ORLEANS — Eight students filed into the bright yellow Nauset Room at the middle school here during the May 22 meeting of the Nauset Regional School Committee. Three more appeared on Zoom. All were there to show support for the high school’s drama teacher, Ian Hamilton, whose contract they had just learned would not be renewed next year.
“Ian Hamilton made me feel welcome in his classroom,” Evan Smith told the committee. Smith is an Orleans sophomore who played the lead in the school’s recent production of Anything Goes. “Don’t take away something that makes this place so special and safe.”
Word circulating in the school community was that Hamilton was one of several teachers who would be let go by the administration. At the meeting on May 22, the students said economics teacher Nicholas Kuppens was one of them. The Independent was not able to confirm the names of other teachers whose contracts were not being renewed.
Principal Patrick Clark said on May 27 that the decision not to renew Hamilton’s contract was “a staffing issue,” and that he “couldn’t get into it.” As of press time, Nauset Supt. Brooke Clenchy and District Finance Director Giovanna Venditti had not responded to the Independent’s requests for information about the staffing cuts.
Hamilton, a 2017 Nauset graduate, began working at the school in August 2021 as an education assistant. In May 2022 he was hired to lead the school’s drama department. His termination comes just before he completes a three-year probationary period as a Nauset teacher.
Hamilton’s students learned he would be let go just days after their performance of the musical, the first play to be produced on Nauset High School’s new stage.
During the school district’s annual budget hearing earlier this year, Clark and Clenchy said that some staffers would likely be leaving at the end of the year. Eastham Select Board member Suzanne Bryan, who was at that meeting, said she assumed that meant some teachers would be retiring.
Bryan and the students said they were surprised to learn that Hamilton was among the teachers who would not be back next school year.
“It’s devastating to think I’ll be graduating next year and not seeing him there,” said Izaak van der Wende, a junior from Orleans who is vice president of the school’s drama group, the Nauset Players. “Losing him as a teacher is an insult to the integrity of Nauset as a school,” he said.
Desmond Conrad-Ferm, a school choice student from Yarmouth Port, presented the school committee with a petition signed by 148 people asking that Hamilton’s contract be renewed.
“I’m here to ask you folks to add to the next agenda the issue of not renewing Ian Hamilton’s contract,” he said. “Ian is not just a teacher; he has created an incredible community.”
Conrad-Ferm said that he had planned to have a scout from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts attend his performance in the fall play, but without Hamilton at the helm he was not sure that would happen.
Personnel decisions aren’t made by the school committee, which focuses mainly on budgeting and programming. Nevertheless, committee chair Judith Schumacher told the students that their voices “had been heard” and that their message would be passed on to the school’s administration. “You all are very well-spoken and passionate,” she said.
Emily Anziano, a Wellfleet resident who introduced herself as a “former Nauset theater kid,” said that the school’s decision to let its only drama teacher go had made her worry about the future of the program.
“Drama and theater programs play an absolutely vital role in adolescent development,” she said. “They offer safe and creative spaces for self-expression, empathy, and collaboration.” Teaching drama, she said, “takes a very special educator like Mr. Hamilton.”
“It seems like there’s a trend of the arts being demolished,” said Aidan Pernal, a junior from Eastham who was the technical director and set designer for Anything Goes.
Schumacher said that “there is nothing that has come before this committee about changing any programs or doing away with any.” She said that it was “absolutely not true” that the drama program was in jeopardy.
Bryan said she thought the school community was anxious because of a lack of communication between school leaders and the public, which she said is “frustrating for people.”
Orleans Select Board chair Kevin Galligan also spoke during the public comments period at the meeting on May 22. He said that insufficient notice was given to towns about a $250,000 budget deficit for fiscal 2025 that was discussed by the committee at its May 15 meeting. The deficit, according to a letter sent by the superintendent to the towns of Brewster, Eastham, Orleans, and Wellfleet, was caused by “costs associated with special education” and would be covered by the district’s Certified Excess and Deficiency Fund.
“I’m not trying to put them under the microscope,” Galligan later told the Independent. “I’m just trying to understand where we’ll be going in the current year.”