DEFENDERS, CRITICS OF TETA, FLYNN SPEAK OUT
Outraged Boston Latin School staff and supporters will rally today in support of outgoing headmaster Lynne Mooney Teta and assistant headmaster Malcolm Flynn, even as black activists are blasting their leadership as out of touch with student complaints about racial tensions.
Backers of Teta and Flynn — who both resigned amid a federal civil rights probe of racial tension at the elite exam school — pushed back at the firestorm of criticism behind their departures, launching a #WeAreBLS Twitter campaign to highlight the duo’s accomplishments, and scheduled a 10:30 a.m. rally at the school.
Flynn, BLS’s longtime disciplinarian, held court on the school’s front steps after a press conference by Mayor Martin J. Walsh and Schools Superintendent Tommy Chang was cut short by teachers bellowing support for the departing school leaders.
Flynn said he’s “not worried” about the federal investigation and faulted black leaders for stirring the pot, namely Michael Curry of the Boston NAACP, Darnell Williams of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts and Kevin Peterson of the New Democracy Coalition.
“I’ve never seen them here,” Flynn said. “They don’t know what this school is like, but they spread the message. They’re telling you these children are in fear in this school. It is not true.”
Williams, who said he’s been to the school “multiple times,” said he has been advocating for BLS students and parents past and present who have came to community leaders with stories of racial hostility and insensitivity following a #BlackAtBLS Twitter campaign
launched in January.
“That’s part of the what the problem is, you’ve got people who refuse to accept the feedback and take the feedback as personal,” Williams said.
Peterson also took umbrage with Flynn, saying that BLS is a “public institution that belongs to all of us” and that “any effort to uncover racism or injury to students in our Boston Public Schools is an effort that’s worthwhile.”
“I’m saddened that Mr. Flynn feels as if the Boston Latin School is a private institution about which he has a certain sovereignty,” Peterson said.
Curry said that he too has visited the school “on many occasions” and was guest speaker for the student group BLS BLACK last year.
“He clearly doesn’t understand that I’m doing my job as a civil rights activist who got complaints from students, parents, alum and others,” Curry said of Flynn. “I wish he had done his job, then we wouldn’t be here, and he would still have a job.”
As quoted in yesterday’s Herald, Teta blamed “others outside” BLS in her resignation letter for “unfairly” judging the school’s efforts to fix racial discord.
Flynn, who’s been at Boston Latin for more than a half-century, dismissed as “garbage” a forum community leaders organized earlier this year where students and parents were asked to submit details about any racially charged incidents they’ve experienced at the school, all of which the district’s Office of Equity investigated.
“People were anonymously reporting stuff that they thought might have bothered somebody else, because they couldn’t think of anything that bothered them,” Flynn said. “This was a lot of the garbage that we’ve been trying to look at.”
Flynn and his supporters repeatedly faulted Walsh and Chang for not stressing that a white student who threatened a black and referenced lynching in 2014 — which an equity probe found BLS did not handle properly — was in fact disciplined by the school.
“That’s what’s killing us,” Flynn said. “This whole thing could have been stopped in February with a simple statement, ‘Yes, they did something, we’re not happy with what they did, we think they should have done a lot more, we’re going to work with them going forward,’ — that’s all that was needed. And I would still have a job next year.”