TRURO — The mood among the members of the Class of 2025 at Nauset Regional High School gathered at Truro Vineyards for the senior banquet on May 30 was, by turns, apprehensive and eager.
Nauset Regional High School
CHAMPIONS
Mission Accomplished: Nauset Boys Take State Title
A four-goal third period gives Warriors their first hockey championship
BOSTON — The Nauset Regional High School boys hockey team completed a year-long quest for its first-ever state title by scoring four unanswered goals in the final period to defeat Medfield 4-1 in the Division 3 championship on Sunday at TD Garden. The victory came almost a year to the day after a heartbreaking 1-0 loss to Marblehead in the 2024 finals.
HOCKEY SIDEBAR: TEAM SPIRIT
‘That’s Logan Poulin!’
BOSTON — “That’s Logan Poulin!” said an awestruck Milton High School student, pointing at the Warriors’ captain near the end of Nauset’s 4-1 win against Medfield on Sunday. “He’s one of the best players I’ve ever seen.”
Poulin finished his high school career with an undefeated run to the state championship and a record-breaking 189 points in three years of play.
The game’s late start — because the previous game between Billerica and Canton went to double overtime — meant that Milton fans caught the end of the Nauset-Medfield game when they arrived to support their team, playing in the next finals match.
Many Milton fans were familiar with Poulin, having met him during his brief enrollment at Milton Academy in the fall of 2022. A crowd of Milton High students filed into a row of open seats near the Nauset section, where they led the black-and-gold-clad crowd in cheers for Nauset’s top scorer.
“LO-gan POU-lin! LO-gan POU-lin! LO-gan POU-lin!”
Eccentric outfits, most sported by the players’ classmates, populated the stands. Gabe Walsh, a sophomore from Brewster, wore a gold spandex suit and a yellow tutu to the game, “because Nauset is the best and we’re gonna win,” he said. Junior Priscilla Labranche had painted the Batman logo on her face with gold glitter in honor of a necktie sometimes worn by Poulin and goalie Zach Coelho.
Eastham’s Deputy Fire Chief Eric Littman was wearing a black-and-gold-decorated fire hat in honor of Warriors defender Andrew Bohannon, who recently completed an internship at the fire dept. “We made up this helmet just for him on his last day,” Littman said.
It wasn’t always cheery in the Nauset stands. After Medfield took a 1-0 lead in the second period, the mood grew dour. Medfield’s fans began to chant “Who’s your daddy?” to their rivals across the ice; Nauset’s response was lukewarm.
“The fans need to be louder,” said Nauset High administrative assistant Christine Labranche. The Warriors were outshooting their opponents but needed to apply even more pressure.
The Nauset fans found their stride around the time Milton’s supporters arrived. Jake Eldredge scored the go-ahead goal, and the Nauset-Milton coalition broke into its own gleeful “Who’s your daddy?”
Maybe all the fans needed was a little faith. As the crowd around her bit their nails and shook their heads, Eddy Elementary student Savannah Stevens told a reporter that, after following Nauset all season, she was confident Poulin would lead the Warriors to victory.
Less than an hour later, she knew she was right.
LEARNING
Nauset Juniors and Seniors Polish Their Portfolios
Members of an honors class put their creative selves on view
WELLFLEET — Three vivid works by Nauset Regional High School senior Lily Cianfaglione are on display at Wellfleet Preservation Hall: a painting with gouache, a drawing done with colored pencils, and a drawing with graphite and decorative paper. “I like to experiment with different mediums,” Cianfaglione says. “I’m a painter at heart — mostly gouache — but I like to step out of my comfort zone and use anything with color.”
Cianfaglione is one of 17 students in Nauset’s honors portfolio class. The school offers an array of art classes from ceramics to woodworking, painting, drawing, and printmaking. Taught by Ryan Birchall, the year-long portfolio class is for juniors and seniors with a strong interest in pursuing art after high school.
Birchall, who lives in Orleans and has been teaching art at the school for 11 years, says the intensive class is intended to help students create and fine-tune their portfolios.
The students’ work is on view at the hall through March 30. For the show, they chose pieces that they felt best highlighted their styles. A lot of the work was the result of monthly open-ended prompts given in class, Birchall says.
Joey Smith chose a drawing on sturdy brown paper. “The paper called to me,” Smith says, “because I knew I wanted to do something with white pencil on a dark background.” His work was inspired by Noh, a form of Japanese performance art that includes intricate costumes. “I wanted to show the patterns on the dress, the fan, and the very fancy headpiece,” Smith says. His drawing is shaded impeccably, the folds of the dress falling naturally toward the ground. The piece took “a lot of erasing and trying again,” Smith says. “But it was worth it.” A senior, he hasn’t decided yet what next fall holds; students have until May to make college decisions.
Saffron Jalbert is another senior in the class. One of her pieces is a photograph: it shows a person clutching a pomegranate, the juice running into her open mouth. “I was thinking of Persephone,” Jalbert says. It has a “seductive element,” she says, “while also looking bloody and gruesome.” While the piece started as a photo, “I felt I wanted more texture in it,” Jalbert says, so she “broke out some bedazzling stuff” and some paint, highlighting certain features on the face and the edges of the work. She glued a white bead over the subject’s tooth, making it boldly three-dimensional.
Jalbert has a hat in the exhibition, too. It is is covered in images from a World War I military book, machine gun shells, and animal print patches. Next year, she’s heading to Savannah College of Art & Design’s Atlanta campus.
Senior Emily Carr plans to study art history at McGill University in Montreal next fall. She has recently gotten into linework, done in pen and ink. “I feel that paying attention to detail is a way of honoring my work,” she says. Carr is inspired by nostalgia and whimsy, she says, as well as “archetypal imagery,” where certain images are universally understood as symbols for a concept or feeling.
Carr chose works featuring animals and architecture for the show; one piece is bordered by a medieval-looking hand-drawn frame. Each drawing takes her “a few movies” to complete, she says. She often watches Disney movies while working — sometimes the film will inspire the art, she adds.
In one piece, a pair of hands parts grasses, revealing an elephant at the end of a path. “It’s about exploring, when you’re younger,” Carr says. The hands were drawn from a picture of her own. “When you get older, it’s harder to be in the moment,” she says. The piece represents the feeling of being present.
Cianfaglione hasn’t decided where she’ll be next fall. Right now, she’s present in her own work. Several of her pieces are self-portraits. “It’s the image I’m most familiar with,” she says. But one of the ceramic pieces she’s showing — “a giant head pot” — is far from an attempt at realism.
She’s been working with clay for four years, wheel-throwing and hand-building. “I started out thinking everything had to be perfect, precise, and measured,” Cianfaglione says. As she’s grown artistically, she’s begun adding hand-built components to pieces thrown on the wheel to produce something “funky and weird — but still functional,” she says.
Parked outside the hall was a decorated Funk Bus — a surprise for the March 13 opening of the show, Birchall says. Last October, students in the honors portfolio class collaborated with Funk Bus painter Justine Ives as part of a workshop at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, creating their own stencils and spray-painting the bus. Ives finished it all up over the winter.
Parker Mumford contributed reporting.
