AMHERST — School staff members are calling on the Amherst, Amherst-Pelham Regional and Pelham school committees to bring back the School Equity Task Force following reported anti-Black incidents at the middle school this year and ongoing accusations of inappropriate behavior being made against Black educators in that building.

At Tuesday’s joint meeting of the committees that oversee the regional schools for Amherst, Pelham, Shutesbury and Leverett students and four elementary schools in Amherst and Pelham, Georgia Malcolm, the assistant to the athletic director, and Lamikco Magee, dean of students at the high school, asked that the task force be restored and given authority beyond its previous advisory role.

“Two recent incidents in our middle school underscore the urgent need for systemic accountability,” Malcolm said.

First, Malcolm said a teacher leading a civil rights lesson, rather than being able to have a meaningful discussion, instead was “met with surveillance, silencing and a clear message: stay in line or face consequences.”

“A real opportunity for dialogue and learning was shut down,” Malcolm said. “This wasn't a missed teaching moment, it was a targeted act of undermining an educator in the line of their work.”

The other incident took place during an assembly honoring Martin Luther King and to kick off Black History Month, when a teacher called the Black Lives Matter movement a terrorist organization. Malcolm said this caused harm, distortion and profound disrespect.

“These incidents are not isolated,” she said. “They reflect a larger, entrenched pattern of anti-Blackness, colorism and retaliation that exists in our schools, especially at the middle school. And we need to name that clearly.”

The task force was first created in 2014 to ease tensions after a math teacher at the high school received a string of racist notes and hostile threats were made against her.

In the years after those incidents involving a Black teacher, the task force offered input to the school committees and administration, including in 2017 when the regional school budget that was adopted included $70,000 in recommendations it made for equity programming and staffing. In 2020, just before the onset of the pandemic, the task force delivered a report focused on how to address discipline disparities among students of different races, and the need to improve restorative justice.

Magee said a lot of what needs to happen is around policy and around anti-racism and giving the superintendent a platform for adopting procedures that will work.

She said there has been a consistent and persistent cycle of hostilities, observing that almost all Black educators at the middle school have been accused of inappropriate behavior.

In addition to what happened to the math teacher a decade ago, 30 years ago the district lost a civil rights case brought by the NAACP.

The educators also are suggesting providing real anti-racism training rooted in history, building restorative systems that value reflection, not punishment and creating clear protocols for addressing staff harm and retaliation and establishing a “Teachable Moment Task Force” to support educators with their conversations.

Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.