Island anti-racism advocates are pressing the Chilmark select board to take a hand in ensuring that the private, nonprofit summer camp at the town-owned Community Center takes measurable steps against bullying and racism.
Nearly 60 people signed in for the board’s regular videoconference Tuesday, including numerous members of the NAACP of Martha’s Vineyard as well as board members from the Chilmark Town Affairs Council, the non-governmental group that runs the summer camp.
Earlier in the day, the council had distributed a report outlining its intentions for the camp, where two white campers placed a strap around the neck of a black camper in late July.
“The plan that we’ve developed begins with an emphasis on building inclusion and diversity starting with the board, continuing staff and campers,” council chairman Sue Ellen Lazarus said at Tuesday’s meeting. The camp plan is posted on the town website.
The council has added four new board members: Robin Rivera, Jay Brelis-Farrell, Ismail Samad and Jennifer Prakash, Ms. Lazarus said.Other steps in the council’s plan include a values statement that all camp participants must agree to, making it clear that bullying is not tolerated and specifying the measures to take when it occurs; diversity training for board members and staff and broadening camp content to include the history of the Island’s first people and its black community, she said.
But NAACP and Wampanoag members who took part in Tuesday’s meeting said these measures fall short of what’s needed to stop race-based bullying.
“Policy is not enough,” said tribal member David Vanderhoop, who joined the call with his wife Saskia.
“It’s good, and it’s a first step, but policy is just not enough. It’s paramount that we have accountability with the people that say they’re going to follow through with this,” Mr. Vanderhoop said.
NAACP member Paddy Moore asked for the council to include an explicit acknowledgment of underlying racism in the larger culture.
“I honestly don’t think we can make the necessary steps forward without that acknowledgment,” said Ms. Moore, whose words were echoed by NAACP member Stephen Power.
“There really does have to be a recognition, for each incident, that there is an inherent bias in Anglo Saxon culture — an inherent racism that we have all inherited — and there really has to be a statement of that,” Mr. Power said.
Multiple speakers, including Toni Kauffman, said the council’s report reached them too late in the day for thoughtful reading, but that the council board should seek comment from the community.
“There should be some accountability there, and I believe that the select board should be a part of that and I would ask, as others have asked, that we too, the NAACP, help you,” Ms. Kauffman said.
“We’re not your opposition. We don’t want to make it any more difficult than it needs to be, but we certainly want to be part of making a very thoughtful, comprehensive resolution to a very difficult situation,” she said. “There are eyes across the nation that are looking to us to make the right decisions and make sure the children are safe.”
NAACP president Arthur Hardy-Doubleday said it’s still UNclear what motivated the white children in the July incident.
“We as an Island community need to understand . . . our inability to find intent from eight and nine year olds,” Mr. Hardy-Doubleday said. “Whether it existed or not the information wasn’t available from them. We did find it racially insensitive.”
Regardless of what was in the children’s minds, Mr. Hardy-Doubleday said the incident triggered their elders.
“[It] reminded adults of adult problems, and their childhood was interrupted with our issues about how they interacted,” he said.
Mr. Hardy-Doubleday asked the select board to consider a local ordinance that would subject camps in Chilmark to the same anti-bullying measures required under state law for public schools.
“Why is it schools have to make sure bullying doesn’t happen, but summer camps don’t?” he asked. He suggested the town health agent could be put in charge of regularly collecting mandated reports from the camp.
Chilmark health inspector and board of health administrator Marina Lent said that while the town does not have an agent per se, she is intrigued by the possibilities of approaching racism and bullying from a public health perspective.
“I serve the board [of health]; I do not make policy with them, but I will certainly bring this to their attention and I see enormous potential in the concept of racism as a public health issue,” Ms. Lent said.
“That will effact things other than this camp, this issue this Community Center,” she said. “It should be a much deeper change in mentality as to what public service actually is.”
Freedom Cartwright of the Martha’s Vineyard Diversity Coalition called for transparency and for an Islandwide community conversation on race.
“We need honest dialogue and conversation on this Island about all the things that have happened in the past,” she said.
Select board members William Rossi, Warren Doty and chairman James Malkin thanked all who participated in the discussion, which called for no immediate board action.
Also Tuesday, the board approved a new assistant library director, Caroline Drogin, who is the new children’s librarian as well.
An Edgartown resident who grew up summering in West Tisbury, Ms. Drogin is no stranger to the Chilmark library: She worked at the circulation desk as a recent college graduate in 2016, library director Ebba Hierta wrote in her request to the board.
Ms. Drogin has since earned her master’s degree in library science and has been working in school libraries and classrooms on the Island, Ms. Hierta wrote.
The board also voted in favor of repaving Squibnocket Road and heard a report from Ms. Lent on Covid-19.
Cases are on the upswing after a few weeks of declining diagnoses, in what she called an established “saw-tooth pattern” of surges and lulls.
“We have been .. fielding some requests to reconsider our indoor mask mandate, and we’ve basically said ‘Listen, it’s been pretty clear the pattern this virus takes,’” she said.
“We’re just coming out of a valley and probably going to see increasing cases for a coming number of weeks.”