BOYS HOCKEY
Nauset Blanks Danvers and Advances to Elite 8
The Warriors’ next obstacle in title run is their old rival, Marblehead
ORLEANS — The Nauset Warriors made it look easy on Saturday, cruising to their second playoff hockey win, 9-0, over the Danvers Falcons and advancing to the Mass. Div. 3 Elite 8. It was the 16th consecutive win for the top-ranked boys team, whose only stumble this season was a 2-2 tie with Milton on Jan. 25.
Senior captain Logan Poulin scored the first goal of the Danvers game on a pass from defender Andrew Bohannon about a minute into the first period, knocking the puck past Falcons goalie Cody Standring. Poulin went on to score two more times against the 16th-seeded Falcons, securing his usual hat trick. His other goals were in the second and third periods on assists from junior defender Logan Miller and senior defender Jack Martin.
But it was senior forward Colin Ward who stole the show on Saturday night, scoring his own hat trick in the first period. The first goal came on a breakaway from one end of the rink to the other, Ward hopping gracefully past the Danvers defenders before scoring unassisted. The next came only minutes later, on passes from junior forward Jake Eldredge and defender Logan Miller following a gleeful sequence of casual passes between the two; the third followed shortly after on a pass from junior defender Oscar Escher.
“I was pretty happy with those goals,” Ward said. “The whole team was working hard — for the breakaway, I just found some ice and took the net.”
Eldredge also went home with a hat trick on Saturday, scoring all three goals on assists from Poulin, with extra assistance from junior forward Brody Bassett in the first period.
Ward said that his team is most comfortable in the offensive zone — that’s where there’s no threat of getting scored against, so he feels more confident. “That said, we’re ready for anything,” he said.
On Thursday, March 6, Nauset will have its long-awaited rematch with the Marblehead Magicians, the team that defeated the Warriors 1-0 in last year’s finals at Boston’s TD Garden. The game will be at Bourne’s Gallo Arena, but for all the energy crackling through the locker room it might as well be at Madison Square Garden: 16 of the 23 members of this year’s team played in last year’s championship game, including Poulin, who told the Independent last year he had “no doubt” they’d be back in 2025 to take the crown.
The Warriors’ path to their rematch with Marblehead has not been as drama-free as many in the partisan crowd at Charles Moore Arena anticipated. In the first-round playoff game on Feb. 26, Nauset pulled away to a workmanlike 5-0 win over the 33rd-seeded Middleborough Sachems, but not before the teams battled through a surprisingly scoreless 15 minutes.
The first period deadlock was attributable mainly to the stellar work of the Sachems’ goalie, Connor Mitchell. The Warriors spent most of the time in the attack zone, but their shots that were not wide of the net were handled adroitly by Mitchell who, despite being a senior, was playing in only his first year at the high school level.
Nauset finally broke through early in the second period on a goal by the steady Colin Ward off a Logan Miller assist. It remained a tense one-goal game with Nauset continuing to dictate the action but failing to find the back of the net. Poulin put the crowd somewhat at ease by scoring with just under five minutes remaining in the stanza. That goal was a thing of beauty, as he outskated the defense to pull in his own rebound and ripped a shot past Mitchell to make it 2-0 going into the third.
That goal was the first of what became a rare natural hat trick for Poulin. Over 11 minutes, spanning the end of the second period and the start of the third, his three consecutive tallies gave the Warriors a 4-0 lead and ended whatever suspense there may have been.
Junior defenseman Max Lanzetta closed out the scoring with a power-play goal. Junior Jake Eldredge had three assists, while Ward added an assist to go along with his goal.
Goalie Zach Coelho was his usual steady self, gloving or turning aside the few shots his defensive unit allowed, while registering Nauset’s 10th shutout of the season.
Whether Coelho can maintain that steadiness against his next opponents could dictate whether Nauset finally takes home the trophy this year. Last year he was the one who let in the goal that won Marblehead the title.
But that necessary playoff mentality, if somewhat elusive last Wednesday, was on full display on Saturday. Coach Connor Brickley said it’s the friendly competition between his star players — including but not limited to the three who took hat tricks — that drives them to do better every game. Obviously, points aren’t everything — but, he said, “it’s nice to see players like Colin getting rewarded for their hard work. It’s great competition within our lineup to establish who’s going to be the big guy every single night,” he added. “It’s great for the team.”
WARRIORS WATCH
Old Rivalries Flourish in Postseason Tournaments
Four wrestlers advance to divisional meet; indoor track brings home three medals
EASTHAM — For Nauset Regional High School freshman Jack Peno, the Division 3 South wrestling tournament was an opportunity to prove himself. When he walked onto the mat for his second match on Saturday, Feb. 15, he found himself face to face with his old rival Greyson Loeffel, a junior from Scituate.
As a middle schooler, Peno had lost to Loeffel in a match for third place at the 2024 Division 3 South tournament. This year, Loeffel once again pinned Peno during the second round, this time catching him in a cradle — a move where a wrestler clamps his elbows around his opponent’s neck and one of his knees, immobilizing him.
“I didn’t get revenge,” Peno said, “but it was kind of close.”
Peno came back in the consolation bracket, pinning three opponents — Colin Thornton of Randolph, Andrew Keith of Hanover, and Kevin Almedia of Martha’s Vineyard — and achieving a technical victory over a fourth, Jackson Myers of Bristol County/Dighton Rehoboth. He finished third overall in the 138-pound class. Loeffel finished second after a 13-2 loss to Jacoby Flynn of Norton.
Peno wasn’t the only one looking for a rematch. Owen O’Reilly, a Nauset junior, went up against Andrew Davidson of Sandwich in a contest for third place in the 150-pound class. The two had wrestled four times during the regular season, with each winning twice: this time, O’Reilly won by major decision, scoring 10 points against Davidson’s 2.
“We really knew each other,” O’Reilly said. “It was the last time we were going to face each other this season, so it was memorable.”
O’Reilly said his practices leading up to sectionals had been focused on finding ways to beat Davidson, who is most dangerous when his opponents are on the ground. Davidson, as it turned out, was reaching too much during their match, which allowed O’Reilly to get the win.
Two other Nauset athletes placed in sectionals: Chaz Thomas, a Cape Cod Tech sophomore who wrestles with the team, finished fourth at 175 pounds after losing his semifinals match 8-5 to Foxborough’s Joseph Blanchard; and freshman Antuane Walker took fourth in the 215-pound class after getting pinned in the semifinals by Michael Brennan of Carver.
This was Walker’s first year wrestling, and, like his teammates, he wanted to show the crowd just how far he had come. Walker said his most important match was against Luke Steele, a senior from Sandwich: after a 21-4 loss to Steele on Feb. 1, Walker said, the rematch became an obsession.
Steele ended up pinning Walker during the first round of sectionals. “I got in my head too much and ended up losing,” Walker said. “I was talking about it all day instead of just thinking of him as someone who was my weight.”
Walker’s teammates said he has a habit of pushing himself too hard during matches. During a dual meet against Barnstable on Jan. 8, Walker fell unconscious following a 14-10 loss to senior Ben Maxwell. “He was giving it 110 percent,” Thomas said. “You could see he was starting to fade during the third period. After the match was over, he collapsed. He ended up leaving in an ambulance.”
