50 Time December 6/December 13, 2021
earliest age with a child’s sense of self.”
What Mystic Valley’s proponents
and critics agree on is that its colorblind
approach is at the heart of the contro-
versy. “Their view is, we’re a melting
pot, there are no racial differences, no
cultural differences—essentially, as long
as you accept white culture, you’re fine,”
says Greg Bartlett, secretary of the local
NAACP branch. Students of color may
be getting good test scores, but they are
not safe, he says. “In my judgment, the
school isn’t overtly racist, but it’s clear
there’s a lot of hurt going on.”
For as long as there has been an
America, scholars have debated the
tension between assimilation and multi-
culturalism, race neutrality and race
consciousness. How to make a single,
neutral set of rules for a nation whose
very Constitution deemed some inhab-
itants to have a fraction of the person-
hood of others—a land founded on im-
migration, genocide and bondage, held
together not by an identity but an ideal.
In recent years, many Americans
have become aware that “equal” rules
can have unequal outcomes. A text-
book example occurred at Mystic Val-
ley in 2017. To ensure parity among
students, the school has a strict dress
code; it mandates uniforms and forbids
makeup, jewelry and other forms of or-
namentation. But the policy against hair
extensions had a disproportionate im-
pact on Black girls, 15-year-old twins
Mya and Deanna Cook pointed out.
For them, box braids weren’t an indul-
gence; they were a way to transition
from treated to natural hair.
School officials say the controversy
was merely a misunderstanding. “As a
middle-aged white guy, despite having
done civil-rights work for 30 years, I was
ignorant to the importance of hair exten-
sions to women of color,” says Howard
Cooper, a liberal Boston lawyer who’s
argued civil-rights cases for the ACLU
and is now representing Mystic Valley
in its lawsuit against the state. Once the
school understood the rule’s dispropor-
tionate effect, Cooper says, it voluntarily
changed the policy, expanded the role
of its civil-rights coordinator and man-
dated diversity training for all employ-
ees. The following year, its charter was
renewed without incident.
But Mya Cook, now a 20-year-old
college student, says this is a sanitized
version of the story. In multiple meet-
ings, she says, the twins broke down in
tears as an all-white group of Mystic
Valley administrators insisted the rule
wasn’t racist because it applied to ev-
eryone. “They were totally in denial—
they didn’t want to understand,” recalls
Cook, who was banned from prom and
extracurricular activities and received
multiple detentions. It was only after
the state attorney general’s office in-
tervened, issuing a letter stating that it
considered the policy unlawful and dis-
criminatory, that the school relented.
From Mystic Valley’s perspective,
this was the end of the problem. But
for many parents, students and alumni,
it was just the beginning—an incident
that led them to see Mystic Valley’s ap-
proach to race in a new way. The con-
cerns gathered steam during COVID-19,
when the school offered fully in-person
instruction, unlike other public schools
in the area, and a Facebook group for at-
home families became a forum for pre-
viously unaired complaints.
After the May 2020 murder of
George Floyd, a group of alumni circu-
lated a petition to “Make MVRCS an Ac-
tively Anti-Racist School,” urging it to
“restructure the mission statement and
handbook to address issues of systemic
discrimination.” At a virtual meeting of
the school’s board of trustees on June 8,
2020, parents and alums demanded to
know why the school hadn’t responded
to the tragedy or denounced Facebook
posts by its co-founder and former board
chair Neil Kinnon, a former DemocraticMalden city councilman who shared a
Wall Street Journal op-ed denying police
racism. The board members announced
no action in response to the complaints.
Finally, on June 16, Dan, Mystic Val-
ley’s director, wrote a letter to the school’s
families. “We recognize that there has
been and continues to be an unaccept-
able tolerance of racism by sections of
our society,” he wrote. “It is our sincere
hope that the current activism will yield
true and productive results and lead to
the fair and just treatment of those who
have and continue to suffer for no other
reason than the color of their skin.”
For many parents, this was insuffi-
cient. “All these multibillion-dollar in-
dustries were finally saying ‘Black Lives
Matter’—even NASCAR!” says Zinah
Abukhalil-Quinonez, whose daugh-
ter was in first grade at the time. “Why
couldn’t they stand up and say those
words?” A Puerto Rican–Palestinian
social worker, Abukhalil-Quinonez
was shocked to discover that the school
didn’t celebrate Black History Month.
Her concerns deepened as she moni-
tored her daughter’s virtual lessons. In
one second-grade homework assign-
ment, a multiple-choice answer about
Harriet Tubman identified her as “a
conductor on the underground rail-
road,” as though she were merely oper-
ating a train. Abukhalil-Quinonez says
her daughter is now much happier at
her local school. “They talk about in-
clusion, they talk about feelings—it’s
not just memorization.”
Mystic Valley’s detractors note that
students of color are disciplined at
higher rates than white students are
and complain that the faculty lacks di-
versity. The staff is 87% white, com-
pared with 43% of students. (At the six
surrounding districts from which Mys-
tic Valley draws, the staff ranges from
89% to 97% white.) To substantiate
their complaints about the school’s cli-
mate, critics circulated 12 anonymous
testimonials from racial and gender
minorities, which raised issues ranging
from bullying to microaggressions. One
Black student said a teacher called her a
“token” while reading To Kill a Mocking-
bird in seventh grade; another said an
eighth-grade teacher repeatedly mixed
up Black students. A bi sexual student
was disturbed by a teacher’s evidentNATION
‘Their view is, weare a melting pot...essentially, as long asyou accept whiteculture, you’re fine.’
—GREG BARTLETT, NAACP SECRETARY