Working group to shape Acton-Carlisle school climate reporting

A new working group will recommend how the Acton-Carlisle Regional District School Committee monitors school cultural climate and the district’s efforts to address bias and hate.

“If we’d been doing this really well [before now],” School Committee member Michael Williams said in a July 9 meeting, “the issues that have come up in the past might not have come up, because [the district] would have had a handle on them.”

The town’s focus on bias and hate increased last summer as the district faced a federal investigation into allegations that Acton-Carlisle High School for years had failed to adequately address antisemitism, prompting a Jewish student to transfer elsewhere.

The district has since reached a deal with the federal Department of Justice and agreed to update its policies on bias and hate incidents.

The district has also confronted other events, including racist graffiti found in a Acton-Carlisle High School restroom.

Finger on the pulse 

After debate over how the School Committee should monitor student prejudice and hate, the Climate and Culture Working Group has begun developing recommendations for how often the committee should receive updates and what information those reports should include.

“Are there other things that we need to be pulling together besides data and metrics so that we could have a useful conversation as a full School Committee?” Regional School Committee Chair Brian Waterson asked in the meeting. 

Members discussed using student surveys, input from student affinity groups like the Black Student Union and Spectrum, community feedback, and other data sources to create regular reports on school climate.

Along with Waterson and Williams, the first meeting included schools Superintendent Laurie Hunter; Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Andrew Nyamekye; K-8 School Committee Chair Sandeep Pisharody; and School Committee METCO Representative Michelle MacDougall.

Taking the temperature

Williams, who initially requested that reports on bias and hate incidents become a regular agenda item, said quantitative data alone will not provide a complete picture of school climate.

Drawing on his background as a surgeon, he compared the process to treating a patient.

“I can look at your lab data. I can look at your imaging studies, but if I’m not paying attention to the patient … I’m going to miss part of the picture,” Williams said.

He suggested supplementing data with recurring feedback from student affinity groups, METCO families, and community events to help gauge how students are experiencing the district’s policies throughout the year.

Hunter said school officials are already collecting information through tools such as the Youth Risk Behavior Survey and Panorama surveys and are looking for more ways to gauge student belonging and mental health. 

An A to an A+

At the end of the meeting, Nyamekye said the public conversation has become overly focused on individual incidents rather than the broader changes taking place in district schools.

“The narrative around this topic has often felt negative,” he said. 

While acknowledging the seriousness of bias incidents, Nyamekye said the district has made significant progress in creating an environment where students, families, and staff feel comfortable reporting them.

“We have truly changed the culture,” he said.

Pisharody echoed that sentiment, cautioning against beginning the work with the assumption that the district’s approach is failing.

“We can always do better,” he said, but added that improving what he said was an already strong system is often more difficult than making gains from a weaker starting point. “Going from an A to an A+ is a whole lot harder than going from a C to a B.”

The working group plans to meet again in late July or August with the goal of presenting recommendations to the full School Committee before regular climate and culture updates begin during the upcoming school year.