He’s new to the sport, and Walker said he loves it. This summer, he said, he had been planning on doing a football program, but he’ll be looking instead to compete in wrestling tournaments to become more proficient.
For now, though, Walker’s eyes are set on the divisional tournament on Friday, Feb. 21 at Foxborough High School. His goal is to win his first match, he said, and make it to day two of the tournament.
“Once I’m in my flow state,” Walker said, “it’s just me versus myself.”
Four Track Medals
While Nauset’s wrestlers competed at the Division 3 South sectional tournament, the indoor track team went to Boston for its own divisional championship meet.
Three members of the Warriors’ indoor track team medaled on Saturday: senior Isaiah Robinson, who finished sixth in the 55-meter hurdles; senior Madeline Mahoney, who took eighth in the 1,000 meters; and junior Violet Roche, who placed second in both high jump and long jump. Roche’s high jump on Saturday matched her personal best of 5 feet, 4 inches, which is also the school’s all-time record.
Roche also set the previous two school records for high jump — 5 feet when she was a freshman, and 5 feet, 2 inches when she was a sophomore.
Roche says she feels a lot of pressure to keep breaking those records at meets, especially when the competition is as strong as it is at divisionals. On Saturday, that meant scratching one event — the 300 meters — from her schedule to allow herself to focus on the others.
“All of my events happen at the same time, which is really stressful,” Roche said. “Conserving energy was a big part of my strategy to perform well.”
Although that strategy seems to have paid off in terms of helping her score, Roche still fell 3 inches short of her personal best in the long jump: 17 feet, 9 inches, another school record. Part of the reason for that, she said, has to do with the way her body has changed since last year: she’s grown stronger, she said, and she’s still trying to find the ideal mark for herself. During the first meet of the 2024-25 season, Roche said, she fouled all three of her attempts when she tried to go off her previous mark.
Now that she’s beginning to find her mark, Roche has her sights set on the MIAA Meet of Champions, which will be held in Boston on Saturday, Feb. 22. After that, she said, she’s hoping to attend nationals in March. Her goal, as usual, is to beat her personal records. She wants to hit 5 feet, 6 inches in the high jump.
And, she said, she hopes to see some of her old rivals at those events, too. “I’ve been seeing the same girls since my freshman year — I don’t know all their names, but I recognize them and talk to them,” she said.
CULTURAL EXCHANGE
Nauset High School Restarts Its International Student Program
The school is seeking host families for up to 10 students this September
ORLEANS — In her youth, Amy Burke’s family welcomed an exchange student from Spain into their Connecticut home. Ever since, she has wanted to host an exchange student in a family of her own.
Years ago, she had proposed hosting a student on a J-1 visa to her daughter and her husband, Brian, but that plan didn’t come together. In 2017, an opportunity finally presented itself: Nauset Regional High School, where her daughter was enrolled, was seeking families to host an international student for a semester or year.
“That was our first,” said Burke, who is now a social worker in Orleans. “A student from Brazil, and we still stay in touch.” The next year they hosted a second student from Hong Kong.
Enrollment in the high school’s international student program was already sinking, however, and in 2020 the program was discontinued — a casualty of remote learning and the pandemic.
This year, international students should be returning to Nauset High. On Jan. 23, the regional school committee approved an annual tuition of $17,000 for international students to enroll in any grade at the high school. Plans are for up to 10 international students to arrive in September.
To help administer the program, the high school reinstated its partnership with Educatius, a placement agency that matches interested international students with exchange programs, including at 13 public schools in Massachusetts.
Through the placement program, international students could select Nauset High School as their school of choice. The school’s arts programming, Advanced Placement courses, or the natural environment of Cape Cod could attract students, Nauset Principal Patrick Clark told the Independent.
The school has already accepted two international students for a September arrival, one from Italy and another from Germany. One of those students had applied to Nauset’s program after visiting the Cape with her family last year and searching for the high school online, according to Genna Margotta, coordinator of the international student program.
The sticker price for an international student to attend Nauset High for a full year is $44,895, according to the Educatius website. That amount includes the school’s approved tuition of $17,000, a stipend for the hosting family, and insurance and administrative costs at Educatius.
The stipend for host families is $900 per month for a private bedroom or $700 per month for a shared bedroom.
Clark said the school had based its proposed tuition rate on the median tuition at Educatius’s other participating high schools in Massachusetts. He noted that when another high school had set its tuition rate over $20,000, demand for the program had collapsed.
The students’ tuition payments will go to a revolving account used for technology upgrades, according to Nauset District Finance Director Giovanna Venditti.
“It’s a win-win when we bring students from around the globe” to Nauset, Clark told the regional school committee on Jan. 17.
“We should have compared notes,” said Margotta at that same meeting. “I also have, ‘It’s a win-win situation!’ ”
“Students from around the globe know that college education is also excellent here,” Clark told the Independent, and a high school program “may give them some cultural understanding of what it might be like at an American college or university.” Students have to pass an English language proficiency test to participate in the program.
The school is now looking for “as many host families as possible,” Margotta said. Host families “don’t need to have kids in the district, and they don’t even need to live in the district,” but they do need to have a bedroom for the student.
Margotta said she had contacted more than 40 families that had hosted students in past years and received unanimously positive feedback on the program. She asked some former participants if they would host again, since vetting new families requires additional interviews, house visits, and background checks.
Amy and Brian Burke did not hesitate to sign up again. The student they hosted in 2017 spent her junior year at Nauset, got involved in theater productions, and at 5 feet, 10 inches was quickly scouted by the girls basketball coach.
“She’d never picked up a basketball in her life,” Brian chuckled, “but it worked out great.”
The student from Hong Kong was only 15 when she arrived here. “We thought that was very brave,” said Amy, “to be so young and come live with strangers for nine months.”
Hosting was not entirely devoid of conflict, but “we felt super supported by the coordinator,” said Amy. “I think it’s part of the fun, to learn each other’s personalities. It would take anyone time to acclimate, but it’s so rewarding in the end.”
HOMECOMING
Nauset’s New Auditorium Made a Holiday Debut
A key component of the high school’s renovation was unveiled at a student-alumni concert
EASTHAM — Nearly two years after Brait Builders got to work in February 2023, every component of the first phase of Nauset Regional High School’s $170-million reconstruction project is complete.
While most of the phase-one projects — including the school’s new cafeteria, gym, science building, and arts department — opened just before classes began last September, the performing arts center could not be used until Dec. 19. The delay was due to the need for safety inspections and final permits, according to Principal Patrick Clark.
“I’ve waited 25 years to say this,” said longtime music department head Tom Faris as he took the stage to welcome musicians and audience to the new performing arts center on Dec. 19. “We have a balcony!”
Balconies are not common in high school auditoriums, according to Faris, but 250 of the 714 seats in Nauset’s new auditorium are on the second floor. The walls are accented with reclaimed wood from the school’s old E building, and a network of lighting catwalks are suspended from the ceiling. Ten-foot-high double doors provide backstage access for theater sets and large instruments.
