At the opening of their Tuesday meeting, several members of the Portland Board of Public Education responded to “unsettling” comments they received from the public regarding violence by students in the district.
The discussion stemmed from public reaction to a violent incident from last October involving Jemal Murph, the Lincoln Middle School Athletic Director.
Murph was accused of punching a student near Dougherty Field at an after-school soccer game, after telling several students to disperse from the area.
The incident, which was captured on cell phone video, shows several students pushing and shoving Murph, who retaliated with a punch to the student who knocked him down. He can then be heard on the video saying, “You wanna do this?” to the group of students.
Video of the incident below from WGME:
A public hearing regarding the potential termination of the athletic director was held before the Portland school board last Tuesday night, and lasted more than eight hours.
The teachers union claimed that Murph was defending himself during the incident.
An executive session of the school board in which they would have voted on whether or not to fire Murph scheduled for last Friday was canceled after the board and the union reached an agreement, and the matter was dismissed.
“We have been able to come to an agreement with Mr. Murph and his Union that at once recognizes the seriousness of the situation and also Mr. Murph’s past contribution to PPS, and therefore we will not be going forward with the recommendation that he be dismissed,” the board stated Friday afternoon.
At the board’s Tuesday meeting, Chair Sarah Lentz began with prepared remarks discussing the controversy and the public reaction to the violent incident.
“The last time we were in this room the energy was very different,” Lentz said. “It was pretty challenging and I think for everyone in the PPS Community this last week has been tough for a number of reasons.”
Lentz then began describing her upbringing in rural Indiana, saying that she “grew up with lesbian moms and gay dads,” and was bullied by her peers.
“It was painful, but it also gave me incredible motivation to help create safe and inclusive environments for young people so they would not have to experience the same things I did growing up,” she said.
Lentz said that during her time as chair of the school board she has had “anger and hate” directed at her and other members of the board, but that the public reaction in the last week to the students’ behavior in the October incident at Dougherty Field was different.
“I heard words used for our students that were harmful at best, and certainly hateful,” Lentz said. “Multiple people referring to our students in the collective as punks, hoodlums, thugs, mobs, terrorists and even inmates.”
The Portland school board chair admitted that “student behaviors have been increasing and escalating,” and that educators may be feeling unsafe or have “confusion about how traditional discipline practices and restorative justice and other techniques coexist.”
“We must continue to see the potential and greatness in every single one of our students,” she said. “We must root out our biases and understand how they impact our mindsets and our interactions with others.”
After Lentz concluded her remarks, the other board members were invited to offer their thoughts on the situation and public response.
“Nobody is infallible, and every person has value,” board member Sarah Brydon said. “Every person has value — this community has shown its ability to see a person with that type of nuance and compassion, to say a person is more than their worst moment, they have good qualities, so there must be an explanation for their actions.”
“I feel a deep, deep sadness that for many this does not seem to extend to students,” Brydon said. “If the community was having a conversation that framed me as a bad person, assumed that my actions were based on ill intent and didn’t make any space for the possibility of information and factors that might offer a different explanation, that would be a really difficult experience.”
“And that’s with my fully-formed adult brain I can’t imagine how children of 11, 12, 13, would experience the shame of that type of narrative about them,” she added.
Brydon said she would support investing in additional teacher support training and safety.
Board member Usira Ali described the public reaction to the incident as an “unsettling side of our community.”
“We quickly forgot that we were discussing children and not adults,” Ali said. “Further comments went on to describe the students with horrible words that are not suitable for anyone, let alone children.”
“No parent raises their children to have disruptive behavior,” Ali said. “This could have been any one of you, and had you found yourself in the shoes of those parents I would hope that your children found support and not called all kinds of names.”
The next board member to offer remarks was Abusana Bondo, who said that as a mother of a “student of color” that her kids “have faced a lot of discrimination and bias during their school years,” and criticized the lack of diversity of the schools.
Board member Julianne Opperman gave a brief comment on the matter, saying that she was told by her mother as a child that “words can hurt more deeply than any fist.”
The last board member to weigh in on the controversy was Ali Ali, who said that he agreed with Usira Ali because he “was a youth that was troubled, as they say.”
“I’ve been working around juvenile justice, and you know pretty much thousands, hundreds of thousands of kids going through our systems, and making sure that they have different avenues and options, because going down that path is obviously going to end them up in, you know, adult jails, or mental health facilities and things like that.”
“I think that both sides was a necessary component to think about, because on one side there is an individual that was trying to prove his innocence based on the situation, and on the other side it’s a bunch of youth that were acting — you know, it was wrong,” Ali said.
“But you know, they make mistakes, so I think on both ends it’s agreeable and understandable that we just need need to improve and we can’t demonize on each side,” he added.
In their statement regarding the agreement that led to the vote on Murph’s termination being canceled last week, the school district said it could not comment on the terms of the settlement as it is a personnel matter, but said that the district, “will support Mr. Murph to have a successful return next year.”
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