Animus over middle school naming feeding baseless attacks on leaders
My mom knew that no solution would make everyone happy. But she told me that good governance requires compromise.
As a junior at Acton-Carlisle High School, what I see in our schools are hallways full of kind, tolerant, and inclusive students, teachers who genuinely care, and classes that challenge us. So when I hear of adults constantly standing up at School Committee meetings saying our schools are broken, it feels surreal. What they describe is totally inaccurate.
My mom was the School Committee chair during the middle school renaming process. I watched her agonize over how to find compromise when parents were pleading, “Please don’t rename CMS,” while another group of older residents pushed for the name “Ellen Garrison.” My mom knew that no solution would make everyone happy. But she told me that good governance requires compromise. She used examples from national politics — like the ACA — to show that leadership means finding middle ground, not just standing on principle.
As a CMS student in 2023, I wondered why this group of older people cared so deeply about the name of my school. From my perspective, the Ellen Garrison School didn’t seem to fit because it didn’t include anything about Acton, the community our school represents. I was on the CMS baseball team. When we played Stony Brook middle school, our team assumed it was some random private school. Little did we know it was Westford’s public middle school. I believe it is important to represent your community in a school, as did my friends.
Two years later, the same people who wanted the school named for Ellen Garrison are angry because they didn’t get their way. And now they’re targeting my mom’s former colleagues, and making it seem like Acton schools are terrible. I wish they’d stop. My mom and her old colleagues served for the right reasons — to make our schools better, and they are.
Fox Anderson
Park Lane