Nauset High’s music groups include a chorus, orchestra, concert band, percussion ensemble, and jazz band, as well as “honors” versions of each. The music ensembles, which are scheduled daytime classes rather than extracurriculars, meet in a pair of rehearsal rooms backstage. The school also offers for-credit classes in guitar, piano, and music production, and the drama club, which meets after school, uses the auditorium, too.
On Jan. 30, the auditorium got its first taste of civic and political life when it hosted a joint budgeting workshop for the Nauset school district. In the future, facilities manager Tony Nannini told the Independent, it’ll be open for more.
“It’ll be a community space, not just for the school day,” Nannini said, adding that performers and presenters will eventually be able to book the space year-round. The second phase of the building project — which includes the remodeling of the A, B, C, and D buildings from the old campus — needs to be finished first, however. “We’d be in a little over our head otherwise,” Nannini said.
Because phase two is focused more on remodeling than new construction, it can be more easily conducted while school is in session, building committee chair Greg Lavasseur told the Independent in 2023. It is expected to be finished sometime this calendar year.
Alumni Concert
The inaugural concert on Dec. 19 was a festive holiday affair starring both current students and Nauset High alumni.
The stage was full on opening night. Nauset’s two music teachers — Faris, who leads the chorus, and Dan Anthony, who leads the instrumental ensembles — had invited all of their former students to perform alongside the current musicians. Nauset Regional Middle School’s instrumental music teachers Berj Hagopian and Megan Anthony were enlisted to help conduct.
For the grand finale, all of the night’s performers took the stage at once — about 135 musicians in total — with some of the chorus members spilling into the aisles as they sang.
Anthony, who directs the jazz and concert bands, told the Independent that playing alongside alumni was a welcome experience for his students because they don’t always get to be part of a full ensemble during their practices. The music department is still recovering from a pandemic-era decline in participation, Anthony said, and the alumni concert was the first time this year that a Nauset band wasn’t missing any instruments.
This reporter, a pianist and 2018 graduate of Nauset, recalls the old music department’s classroom space, a linoleum lecture hall whose ceiling was caving in at the corners. The dark corridor leading from our classroom to the stage had a shaky plywood ramp that rattled as we pushed percussion instruments across it. While playing vibraphone at the alumni concert, the difference between that auditorium and this one felt like night and day.
“I asked every year for 25 years for the venue that our students deserved,” Faris said. “I’m very proud of the way it turned out, and I believe everyone who’s gone in there feels the same way.”
BACK TO SCHOOL
Nauset High Reconstruction Is Almost Half Done
New spaces for art, physical education, and science will update an old campus
EASTHAM — The eastern half of Nauset Regional High School’s campus has been under construction since February 2023, pushing faculty and students into temporary modular classrooms, but with the new school year beginning on Tuesday, Sept. 3, the first half of the school’s total renovation is nearly done.
Built in 1972, Nauset High has needed updating for years. Construction crews carrying out the first phase of the $170-million project have been creating new, modern spaces for the art, physical education, special education, and science departments, as well as the administration offices.
Nauset’s revised design puts a higher priority on security. The old open campus allowed people to walk into the courtyard at the heart of the school at any time, but the new plan closes more of the courtyard off and puts student parking at the front of the building near the main office rather than around the side, making it harder for students to sneak off to their cars during the day.
The new main office on the first floor is sleek in tones of gray, white, and black. The staff rooms on a recent visit were completely finished except for the furnishings. Several moving boxes waited to be unpacked.
A few steps from the administration offices is the new nurse’s office, which was previously located on the other side of the campus. “The nurse’s new suite has records rooms,” said Principal Patrick Clark, “two resting areas, a nurse work station, and a nice reception area.” It’s much bigger with more natural lighting than the old one, he said.
Down the hallway is the performing arts center, which will likely be the last part of phase one that’s completed, said Clark. He doesn’t anticipate students having access to it until late September or October. It includes a 770-seat theater with accent walls made from reclaimed wood from the exterior of the old buildings. Currently, the stage is being rigged and the chairs are getting unwrapped.
“Arts are a huge part of what we do here,” said Clark. The new school will have bigger studios for ceramics, jewelry, woodworking, and painting, with dedicated spaces for art seminars and a gallery to show off student work. For the past two years, events like Fine and Applied Arts Night were held in the courtyard and the Librateria (Nauset’s term for the library and cafeteria that had to share a space during the renovations), so students will appreciate a new dedicated space for hosting events. Upstairs are sleek new classrooms for graphic design and fashion. What used to be the world language and math building has been completely transformed.
The old counseling area upstairs has been rebuilt to connect to the new gymnasium and cafeteria, which has been moved and updated from a one story to two, with more reclaimed wood, a large screen for presentations, and a glass curtain wall that looks out into the courtyard. “This place really glows at night,” Clark said.
The spacious second-floor workout center looks down onto the cafeteria with a floor-to-ceiling window so students will have a view while they use the weights and exercise bikes. The gymnasium has been redone with cherry flooring and arena-style seating more reminiscent of a college gym. Only the old scoreboard in the front wall and the loading dock on the back remain from what was there before.
The three floors of the new science department are all similar. “The typical science classrooms are double-sized,” said Clark. “We’ll have the classroom and the lab in one area with lockable built-in storage.” The floor is vinyl sheeting, so nothing will get stuck in the cracks of the tiles as in the past. These spaces have fewer windows but not the old cement block walls, and they have been updated with extra storage space.
During the coming year, students will use this space while the four older buildings (A, B, C, and D) will be remodeled, stripped, and redesigned to resemble the new campus.
“Once the siding comes off, these buildings are all going to be gutted and entirely rebuilt except for the frame,” said Clark. “The idea is that the first part is a little more than half [of the campus] and is more complex.” Since the school will still be an active construction zone, a fence will be erected around the buildings being worked on and a path will be paved around the outside of Building D for safe travel between the modular classrooms (now housing English, history, math, and world language) and the new buildings. Passing period between classes will also be extended.
Clark said the work crews are on schedule to finish this week and get an occupancy permit for the main building, which will be first to open so school administrators and counselors can get situated and then help open up the rest of the new campus.
Olivia Bryant is a senior at Nauset Regional High School.
HOCKEY HOPES
Nauset Boys Head to TD Garden for State Finals
Warriors top Somerset Berkley 6-0 in Final Four game
BOURNE — When the top-ranked Nauset Regional High School boys hockey team takes to the ice against no. 6 Marblehead High School in the MIAA Division 3 State Finals this Sunday at 3 p.m., the scene will be very different from the last time the school’s hockey program played in a state championship game 20 years ago.
Because of a scheduling conflict with the FleetCenter — now TD Garden — and the host of that year’s basketball finals, the Division 2 hockey championship was played at the Chelmsford Forum. The Warriors lost to defending champion Saugus High School 6-0 and haven’t made a finals appearance since. That is, until now.
“It was a dump,” recalled longtime Nauset athletic trainer Michele Pavlu, who made the trip to Chelmsford. The game was scheduled for a Wednesday, but Athletic Director Allan Sullivan fought hard to get it moved to Friday.
