This morning, the Register-Star published an article reminding folks that what's been happening recently at Hudson Junior/Senior High School has happened before: "HCSD had discipline issues in 2010." From September to November 2010, there were thirteen fights at Hudson High School, eleven of them involving girls. Then as now, the HCSD Board of Education held a meeting to discuss the problem with the community. In 2010, discussing the mayhem among students incited an altercation between the two co-principals at Hudson High School that resulted in one of them being put on administrative leave. The headline that appeared in the Register-Star, however, declared he had been suspended.
The headline and the article were amended in the digital version of the paper to clarify that Tom Gavin, then co-principal of HHS, had been placed on administrative leave after he allegedly threatened his fellow co-principal Steven Spicer with violence at a school board meeting. The article, written by longtime Register-Star reporter John Mason, can be read here: "Fights erupt at HHS; principal put on administrative leave." The article was published on November 23, 2010, the day after the meeting during which Gavin challenged Spicer to step outside into the hallway. The next day, on November 24, Mason wrote a second article to announce a special meeting of the Board of Education: "HCSD to meet to discuss recent violence." The special meeting took place on Monday, November 29, and was reported on by Andrew Amelinckx: "Crowd turns out to talk solutions to school fights." Reading all three of these articles is recommended to get a sense of the circumstances that were blamed for the violence in 2010 and the district's response to the situation then.
Returning to the present, the HCSD Board of Education will meet on Tuesday, February 28, at 6:00 p.m. The board typically meets in the library at Hudson High School, but this meeting will take place in a larger venue: the cafeteria.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CAROLE OSTERINK
Gratitude to Peter Meyer for providing Gossips with the image of the front page of the Register-Star from November 23, 2010.
Having been a member of the BOE and present during the meeting of that 2010 headline, I can tell you that the events leading up to it was very predictable -- and very different from what's causing the current spate of fights. Tom Gavin, an ex-marine, was running an "alternative" school for about 50 marginal high school students in old military trailers on the campus of what was then the Greenport School. And it worked. The kids were doing well in their studies and there were no discipline problems. But he had enemies on the board and when there was a slight budget crunch earlier that year, the board voted to close the trailers, move the kids back to the regular high school, make Gavin (for contractual reasons) a co-principal, demoting then principal Stephen Spicer, who was black and doing a fine job, to co-principal. Some of us board members called the move "crazy" -- and so it was. And that is why the headline from that November 2010 RS hangs on my wall. And while we're on some history I recommend two reports that I helped shepherd through the BOE while I was there: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_oJeHfRym870Fz_L8QnPiz42LlWeJNyJ?usp=share_link. One on discipline and the other on academic performance.
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