“Absence of Malice”
…is the name of a 1981 drama starring Paul Newman and Sally Field about journalistic ethics and how people’s lives can be damaged in the wake of the public being given only part of the story, even when everyone involved believes they’re doing their jobs properly. It’s a great film and I highly recommend it.
A few days ago I posted an entry titled “What’s the deal with the Bloomfield Hills School Board?” in which I laid out pretty much everything I knew about the controversy here in Bloomfield Hills surrounding a list made by one district parent who strongly supports school masking mandates of other parents in the district who they believed opposed such mandates.
“The List,” as it’s come to be known, consisted of 95 names (the local press reported it as “97 families” but most of the names are couples and 2 of the names were duplicates). The source of these names came from a bunch of Facebook comments agreeing to sign onto an open letter to be sent to BHS Superintendent Patrick Watson supporting a “mask-optional” school district policy for the 2021–2022 school year.
The parent who compiled the list chose to share it within a private WhatsApp chat group with an explicit request that it not be shared externally, and that it was only to be used for group members’ own reference. As Lt. Paul Schwab of the Bloomfield Township Police Department later stated:
“It was not intended to cause any disruption in the district, and it’s not politically motivated. This individual made the list because she didn’t want her kid hanging out with (unmasked students) after school, that’s all. We found out what was going on in a very short time, and when we found out who it was they were very cooperative. We didn’t have to do a lot of digging or get search warrants.”
Regardless of the original intent of the list, however, once the parent chose to share it with even one other person, they no longer had control over who else would see it. Someone shared it externally, and at some point someone altered the list, and others may have added or removed names after that. There could be a dozen different versions of it floating around by now.
It’s important to note that there’s one person in this entire debacle who hardly anyone has talked about: Whoever shared the original list outside of the private chat group against explicit requests not to do so. The problem is that no one has any idea who that actually is other than that person.
In addition, some unknown party edited the original list. Unfortunately, without knowing who that was, there’s no specific person to be angry at.
This caused quite an uproar within the BHSD community, eventually leading then-School Board President Paul Kolin to ask the BTPD to open up an investigation. Unfortunately, he did this without consulting the rest of the school board, which he was required to do by BHSD regulations. He also chose not to share any of his communications with the rest of the board, and to my knowledge still refuses to do so today for reasons unknown.
As an aside, here’s a summary of the specific violations cited by the rest of the board I mentioned in my public comment on Oct. 7th; there were a few others as well which I couldn’t include due to the 3:00 minute time constraint:
BHS Board Policy dictates that “the board acts as a whole and only at properly convened Board meetings. An individual Board member lacks independent authority and may not act for or on behalf of the Board unless they’ve been specifically delegated authority by the Board to act in a particular instance.”
The Code of Ethics states that “each Board member will recognize that they have no legal authority as an individual and that decisions can only be made by a majority vote at a public meeting of the Board and that they will take no private action that might compromise the Board or administration.”
It states that “the Board President will provide copies of School District-related correspondence to all other Board members.”
Board Procedures state that “all Board members will vote on all action items, and it’s the responsibility of the Board president to relay any pertinent information affecting the district to other Board members on a weekly basis.”
For these reasons, on September 23rd, the rest of the board unanimously voted to remove him from his position as board President, though he still serves on the school board as a trustee.
As I said in my Public Comment at the following BHS Board meeting on October 7th:
Posting “the list” was a well-intended but poorly-thought out decision made by one person. Sharing it outside of a private chat group was a poor decision made by someone else. I believe the way Kolin responded compounded both of these poor judgments. I don’t believe any of the three thought through the potential consequences of their actions.
I stand by this statement, and I still believe that the board made the right decision under the circumstances. Regardless of his intentions or motives, there was a fundamental breach of trust between Kolin and the other six members of the board which made it impossible for them to continue operating under that arrangement.
HOWEVER, I left out an important part of the story.
The impression which has been given in some of the news coverage of this issue, including by myself until now, is that since there was no malicious intent in the posting of the list to the private chat group, no crime committed, and that the list originated from an open letter opposing a masking mandate, that this meant this was a “no harm, no foul” situation:
1. Although technically a breach of some code or law may have occurred, there was no actual damage meriting punishment, apology or retribution.
“After all” the thinking goes, “these folks all willingly signed an open petition/letter opposing mask mandates, why would they have a problem with people knowing about it?”
At the opening of the Oct. 7th BHS Board meeting, around 15-20 district parents who support Paul Kolin, and who feel he was unjustly removed from the board Presidency, spoke up during the Public Comment period.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never heard of any school board trustee getting so much lavish praise from parents in the district, much less a board President, and I still honestly don’t claim to understand it. I’ve known Kolin somewhat for five years and I fail to see what they do, but for whatever reason, they think of him as the “heart and soul of BHS” etc etc…again, he’s still on the board, he’s just not in charge of it anymore.