This year’s Nauset hockey team is everything that dominant Saugus squad was in 2004 — and more. The Warriors are big and strong, and they are incredibly fast — so much so that opponents struggle to get anywhere near them. When they do lose the puck, they win it back almost instantly. They’ve stormed their way to this championship match at the Garden, outscoring postseason opponents 18-2. The game against Marlborough in the Sweet 16 round, a 2-1 win, was their closest contest.
“We’re playing our best hockey at the right time, which is all you can ask for as a coach, and these guys are executing exactly how we want them to,” said Nauset Head Coach Connor Brickley after his team’s 6-0 win over no. 12 Somerset Berkley at Bourne’s Gallo Ice Arena on Sunday. “These guys have been earning it. That’s what we’ve talked about throughout these playoffs.”
The Warriors have twice eclipsed the 6-goal threshold to have the clock run continuously in the third period. They forced Pembroke into a timeout 3 minutes into the game after taking a 3-0 lead in the Elite 8 round and saw Somerset Berkley follow suit at the 4:46 mark of the first period trailing by the same score.
The current seniors have an appreciation for what it feels like to be on the other side of the scoring line, having lost 7-1 to Lynnfield in the Round of 16 as sophomores.
“Those losses really taught us anything can happen,” said senior assistant captain Julian Krivos. “Since then, every kid on this team has worked hard with one goal in mind, and that’s to win a state championship.”
The team has been backed heavily by its fans. The Warriors maxed out capacity at Charles Moore Arena for both the Round of 32 and Round of 16 games and then were the marquee ticket at Gallo Ice Arena for the next two rounds. The Nauset crowd’s chants of “We can’t hear you” and “This one’s over” got little pushback, with opponents’ fans seemingly waiting for the clock to run out.
Over the last two seasons, Nauset hockey has morphed into a juggernaut. At noon on Sunday, 1,100 tickets had been sold for the Nauset-Somerset game. There have been more cameras and more reporters each round, with a television crew turning up at practice in between rounds.
It was, coincidentally, an oversold quarterfinal game at Charles Moore Arena in Orleans last season that sparked a rule change by the MIAA after Watertown’s fans were unable to get into the rink. That meant the Elite 8 round was moved to a neutral venue this year. It didn’t stop the Nauset community from showing up in droves.
“The support has been amazing, and it’s been amazing from day one,” said Brickley, now in his second year with the team. He coached the girls team during the 2021-22 season.
“The kids really feed off it,” he said. “It’s a great thing to play in front of your whole community that has your back.”
The team was met by a sea of fans dressed in pink for the Elite 8 game and in red, white, and blue for the Final Four match, including students with N-A-U-S-E-T painted on their stomachs. The Warriors team bus was given an escort from Charles Moore Arena to the highway by the Orleans police and Orleans fire and rescue ahead of the game in Bourne.
It has been a frenzy of peers, parents, family, Nauset alumni, and friends in the crowd.
“I don’t know if I can speak right now,” said senior assistant captain Aaron Howard after the semifinal victory. “I can’t even explain it. Everything, from all 60 practices, 24 games, just all coming to fruition. It’s great to get there with this team.
“My freshman year was the Covid year,” Howard continued. “We were getting dressed in tents and we won three games, and to come all the way here and make it to the Garden — I wouldn’t ever have thought that it could happen. It gives us a chance to do something no other Nauset hockey team has ever done.”
JUST POSTERS
Black History Month Gets Little Attention at Nauset High This Year
With the Black Students Union inactive, no events are planned for February
EASTHAM — Nauset Regional High School’s observance of Black History Month last year caused controversy when an “All Lives Matter” banner was hung in a school hallway. This year, students say, the school is not having any formal celebration of Black History Month at all.
Among five Nauset students the Independent spoke with, just two said they had seen posters or decorations, and none had heard of an event being hosted to celebrate Black history. Last year, a rally and a movie night were sponsored by the school’s Black Students Union, according to Kimesha Harriott, a Nauset junior.
“Black History Month at school will be just a regular month,” said Harriott, who is president of the Nauset Multicultural Club. “There’s nothing exciting that’s going to happen.”
Harriott said that she had seen just one poster celebrating Black History Month in the school building as of Friday, Feb. 2. It was in the office of the school nurse, Meagan Santos. Santos said that she had made it with the help of students and used it as a “learning opportunity.”
Maura Kerse-McMillin, a Nauset English teacher who was the faculty adviser for the Black Students Union last year, said that beyond “a few posters” and commemorative music played at the end of the school day over the loudspeakers, there were no other plans to celebrate Black History Month at the school.
Harriott pointed out that the school is hosting a “winter spirit week” this month. “We could have had a Black History Month spirit week,” she said.
Julie Quigley, who teaches the school’s Exploring and Respecting Differences class, said that the course curriculum is focused on Black history for February. Students will make a mural honoring Jamaican singer-songwriter Bob Marley and explore the idea of “revolutionary love,” which Quigley defines as “love based in humanity.”
Ian Hamilton, the faculty adviser for the social justice-focused Human Rights Academy at Nauset, said the club is planning on doing outreach events and creating “informational posters on Black artists and advocates” in celebration of the month.
Nauset Principal Patrick Clark did not respond to several requests for comment. Assistant principals Karen McGrath and HoYin Yuen also did not respond.
Last year, two Nauset seniors complained about the “All Lives Matter” banner that had been put up during Black History Month and asked Clark to take it down. They said it represented a dismissal of the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” But the school administration did not see anything wrong with the banner, according to School Supt. Brooke Clenchy. “It was a good message, not a bad message,” she told the Independent.
An Inactive BSU
Part of the reason there are no events planned for this year’s Black History Month is that the Black Students Union is not currently active, according to Kerse-McMillin. Scheduling conflicts among its members made it difficult for the group to meet, she said. According to Harriott, the group is being absorbed into the Multicultural Club.
“I’m sorry that hear that the Black Students Union is not meeting again this year, because it was a very strong group last year,” said Chris Easley, chair of the Nauset Regional School Committee.
Easley also attributed the lack of observance of Black History Month in part to staff turnover. He said that the former curriculum coordinator, Robin Millen, left Nauset last spring, and that she may have previously been involved in planning Black History Month events as a diversity, equity, and inclusion specialist. The school has not yet found a replacement for her.
When asked for her reaction to the fact that the administration had not organized any events for Black History Month, Harriott said, “I wouldn’t say that I’m surprised. At Nauset, if you want something to happen, you have to speak up and ask for it to happen.”
That’s what Harriott did last spring, when she wrote a letter to the administration requesting that there be a Multicultural Week at the school.
Harriott said she got the idea after she requested Jamaican songs at a Homecoming dance and they were not played. She asked the administration if she could organize an event to highlight cultural diversity at Nauset.
According to Harriott, Multicultural Week was the first multicultural celebration the school had ever hosted.
According to data collected by the state, 5.3 percent of Nauset High students — 40 students in all — identify as African American. A total of 16.5 percent of students are nonwhite.
The Multicultural Club is planning another event in May, this time just a day, not a week. Harriott imagines it could include a musical performance from a Cape Verdean singer and a soccer game.
