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Thoughts on the December 2023 incident at Du Bois Middle School over the book “Gender Queer”

About the publisher:

Although the public record appears to show that Peter Dillon, the Superintendent of the Berkshire Hills Regional School District, made significant errors in his response to the December 8, 2023 incident at WEB Du Bois Middle School (triggered by poorly substantiated allegations related to the book “Gender Queer”), it is typical of his integrity that he promptly publicly acknowledged those errors – long before the two investigative reports into the incident were even commissioned.

My overall opinion of Dillon’s 15 years as a senior school district administrator has not been tainted by this unfortunate incident and its aftermath. I continue to believe that he was by far the most competent principal the Berkshire Hills Regional School District (BHRSD) has had during the 29 school years I have lived in Great Barrington.

His error of judgment in not insisting on a search warrant before Officer O’Brien questioned an eighth-grade teacher and searched her classroom last December was unfortunate, but he is not a lawyer. He is an educator and a supervisor of many other educators and support staff. Ideally, our district’s officers would have a broad understanding of the legal procedures that may affect their jurisdiction, but that knowledge is irrelevant to what we pay them to do.

The documented conduct of the Great Barrington Police Chief and the Berkshire County District Attorney in handling the December 8 incident is a different story. The two released investigative reports and the text of the civil lawsuit filed in Springfield Federal District Court make it clear that the errors of the Great Barrington Police and the Berkshire County District Attorney in the December 8 incident were inexcusable, unlike Dr. Dillon’s errors that day.

The teacher was interrogated without the presence of a lawyer and without prior notice, and her classroom was searched without a court order because there was reasonable suspicion.

The conduct of our police chief and district attorney on December 8th appears to have violated generally accepted state and federal laws, the United States Constitution, and our public trust.

The incident report, prepared by attorney Kevin Kinney for the BHRSD School Committee, includes an email exchange from last December between Berkshire County District Attorney Timothy Shugrue and Assistant District Attorney Andrew Giarolo. In it, Shugrue wrote that there was an urgent need to immediately remove the “Gender Queer” book in question from the middle school on December 8 because he had seen pictures of just two pages of the book and its cover.

At Great Barrington’s annual town meeting on May 6, I said that a student who was then working as a high school English tutor would have failed the assignment had he submitted a book review on the same flimsy basis. I also said that the evidently poor quality of the initial investigation into the book Gender Queer begs the question: How flawed can other police and district attorney investigations in our region be, in situations that receive far less public attention than this one?

The lawsuit filed eight days later in federal court made it clear that the handling of the matter was even more clumsy and more blatantly illegal than was generally known at the time of my speech at the town hall meeting.

The total cost of the two commissioned reports to city and county taxpayers was $44,400.

Not having served on any board required to pay or oversee legal fees incurred on behalf of our fellow citizens since 2011, I have to assume that BHRSD School Board Chairman Steve Bannon and Peter Dillon’s May 24 statement to The Berkshire Edge was accurate: The $39,000 paid to the Kinne law firm “fully matched the cost of good legal advice in 2024.” I know that getting yourself (or others) into political trouble can cost you real money.

I imagine that the ultimate cost to taxpayers of the now mandatory legal responses to the federal lawsuit will far exceed the amounts paid to date.

It will be interesting to see what amount a judge or jury will award as civil damages for the eighth-grade teacher whose legal rights and respected professional work toward her students appear to have been so grossly abused on December 8 of last year.

Johannes Breasted
Great Barrington

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