(As another aside: Ironically, Paul Kolin himself was nowhere to be seen during the entire first Public Comment period…he left a few minutes into the board meeting and didn’t return until sometime later. One of his supporters said that he was leaving to “be with the students” which I guess is supposed to prove how dedicated he is to them, but that also kind of undercuts his duties as a Board of Education Trustee, given that this was a regularly-scheduled Board meeting which I presume he was supposed to be attending. But…I digress.)
Several of the parents who spoke are also those on “The List.”
After Public Comment ended and the meeting switched over to normal board business, I caught the attention of one of those parents. We stepped outside and were soon joined by perhaps 9–10 other Kolin supporters, most of whom were also on the list. And then…we talked.
We talked about real emotion, real pain and real anger.
For two solid hours.
For most of it there were about a dozen of us, including myself, one other parent who supports the boards’ decision, and around 10 Kolin supporters. Towards the end it dwindled down to 5 of us total. There was no microphone or camera on us (at least I don’t think anyone was recording), there was no news media or administration officials; just a bunch of suburban parents of K-12 schoolchildren who care deeply about their children’s well-being.
Throughout it all, though, we had something which is all too rare in these days of extreme political and social polarization: A real conversation.
They got to hear my perspective, but I had already laid out most of my POV in my prior Medium piece so I don’t know how much hearing it from me in person added to that.
I, however, learned several important things from them as well.
The first thing I learned is that not all of those on the list oppose masking mandates.
To be clear, in some cases this was a matter of semantics: There are some parents who said that they support mask-wearing, but just don’t feel it should be required.
Now, to me, this amounts to the same thing given that the point of wearing a mask during a pandemic is mostly for other peoples’ protection, not yours. Ultimately, however, you could debate this endlessly, and in the end it doesn’t really matter. For better or worse, they truly feel their views were misrepresented.
In at least one case, however, they said that they not only support masking, they literally support mask mandates (and even vaccine mandates, I believe, though that part of the discussion got sort of garbled at a few points).
One parent explained in detail her rationale for signing onto the letter. She pointed out that the letter to Mr. Watson dated back to late July, when the COVID-19 case and death rates were still at a fairly low rate in Oakland County, and BHSD was still presumably operating under the mitigation policies which Watson had put in place in late June.
Part of her point (I think) is that there may have been some folks on the list who opposed making mask-wearing mandatory at the time, but who might have changed their minds a few weeks later after the Delta variant really started to surge in Southeast Michigan.
The crux of her explanation was that she felt that District personnel were kind of all over the place even when it came to their own policies, telling a story of her children’s District summer camp experience (Or perhaps this was from last Spring? Sorry, I’m writing this all from memory*). Some policies allowed the younger kids to take “mask breaks” when outdoors, while some teachers apparently didn’t want the the kids to take the masks off for a break because it caused too much confusion/disruption to put them back on again, and so forth.
*Update: The parent has clarified that this was indeed from last spring, when the district changed their outdoor masking policy; she says families were given a choice if they wanted to allow their children to remove their mask outside, but some teachers weren’t allowing students to do so due to the extra complications they felt that would cause.
Basically, this parents’ rationale was that she wanted a mask mandate, but wanted the County to put it into place, not the District, reasoning that Oakland County Health Department personnel were better equipped to make such policy decisions than the School Board members.
Whether you agree with her reasoning or not, the bottom line is that you had at least one parent who said she supports mask mandates but was put on a list claiming that she opposed them.
There’s a line in Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues” which comes to mind (a great play and movie, by the way):
I learned a very important lesson that night.
People believe whatever they read.
Something magical happens once it’s put down on paper.
They figure no one would have gone to the trouble of writing it down if it wasn’t the truth.
The moment that “The List” was shared externally, it took on a life of its own. According to some of these parents, they, and in some cases their children, are being shunned by other families who assume that they’re unvaccinated and/or that they’ll refuse to wear a mask indoors, regardless of whether this is the case or not, and they blame this on the list being shared to the community at large.
Another parent, who says she puts in countless hours with the PTO and other school functions, insisted that she & her husband are vaccinated, they make sure their kids are masked indoors, and yet she’s faced scorn and suspicion from her friends & neighbors. She broke down in tears, and I didn’t sense any acting on her part. She was genuinely upset.
In short, this whole ugly incident and the way it’s been handled has opened up a deep well of pain and anger across the board.
The main point that the “list” parents want to convey is that, contrary to the views of the police, the school board, some of the media coverage and, yes, my own prior blog entry…this was not a “no harm, no foul” situation.
The police concluded there was no crime committed, but the fact remains that these parents hurt and anger is real. The irony, of course, is that this particular incident happened at the same time that public health officials and school board members around the state and country who support mask mandates are being subjected to literal threats of violence by anti-mask extremists.
Nevertheless, it’s real.
They’re angry at the list-maker for “playing the victim” and for not coming forward, and they’re angry at the other six members of the school board…not just for stripping Kolin of his authority, but for what they perceive (whether intentional or not) as a dismissive response by the board.
Towards the end, the conversation turned to a more positive note: We discussed what might be helpful going forward given how torn apart the BHSD community is over this issue. I have a few ideas, but I won’t get into that here.
As far as I’m concerned, unless there’s another significant development, this will be my final post on this incident.