Since Harriott first spoke to the Independent, she said, she has noticed more posters for Black History Month have gone up. Atalya Stewart, vice president of the Multicultural Club, said she saw several posters hanging in the cafeteria on Monday this week.
HIGH SCHOOL RENOVATION
Senate Budget Could Add $7.2M to Nauset Building Project Funding
Cyr wants to unlock ‘millionaire’s tax’ money for school construction, but green schools is a competing priority
EASTHAM — If the state Senate’s budget proposal for fiscal 2024 makes it through negotiations with the House this month unscathed, the Nauset Regional High School renovation project will receive another $7.2 million to offset rising costs. That’s on top of the $36.6 million the district has already received from the Mass. School Building Authority to help pay for the project.
This would be the second funding win in six months for the project, which faced a possible roadblock when the lowest bid, from Brait Builders, came in at $134.3 million in October 2022.
Voters in the four district towns, Wellfleet, Eastham, Orleans, and Brewster, first approved a total budget of $131.8 million for the project in March 2021, with $104.9 million earmarked for construction. But when the Nauset Regional School Committee found that the winning bid exceeded the estimated construction budget by $30 million, it decided to go back to voters to authorize additional taxpayer funding.
“We’d already spent a fair amount of money,” said committee chair Chris Easley. “We’d been given authority to build a school and had moved in that direction. So, it just logically made sense to keep going.”
Shaving $30 million off the budget was not an option: at the bid presentation on Oct. 27, 2022, Nauset Regional High School Building Committee chair Greg Levasseur told the school committee that they would have to scale back the renovation footprint by a third to do that.
Labor shortages, inflation, and supply shortages all contributed to the ballooning difference between the estimate and the actual bid, Easley said. Subcontractor bids came in $19 million higher than expected, with HVAC alone surpassing the pre-bid estimate by $9 million, he said.
The committee’s request to approve up to an additional $38.1 million for construction, increasing the total budget by 22.5 percent to $161.2 million, passed easily in mid-January, with 71 percent of voters across the four towns in favor.
Meanwhile, district leaders also reached out to elected officials, the Mass. Association of School Committees, and the Superintendents Committee to ask for help in bridging the funding disparity, Easley said. Nauset Public Schools Supt. Brooke Clenchy confirmed that she arranged meetings with legislators “as soon as we realized that we were going to have a substantial budget gap.”
“The superintendent asked us maybe nine months ago about this, but we advised them that whatever we do, it will be retroactive,” state Sen. Julian Cyr of Truro said last week.
“We are incredibly appreciative of the Senate recognizing the fiscal issues we are up against,” Clenchy said.
Easley said that the district had seen similar situations elsewhere in the Commonwealth where bids had surpassed estimates for library construction projects, and the state had authorized additional funding accordingly. “That’s part of what made us hopeful,” he said.
“Education has been promised a ton of things, and the delivery is often much less robust than the promise. I was pleasantly surprised by this,” Easley added.
The infusion of another $7.2 million is part of a $100-million Mass. School Building Authority package in the proposed Senate ways and means budget aimed at addressing inflated construction costs for school building projects across the Commonwealth. It would bring the total state subsidy for the project to $43.8 million.
The supplemental MSBA grants represent one possible use of $1 billion in revenue to be unlocked in fiscal 2024 by the Fair Share Amendment passed in November 2022, which is essentially a millionaire’s tax in Massachusetts that’s earmarked for education and transportation.
The proposed House and Senate budgets don’t agree on how to spend that money, however. For example, while the Senate wants to allocate $100 million to MSBA construction grants, the House is proposing the same sum go towards a program for greening and retrofitting school buildings.
Time will tell which priorities prevail when the final budget lands on Gov. Maura Healey’s desk in July.
Cyr said he thinks “there’s a good shot” the MSBA grants will pass. “But I want to have a little humility,” he said. “You have a lot of members of both the House and the Senate whose districts are affected by it.”
It is true that Nauset High is not alone. From Stoneham to Andover to Lowell, school construction projects across the Commonwealth are blowing past their budgets.
Easley said that Phase 1B, which will represent 60 percent of the project, is slated to wrap up in August 2024. Completion of Phase 2 is on track for August 2025, with final landscaping and paving done in December of that year. If all goes according to plan, students will spend the 2025-2026 school year in the brand-new building.
While Brait Builders got to work at the beginning of February, just weeks after the funding authorization passed, there is a formal groundbreaking scheduled for June 14, Easley said.
NAUSET HIGH SCHOOL
Creator of ‘Respecting Differences’ Class to Retire
Lisa Brown’s students give credit to a teacher who believes in them
EASTHAM — Anyone who has ever been a student will tell you that some courses seem inseparable from their teachers. But Lisa Brown, who teaches Nauset Regional High School’s Exploring and Respecting Differences (EARD) courses, insists that hers can be.
When Brown retires at the end of this year after 25 years at Nauset, the school administration must decide if EARD, EARD II, and the honors compendium known as HEARD will outlast her. The school’s principal, Patrick Clark, did not return a call seeking comment.
Nauset Regional School Committee Chair Chris Easley hopes the courses will continue. “No program has affected that school’s culture more than EARD,” he said. “It is worth its weight in gold.”
Brown’s classes are electives that begin with exploration of an attention grabber for most teenagers: cliques. The curriculum segues into stereotypes, explicit bias, the formation of hate groups, and cults. “This is where it gets dicey and really cool and fun,” Brown said.
They take on gender and sexuality. “That whole section — I let the kids teach it now,” said Brown, who is gay.
Her one interjection is to show the students a few ads from the 1950s, including one with a woman’s head superimposed on a bearskin rug. “A man is stepping on her,” Brown said. The ad is selling shoes. “We look at the intrinsic and extrinsic implications of sexualizing, humiliating, and debilitating one whole half of our population for many, many years.”
EARD II covers the Black Lives Matter movement, human trafficking, and mediation, said Ali Hawk, a junior from Orleans who has taken every course Brown offers. Through Brown’s advanced courses, Hawk has become a student mediator and presents twice-monthly seminars on empathy to 90 middle-school students at a time. The skills she honed don’t just look good on a college application, Hawk said. “They matter to me personally. You learn a lot in Lisa’s classes that you would not normally be taught in a classroom but that you really should be taught.”
Sophomore Lily Rice of Truro takes a class called Study Strategies with Brown. “Not only does she have energy that is off the charts,” said Rice, “she doesn’t look at kids as ‘problem’ kids.” Brown, she said, sees students’ potential “if only someone believes in them — and she is the one who believes. She is the first person I go to if I need advice.”
Many of Brown’s students are members of the school’s Human Rights Club, which Brown advises. Until 2018, Brown traveled to Haiti with some of her students and artist Ellen LeBow, who helped build an arts center there in the 1990s. In the summer, Brown still takes students to the Hague Global Student Leaders Summit where they once heard Greta Thunberg speak.
EARD is not a how-to on becoming a political activist, said Brown. The point, she said, has always been to inspire students’ interests.
