FAYETTEVILLE-MANLIUS SCHOOL DISTRICT – Centered around the district’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiative as well as its COVID-19-related protocols, the public comment period filled the first hour and a half of the Fayetteville-Manlius school board’s Aug. 9 meeting.
Manlius resident Kelly Ward voiced support for the DEI initiative when she stepped up to the podium.
“I believe that to provide a first-rate education in 2021 and beyond means making sure our students know that there are many stories that can be woven into this story of our country, and I think it’s past time to listen to them,” Ward said.
Grace Pierson, a 2020 graduate of F-M’s high school, said she was afforded the comfort of blending in as a newly enrolled student due to her “white privilege.”
“Black students don’t feel like they’re allowed to grow here,” Pierson said. “F-M’s culture doesn’t give them the space to learn and live. It is toxic.”
Leila Abdul-Malak, a 2019 graduate, said she loved going to school in the district despite being one of only a “handful” of black students in her grade.
She added, however, that the district is burdened by a “huge diversity problem,” as indicated by the decade she spent without seeing a “POC” teacher.
Christopher McKee of Manlius said students would benefit more from the “healthy debate and compromise” taught in civics classes than from a DEI initiative. He also said that learning about all 27 constitutional amendments as well as legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 would be useful.
Another speaker, who emigrated from China in 2002, said she has felt welcomed in the United States, thereby making the “shame for country” she witnesses from other citizens concerning.
Labeling DEI as an offshoot of Marxism, she said that although its tenets sound “loving,” they turn divisive in practice through the separation of students by skin color into the categories of oppressor and oppressed.
Chiming in beside her grandmother, local resident Gail Maddox, one student said she felt as though she was being made to attach wrongdoing to her skin color in the classroom.
During those same three allotted minutes, Maddox was the first speaker of the evening to turn attention to the school’s COVID protocols. Maddox equated the masking of schoolchildren to child abuse, since she said the COVID survival rate among children ages 0 to 14 is too high to necessitate excessive inhalation of carbon dioxide and resulting anxiety.
Michael Barfknecht, a father of three F-M students, said that parents should be the ones deciding whether their kids wear masks or get vaccinated, not the school board and teachers’ union. He also stated that suicide and depression rates are higher now among children and teenagers than they were prior to the March 2020 lockdowns.
“When did mental health get put on the back burner of school priorities?” Barfknecht asked the board of education. “This has always been a high priority, and now we’re just shrugging it off because of COVID?”
Dr. Travis Hobart, a pediatrics specialist, said during his time at the podium that the district should follow recommendations to take a “layered approach” to safety from COVID during the school year. He said that should include universal face masks, physical distancing rules and regular testing.
A parent of a soon-to-be second grader in the district, Hobart said students should be back in classrooms full-time but that the district owes it to them to keep the schools safe in the face of the “more severe” delta variant.
After mentioning that administration reprimanded him because of his refusal to wear a mask on school grounds, local Little League coach Joe Dunaway said during the public comment portion of the meeting that he would be running for a seat on the F-M school board in 2022 to serve “the underrepresented in the community.”
