “Support Chelsea Youth by Supporting Our Educators,” they also carry the usual stuff along with notifications of community events and congratulations to our sports teams, music programs and graduates, even to our new superintendent when he got his position. Sometimes, I find myself scrolling through to see what’s going on around town that I’ve missed. They even vet their posts and posters.
Dr Fox is the only candidate I really know. I count him a good friend, and he knows I wouldn’t vote for him if I didn’t think him right for the job. Glenn and I disagree quite often—he’s always wanting to build the coalition; I’m wanting to find compromise—but he is about the most thoughtful person I know. He is also one of the kindest. Our oldest children have been friends since preschool, and he’s always gracious and appropriate. He probably dislikes some of the tone I’ve taken here.
The biggest reason I am voting for Glenn though is that he’ll do his doggondest to represent you and your family. Whether you pull a purple or a red or a blue lever in the voting booth, or your kid identifies as Country or Goth or LGBTQ+; whether they play the cello or the piccolo or the radio, lacrosse or football or chess or are on the bowling league; no matter how they look, their background, their class schedule, grades or learning ability, Glenn understands the importance of resources and ideas. That’s why he wants to hear yours about Toni Morrison and Mark Twain and the curriculum, how your child’s education can be made better and how we should address our challenges.
He may disagree with you, but he’ll listen and you won’t have to yell. Joining with the other candidates endorsed by the Chelsea Education Association—Craig, Moore and Henson—they make for a strong team. It’s abundantly clear that each of these candidates want to give our kids the tools they need to be successful, with candor and without so many distractions.
I started out by quoting Mark Twain on school boards, a grouse rooted in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which since publication in 1885, has been banned more times by more school boards than anyone can count. It isn’t an historical example so much as another of restricting valuable and diverse views.
There are only four candidates who will advise that all our kids should be allowed to be themselves, that ideas undoubtedly relevant to their lives and world are worth discussing in a safe manner that respects guardrails, demands accountability, and identifies injustice, intolerance, and dishonesty. After all, this exactly what Huck Finn hits on, and probably, Bluest Eye, too. But educating this way is risky, especially when those students might realize that the other half of the candidates running are behaving badly.