When Brown left restaurant ownership — she had opened the Flying Fish in Wellfleet with Pat Foley in 1990 — and began teaching special education at age 40, her students were near dropouts, she said. Keeping them in school was her sole focus.
“I used current events and the injustices that they were experiencing to hook the kids in a meaningful way,” said Brown, now 65.
Two years later, she began teaching EARD as an elective, and students with a wide range of interests signed up. Brown has a degree in ethnomusicology from Hampshire College and also taught World Music at Nauset until 2008.
She grew up in Wellfleet and still lives in her childhood home. She credits her career success to Wellfleet Elementary School fifth-grade teacher Barbara Winslow. “She was a poet,” Brown said. “Frankly, I had a massive crush on her.”
Eager to please on her first book report for Winslow, Brown read The Hobbit in a single weekend (it was easy, she said, given that her parents had already read it to her). But when she told Winslow, the teacher said, “I think you skimmed it. Go back and find me the longest sentence in the book.”
Brown said it took her another week and a half to find that sentence, on page 17, which she recited from memory for a reporter: “By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green and the hobbits were still so numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing in his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his long woolly toes (neatly brushed), Gandalf came by.”
What Ms. Winslow taught her, she said, is that a good teacher can help students do just about anything they set their minds to. Brown’s students have done a lot; each year, the Human Rights Club has lunch with legislators on Beacon Hill, where the students are recognized on the floor of the Senate and get to talk about the issues that matter to them. “I cry every single time,” Brown said.
In 2018, the right-wing group United Cape Patriots showed up at Nauset High School to protest at a forum her students were holding on a Saturday about a ballot question known as “the transgender bathroom bill.” One member of that group carried a sign that read “Safety Trumps Diversity” and depicted a transgender person with horns and a tail. The figure had a big slash through it, Brown said.
“There were kids who were afraid to leave the auditorium,” Brown recalled. “There were parents who were saying this is not safe. We circled up and everyone held hands. I said, ‘We can do this.’ ”
MacKenzie “Mac” Bell, 24, of Harwich, who graduated from Nauset in 2018, said Brown inspired him to pursue filmmaking when she assigned him to produce a documentary on their trip to the Hague leadership summit. She bought the camcorder.
Brown encouraged Bell to attend Hampshire College where he is now a senior studying film. “Hampshire students pave their own path,” he said. “That is why I love Lisa so much. She instilled this sense of path-making for yourself, taking your own trail, and making an impact.”
SCHOOLING
‘All Lives Matter’ Sign Raises Questions at Nauset High
Message is defended by school leaders as ‘celebrating inclusion’
EASTHAM — A banner posted in the main administration building at Nauset Regional High School to celebrate Black History Month has upset some students because it includes the message “All Lives Matter.”
The banner, which in larger lettering says “Black History Month,” was put up near the school’s main office on Feb. 1, said Danessa Luster, a senior from Provincetown. The next day, she said, she and her cousin Rogene Waite, also a senior, went to Principal Patrick Clark and expressed their objection to the “All Lives Matter” message. Both students are Black.
“We had to explain to him why it was bad,” said Luster. “My cousin and I both talked to him and said it was like a kick in the face. I asked him if he could take it down. He said, ‘I’m going to look at it.’ But I felt like he wasn’t really understanding.”
Luster said that she returned the next day and the sign was still there.
Another Nauset senior, Isabelle Robicheau of Wellfleet, sent a photograph of the sign to the Independent, writing, “I was horrified when I saw a banner posted in the main entrance of the school stating ‘All Lives Matter.’ All of the students were talking about it and are dumbfounded about why it was put up for Black History Month.”
On Monday, Principal Clark told the Independent that the sign had been put up by the school’s Black Students Union and its faculty adviser, Maura Kerse-McMillin. He said, “I didn’t know there was any controversy about it. I’m not quite sure what the matter is.” He said the Black Students Union had done a nice job of decorating the school for Black History Month, celebrating “the theme of inclusion.”
Asked whether any students had come to him to complain about the sign, he said, “I don’t know.”
Also on Monday, Kerse-McMillin, the Black Students Union adviser, told the Independent that she and her students had ordered and put up two banners for Black History Month. But she said she hadn’t seen the one near the administration office because she teaches at the opposite end of the school.
When asked whether she had put up a sign that said “All Lives Matter,” Kerse-McMillin said, “The whole month is about Black consciousness. Why would we put that up?”
But the next day, Kerse-McMillin had a different explanation. She said she had in fact ordered the sign and that the president of the Black Students Union had put it up. She defended the message.
“It says, ‘All Lives Matter,’ which is the theme of inclusivity,” said Kerse-McMillin. “It’s not the kind of retaliatory yard sign that people put up. Everyone is fine with it. If it had been put up as a retaliatory message it would not have been OK.”
Orianna Porter, the president of Nauset’s Black Students Union, did not respond to an email message seeking comment.
Nauset School Supt. Brooke Clenchy said Tuesday that she had talked to Clark and Kerse-McMillin about the sign and that “they thought the statement was fine — it was a good message, not a bad message. It was not seen as a sign of disrespect.”
Donna Walker, Provincetown’s director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, said the slogan “All Lives Matter” was “a reaction to the message behind ‘Black Lives Matter.’ People need to understand this is not an attempt to say that some lives are more important than others. This is a way of highlighting the fact that this group of people has had to face violence and brutality.
“ ‘All Lives Matter’ negates the experience of Black people,” Walker said.
“I am surprised,” said Ngina Lythcott, a Black resident of Provincetown, “that when the students went to complain, the administrators did not see this as an opportunity to engage them. Saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ implies to some people that other lives don’t matter. In fact, it’s a sort of crying in the desert: ‘Don’t Black lives matter, too?’
“The appropriate response,” Lythcott added, “is not calling people out. That never brings people over from the other side. The appropriate response is calling people over — using that as a teachable moment.”
RACISM ON CAMPUS
Nauset Officials Covered Up Bullying Incidents
Staff were ‘kept in the dark’ about anti-Semitic harassment at high school
EASTHAM — Throughout Mia Rubenstein’s freshman year at Nauset Regional High School, she says, she was taunted and bullied by students and by a teacher because she is Jewish. Her parents eventually withdrew her from the school in May 2019 and filed a complaint with the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
Federal investigators concluded, in a March 11, 2021 letter, that the school had failed to follow its own grievance process for harassment based on race, color, or national origin. There were no written reports about five separate complaints made by Rubenstein and her parents during that year, the OCR found, and it was unclear whether school officials had conducted a proper investigation.
The Independent obtained a copy of the OCR’s findings through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The OCR closed the case after Nauset officials agreed to rewrite district policies, conduct staff training, and put out a notice that harassment would not be tolerated. But details of the Rubensteins’ complaints were never revealed by the school and few among the staff and in the community knew anything about them.
A March 29, 2021 letter to faculty, staff, and students from then-Supt. Tom Conrad began with “In light of the events happening locally and nationally, I wanted to send this statement out to you all as reminder that if you are being harassed in any way to please reach out to someone within the school district.”
Lisa Brown, who teaches a class at Nauset High called Exploring and Respecting Differences, said staff were kept in the dark about the real impetus for the letter.
