In December the Boston-based Disability Law Center rocked the Valley with a report about alleged physical and psychological abuse suffered by students at the Peck School in Holyoke. In the report, the protection and advocacy agency details a number of disturbing situations between staff and students. For refusing to move, a disabled child was reportedly thrown to the floor and slapped by a staff member. For resisting being put in restraints, the law center says, a student with disabilities says he was punched. Widespread misuse of restraints causing injury was also reported by at least 10 staff members to investigators.
But less than two years before the DLC began its investigation in May, Peck was being touted as a model school. Its then-principal Paul Hyry-Dermith was invited to Washington, D.C. to testify before Congress about the success his school had in improving culture, reducing fights, and connecting students with community resources.
What the hell happened?
In the wake of the Peck school news, people have been pointing fingers at teachers. All individuals who put physical and emotional bruises on children must be held responsible, but the teachers shouldn’t shoulder all the blame. Administrators, in particular former Superintendent Sergio Paez, turned the on-the-rise Peck school into a confusing, over-burdened education center with the highest concentration of students with emotional behavioral problems in the city. Paez left the school district when it went into receivership in 2015. In December he was offered a job as a superintendent in Minneapolis, but that school district has put contract negotiations on hold due to Paez’s potential involvement in the Peck scandal.
Holyoke education officials created the mess at Peck, and the teachers were left to figure out how to educate children within a distraught system.
To understand what happened to Peck, it is important to go back to the school’s creation in 2008. The building where Peck resides, 1916 Northampton St., has long been used by Holyoke as a school. In 2008, Holyoke combined an elementary school with an under-performing middle school to make Peck, a Full Service Community School, which means staff and faculty and community service providers work together to best aid students.
The transition was not entirely smooth, and a year later Peck was chosen as one of a handful of schools in Massachusetts to join the state Wraparound Zone three-year program. For this, the school received grant money and additional support from the state to connect students to outside support services. According to annual reports compiled by Wraparound Zone program researchers, instances of misbehavior and fighting were on the decline and teachers and students expressed having better, more trusting relationships with each other.
Meanwhile, the state ordered the city to disband its Center for Excellence alternative school for emotionally disabled students. The center sounds like something cooked up by Mr. Burns on The Simpsons, and it seems the state felt the same way. The Center for Excellence was ordered closed because state officials said it is improper for Holyoke to put all of its disabled students into one school.
Students attending the Center for Excellence also didn’t have any access to non-academic after-school programs or extracurriculars, as did students enrolled in the district’s other schools. So in 2013, several months after Paez was hired, the superintendent pushed for all Center for Excellence students to be moved to Peck. Some School Committee members balked at the idea and tried to come up with a plan to distribute the 130 students among five city schools. In the end, members decided that it would take too much time to come up with a five-school plan, and they put all those students in Peck. Peck, became a middle school, and its elementary school program was moved to the old Center for Excellence building.
At the deciding School Committee meeting, Mayor Alex Morse, who also chairs the School Committee, said this decision would dismantle the sense of community forged over the past four years at Peck. He was the lone dissenting vote. But Morse was right. A few months after the merger, the superintendent began getting complaints from parents concerned about bruises on their kids.
The 130 Center for Excellence students were transferred to Peck for the start of the 2013-14 school year. This was also the last year of the school’s participation in the state Wraparound Zone program. The WAZ, as it’s called, immediately noted a change when Center for Excellence students arrived. “There’s been really significant reduction [in behavioral issues] from the start of the year until recently,” notes the 2014 WAZ report.
In the first year of the consolidation there were 445 students enrolled at Peck. 197 of them, or 44 percent, were disciplined — meaning they received an in- or out-of-school suspension, according to the Massachusetts Department of Early and Secondary Education. In the year before the Center for Excellence and Peck joined together, Peck had an enrollment of 761 students, 191, or 31 percent, of whom were disciplined. At the Center for Excellence there were 177 students and 102 of them, or 57 percent, were disciplined that school year.
Peck has already made some changes to improve the school, including hiring a new principal and bringing in a private special education school to operate the program. Perhaps these changes have already improved Peck. Last year there were 450 students at Peck and only 64 or 14 percent of students were disciplined.
Peck still has a long way to go to rebuild trust with the community and students, but many of the same teachers who were able to turn around Peck through their hard work and assistance from the Wraparound Zone program are still there. Teachers who injured children must be held accountable, but we should seek to raise up the teachers who have been doing, and will continue to do, good work with emotionally disabled students who need their help.•
Contact Kristin Palpini at editor@valleyadvocate.com.
