MVRHS Principal Sara Dingledy deserves praise for standing up and speaking her mind in front of the high school committee this week, asking to please find a way to compromise on the turf debate.
She spoke for the school staff and students, and also for the Islanders who are fed up with this ongoing battle, and want it to end. It was a proverbial mic drop at Monday’s meeting.
To stand up to her own governing board took courage, which is what the Island needs at this time.
In her comments Monday, Dingledy urged the committee to turn their attention to a much larger and much more significant project: the overhaul of the school building.
Replacing a school building is a once-in-a-generation project that will be costly and important; Islanders will want all the help they can get to fund it. With the state’s help, they will get that. But the project will need a clear message from voters if they want that aid, and the turf debate, as it has in the past, threatens to derail those plans.
As it stands now, the committee can proceed with building a synthetic turf field based on a recent court decision — if it moves through the Martha’s Vineyard Commission and other proper channels — even though the Oak Bluffs planning board has filed an appeal of that decision. If the planning board wins its appeal, it’s unclear what would happen to the turf field if it were to be built in the interim; meanwhile, the Oak Bluffs health board is considering its own temporary ban on all artificial turf fields as a means of rebuffing the school committee’s efforts and preserving the Island’s drinking water. And voters are four town meetings have made their remarks clear that they don’t like how the field is proceeding.
Aside from addressing the building project, the principal told the committee on Monday that staff morale at the high school has been suffering, with the school getting clumped together in the eyes of the public with the school committee’s decisions as the debate plays out in the media.
School committees, and governing boards in general, are the leadership of their institutions. If they make unpopular decisions, that is reflected on the staff. If they cling to a project no-holds-barred, they bring the school’s staff down with them.
The clearest example of this came at town meeting season in May. Voters, right or wrong, were frustrated with a school committee bent on pursuing the turf debate through the courts and spending taxpayer money to do so. Using their only actionable recourse available, voters held the school’s budget ransom, hoping to force the hand of the school committee to drop its legal battle.
As voiced by teachers on town meeting floor last year and Dingledy on Monday, that had educators wondering if funding would come through for some programs.
Yet the turf debate rages on, and educators are worried again that their budgets will be the subject of another political debate as we head into town meeting season.
Most recently, and what seemed to prompt Dingeldy’s comments on Monday, there’s been a lack of transparency. Three days before Christmas, a demolition permit was filed at Oak Bluffs town hall for the high school’s athletic field, a preliminary step in launching the field project. The demo permit was filed despite the school not having funding to complete the project.
Dingledy said that she was not made aware of the plan. She sent an email to staff when news broke — two weeks after the permit was filed — explaining that she had nothing to do with it. A high school principal not being informed that plans are in the making for her school’s field to get ripped up is a bad look.
When transparency is compromised, morale suffers; the workforce suffers. There’s potential for attrition, and hiring staff — already difficult on an Island — can be impacted. Most importantly, there’s an impact on the quality of education.
The best thing that the school committee can do as it enters the planning stages for a building overhaul, and with morale weighing in, is to put the turf debate in their rearview window. School committee members have the opportunity to step up and be leaders. They can very easily drop their plans for a synthetic field, and get us out of this mess. By agreeing to grass, a new track could be built with relatively minor permitting.
A pro-turf advocate might argue, Well, Oak Bluffs and the two members who voted to appeal the decision could drop their lawsuit, and their concerns about PFAS; and the health board in Oak Bluffs could drop its proposal for a temporary moratorium on turf fields; and the up-Island voters could drop their concerns as well.
But those decisions are out of the hands of the school committee. They can do what they can control, though, and say, Enough. Already.