The three administrators named in the Rubensteins’ complaints are Conrad; former Principal Chris Ellsasser, who resigned in 2022; and Assistant Principal Sean Fleming, who is now an assistant principal at Nauset Regional Middle School. All three refused to comment for this article.
Brooke Clenchy, who became superintendent in the fall of 2021, said she knew of the Rubenstein complaints but none of the details. She said the school is now focused on making changes over the long term and has hired diversity consultants to provide staff training. Brown said the high school administration is totally new, and she has faith that it will set boundaries and enforce the rules.
Sandy Rubenstein, Mia’s mother, said she is skeptical of Nauset’s efforts because of the way her daughter’s case was swept under the rug.
Harassment Charges
Mia Rubenstein, 19, is now a senior at Suffield Academy, a private school in Connecticut, where she repeated her freshman year after leaving Nauset High. In her senior speech, she talked about her experience at Nauset, and her mother posted a video of it online.
Mia described her first day at Nauset in September 2018, when she said her government teacher, whom she did not name, called her to his desk after class.
“ ‘I just want you to know that I have a tattoo of a swastika on my back,’ he says with a smile,” Mia said in the speech. “My teacher continued to make derogatory remarks throughout all of September. On Oct. 27, 2018, there was a devastating shooting in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life Synagogue. Eleven innocent Jewish people were killed.”
Mia said the teacher asked her to read a news story about the shooting aloud to the class.
“I read it,” she said. “One of the girls sitting next to me said that her dad had said that morning the event was ‘a step in the right direction.’ ”
The Independent learned the government teacher’s name and interviewed him in person. Because Rubenstein’s story could not be independently corroborated, the newspaper is not identifying him at this time. The teacher denied all of the accusations. When he was asked about the tattoo remark, the teacher took off his shirt and showed a reporter his back, which had no swastika tattoo.
The teacher said he did not know he had anything to do with Mia’s leaving the school and he denied being questioned by administrators.
“No one ever told me anything,” he said. “Nobody ever asked me about anything.”
His denials, however, are contradicted by the school’s version of events in the OCR report.
One of Mia’s final complaints in May 2019 was about a class project involving playdough when “the teacher placed a replica of a yarmulke on his head, which the student felt was disrespectful to the Jewish faith, and told her ‘Look: I’m Jewish,’ ” the OCR report states.
Nauset responded by describing an administrator’s interview of the teacher.
“The teacher explained that the yarmulke replica was part of a project regarding various religious symbols and expressed regret that the student was impacted,” according to the OCR. “He denied that he mentioned Judaism or that his actions were directed at any particular student.”
Based on the teacher’s statement, and with no other witnesses, the school could not say whether the teacher harassed Mia, Nauset’s attorney, Paige Tobin of Murphy, Lamere & Murphy, stated in the OCR report.
The OCR investigators stated they were “concerned that the district may not have conducted investigations designed to ascertain whether harassment occurred (e.g., identification of witnesses for the yarmulke incident.)”
The teacher had been a long-term substitute and part-time educational assistant for the school system from 2015 to 2019, Clenchy said. He was not rehired in 2019, he said, and now works in another Massachusetts public school.
Student Bullying
Mia said kids were bullying her, too, airdropping images of concentration camps and Hitler to her iPhone, according to the OCR documents. She went to Fleming for help. He went to the school’s information technology department, which found they were sent from an anonymous iPhone, according to the OCR.
Around the same time, sticky notes with swastikas were placed on Mia’s backpack. The school resource officer and Fleming looked at security footage and searched the trash where Mia said she disposed of them but found nothing, according to the OCR.
The Rubensteins told the OCR that in October 2018 and again in January the government teacher singled her out because she was “the only Jew” in the class and made comments such as “I don’t know if your opinion is different because you are Jewish.”
The district, according to the OCR, did “not provide any material to OCR related to the notice of or response to these alleged incidents.”
On March 27, the Rubensteins complained that Mia had received two emails with anti-Semitic slurs; one said “welcome to Naushwiz” [sic] and the other “leave you filthy Jew.” She deleted them, Mia said. The IT department looked but did not find any that were traceable, according to the OCR report.
School officials told the OCR that they tried to address harassment and discrimination on a schoolwide basis. On April 2 and 3, 2019, administrators and counselors went to every math class to discuss “topics of culture, inclusion and peer influences,” according to Nauset’s response to the OCR. “The topics gave students tools for how they can contribute to a positive school culture.”
Mia told the Independent that the meeting she witnessed focused on vaping with nothing about anti-Semitism.
Lisa Brown said she cannot remember any such meetings. Principal Ellsasser often talked about kindness, Brown said.
“Chris is good at philosophizing, but you need action, and that means very clear boundaries,” Brown said.
Mia fell apart emotionally that year, said her father, Will. She did not tell her parents the full extent of what was going on until January, he said; she deleted harassing messages because she did not want to deal with them, she told the Independent.
The decision to send her to boarding school was expensive and heartbreaking, he said. “When you have a child you expect them to leave home at 17 or 18,” he said. “I was really angry that she was taken away four years early.”
A Missed Opportunity
On Sept. 1, 2019, Mia was sent a Snapchat photo of a student with a swastika on her forehead. The Rubensteins forwarded it to Conrad’s office; Ann Taft, Conrad’s secretary, told them she was passing it to the police. Eastham Lt. Gus Schnitzer said they looked into it. “But we determined the matter occurred outside of our jurisdiction,” he said, because it was sent before the school year began and because the subjects did not live in Eastham.
The Independent obtained a copy of the photo from the Rubensteins and contacted the girl in the photo. (The newspaper is not naming her because of her age at the time.) She expressed regret, explaining that during freshman year she hung out with an older group of friends who “were not good people.”
“To think four or five years ago, I thought that was OK,” the girl said. “Now I want to throw up. All I can do is apologize.”
This girl confirmed that kids were making fun of Mia for being Jewish that year. As for her own involvement, she said she did not understand the Holocaust well enough until she studied it sophomore year.
Holocaust history must be taught in high school, according to the Mass. Curriculum Frameworks. But at Nauset Regional Middle School, English teacher Anne Needel’s eighth-grade students held an assembly during her Holocaust literature unit and put flags on the lawn representing 1.5 million murdered children. The event was canceled by the pandemic in 2020, and Needel has not decided if it will resume, according to Robin Millen, Nauset’s director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 2,717 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. — a 34-percent increase from 2020 and the highest number on record since ADL began tracking such incidents in 1979.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, told the PBS Newshour that the U.S. is seeing a “kind of normalization of anti-Semitism and extremism” because of government leaders like Donald Trump and celebrities like Kanye West going on racist rants. “I’d like to see policymakers bring anti-bias education into classrooms,” said Greenblatt. “There’s a lot more that could be done.”
“Here is what I would have liked,” said Lisa Brown. “For the administration to have a faculty meeting to talk about what happened and give the power to the faculty to say something and stop it in its tracks. Because we all have a moral duty to protect our students’ safety and identity. Why didn’t they use 80 teachers on that campus to assure that this would not happen again? It was a deeply unfortunate missed opportunity.”
