Teachers’ Row. Such was the nickname in the’70s and’80s for the Tahanto Trail, West Bare Hill Road and Woodside Road neighborhood in Harvard. The area was aptly named since at least eight Bromfield faculty and staff members lived along those roads. Many others resided in other parts of town.
When I first came to teach at Bromfield, I was surprised by the sense of community created by the parents, students, and teachers that resulted in such a caring and nurturing environment. The school was always a beehive of activity: three-day Buche de Noel fundraisers, talent shows, French and Spanish potluck dinners, Toga day, Thanksgiving pie sales.
My wife and I married two months after I began my teaching career here and I was overwhelmed by the generosity of faculty, students, and parents toward a new teacher. A few months later, when we were looking for a new apartment, the town nurse at the time, Betty Bergendahl, encouraged us to become part of the Harvard community and paved the way for us to move into a house on Old Mill Road. Imagine, a first-year teacher able to afford to rent a small house in Harvard! Teacher friends from other communities referred to my experience in Harvard as living and working in Camelot. Even when we bought our first house in Leominster, we spent more time socializing in Harvard with students, parents and friends, and then were pleased to be able to move back here to our own home a few years later.
However, those days of a well-rounded community have eroded over the past 15 or so years. No longer are teachers welcomed into the community in the same way. I don’t think any teachers hired in the recent past have moved to Harvard, and most of the sports and activities are run by either the older generation of teachers who are about to retire or outside advisors. These days, new teachers are told that that they should be “honored” to teach here, that they should work more than other teachers for that “privilege,” yet not expect to be paid what teachers in comparable communities receive. They are encouraged to run extracurriculars, for which they will receive a minimum stipend that they will have to raise themselves. They will have to fundraise like crazy to run all activities and then to make matters worse, pay a fee to use the school facilities. In addition to all this, there is no encouragement from the community to become part of the fabric of Harvard. How could anyone refuse such a tempting offer? Is it no wonder that a few years ago almost the entire English department left for jobs in other school systems where they now work with a realistic number of students for a much better salary? And not surprisingly, they’re very happy with their choices.
I cringe these days whenever I hear the school system referred to as a business. Teachers are not cogs of a machine designed to spit out mass produced students. Each student is an individual who needs to be nourished to grow. Communities do that, not machines and certainly not businesses. And this process is well worth the investment when one measures the results that the Harvard school system, its faculty, and its students have achieved.
The current contract debacle is just one more example of the slow demise of this sense of community. The longer the town administrators and teachers remain at such odds over the acknowledgement of a living wage, the more I see the cultural atmosphere at Bromfield undermined even further as teachers are driven away from the community, leaving behind a school that becomes more and more like other schools—cold, formal and institutional, where everything is treated as part of the “business”.
I still see glimpses of that old community in Bromfield, but those moments are becoming more and more a memory driven away by decades of misguided decisions to keep Harvard insular and exclusive, decisions that continue to this day.
Michael McGarty lives on Tahanto Trail and has been a Bromfield teacher for many years.
