The following letter was read aloud at the Feb. 23 meeting of the All-Island school committee.

On Sunday Feb. 19, at a community meeting attended by over 100 people, we listened as our Brazilian neighbors and friends described ongoing hate speech and aggression their children have been suffering in the Martha’s Vineyard public schools.

The incidents described all had a common thread: The children were singled out because they are immigrants, or the children of immigrants. We listened as their parents described how their children were being spat upon, called derogatory names, and told they and their families would be deported. These incidents are not isolated. They have occurred in almost every single school on this Island.

School districts across the United States are confronted with similar situations, as the normalization of derogatory language increases nationwide.

The anti-bullying policies and disciplinary practices in place in the MVYPS schools may be effective for addressing isolated, unrelated incidents of bullying, but they are clearly not implemented in a way that can address such a pervasive problem, and the school district has made no broad efforts to address these many incidents as related parts of a larger issue.

Hundreds of school districts across the country have issued clear, detailed statements supporting their immigrant and minority students and their families, have stressed the importance of supporting and promoting diversity, and have clearly reiterated a zero-tolerance policy for hate speech. These statements have been effective in communicating not just to students, but also to parents and community members, that diversity, inclusion and respect are core values of our schools, and that derogatory and hateful behavior will not be tolerated.

We call upon the school committee and superintendent to issue a clear, detailed, specific, and public statement of this nature addressed to students, families, and the community.

We call upon the school committee and superintendent to call assemblies in every school to clearly address the situation and communicate these commitments in a public way.

We call upon the school committee and superintendent to implement the recommendations set forth by the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers to adopt a K-12 Immigration Campus Safe Zone Resolution to protect students, support families, provide training for teachers and outline protocol for the district.

We call upon the school committee and superintendent to institute an internal reporting system throughout the district which makes it easy for students to report incidents of hate speech and immigration/minority/race-related bullying, and which requires these incidents to be reported up the chain of command, and retains the data in an organized way so that it can be analyzed to track the problem.

We call upon the school committee and superintendent to adopt the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance curriculum, or a similar curriculum, for instruction across the school district through all grades, to address systemic underpinnings of the problem.

We respectfully ask the school committee and superintendent to take swift and decisive action, and by doing so to clearly demonstrate that hate has no home on Martha’s Vineyard.

Irene Bright-Dumm
Oak Bluffs