You Guest It: Reaffirming Our Community Norms

In our schools, when there is a transgression of school values, we pause to discuss what happened, to ensure that all understand how the act violated our norms, to reflect on who was impacted by the event, and to work together to prevent future transgressions. When a transgression occurs outside of school and violates our community values, it’s only appropriate to call out the violation, reflect on what happened, and hopefully prevent the behavior from happening in the future.

Last week, a ninth-grade student went door-to-door selling holiday wreaths as part of a Monomoy robotics team fundraiser. The schools have a policy against door-to-door sales and so do our towns, but the boy didn’t know this. There is something to be said about the boy's entrepreneurial spirit and his love for robotics, two traits that will serve him well in the future. His salesmanship was not the significant violation of community norms; rather, it’s what happened next.

For whatever reason, one homeowner chose to post the video and audio from their doorbell camera of the boy at their front door on a community Facebook site and enabled others to comment on the video of the boy. Posting videos on Facebook of any child who is not your own seems like a breach of community norms, but why post this video of this child? It gets dark early this time of year, and perhaps having a kid knock on the door after dark while their parent was waiting in the car was unsettling, and the homeowner felt they needed to warn others. Or was it unsettling because the budding robotics entrepreneur knocking at the door happened to be Black? Nonetheless, the choice to post the video of a Black child at the door on a public forum then opened that boy up to comments that were a significant transgression of our community values. When a reply to the homeowner’s post read “another illegal to send back come January,” a few of our Monomoy staff called out the prejudice and hate.

The video and posts have been taken down, but it does not excuse the intolerance that surfaced in a community Facebook forum this past Friday. All it took was one child knocking on a door, trying to support his robotics team, to have implicit and explicit biases lying beneath the surface in our community bubble up. There is no place for prejudice and hate in our schools or our towns, and clearly, there is work to be done so that all feel valued, are welcomed and are treated with dignity. We must treat all members of our community better than this, particularly the most vulnerable.