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School districts in Massachusetts have suspended at least five employees over social media posts about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Now teachers’ unions are asking administrators to protect teachers from harassment.
“The ongoing campaign by extreme-right conservatives to discredit and defund public education has grotesquely exploited the shooting death of Charlie Kirk to launch attacks against people commenting on this public figure’s beliefs and statements,” Massachusetts Teachers Association President Max Page and Vice President Deb McCarthy wrote in a joint statement.
Jessica Tang, president of the American Federation of Teachers’ branch in Massachusetts, said she is alarmed to see people being punished for their speech.
“Instead of having serious conversations about the gun violence epidemic that has gripped our nation and our schools, we’re having to address bullying and harassment — both of which have no place in the classroom or in our democracy,” Tang said in a statement.
Four Things to Know
1. A Boston municipal worker who was fired earlier this year after being arrested during a domestic dispute is suing, saying the city was wrong to fire her.
Marwa Khudaynazar, former chief of staff for the city’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, also says the city did not make public information that would have reflected poorly on Mayor Michelle Wu and Segun Idowu, the city’s chief of economic opportunity and inclusion. (You can read more about the arrest and subsequent investigation here.)
2. East Boston now has a health vending machine, where hygiene products, socks and the opioid overdose-reversing drug Narcan are available around the clock — for free. You can find it outside of NeighborHealth’s East Boston clinic, at 10 Gove St.
“Substance use itself is a community issue, and if it’s not being addressed at a community level, then we’re missing a really big component of it. And this machine itself is addressing so many different areas,” said Desiree Millet, NeighborHealth’s director of recovery service programs.
3. What are Somerville’s two mayoral candidates focused on? After defeating incumbent Mayor Katjana Ballantyne, at-large city councilors Jake Wilson and Willie Burnley Jr. are laying out their priorities. Wilson, who got 42% of the vote in Tuesday’s preliminary, said he’s pushing the experience he’s had running Somerville Youth Soccer. “This is a city of 82,000 people, with a fairly large municipal workforce of more than 1,000 employees, and the city needs someone in charge who knows how to lead and manage,” he said.
Burnley got 34% of the vote and said that as a renter in a city where about two-thirds of residents aren’t homeowners, he’s been focused on tenants’ issues. “I, too, struggle every month with worry if next year my rent is going to go up so much that I get pushed out of this city,” Burnley said.
4. Should you get a COVID shot this year? Public health officials in Massachusetts reviewed the science and issued some recommendations.
First, anyone in the state over the age of 6 months can get a vaccine if they want one. The panel recommended shots for kids between the ages of 6 and 23 months; for anyone who has a medical condition that makes severe COVID more likely, or who lives with someone that does; and for people over the age of 65. They also suggested vaccines for anyone who hasn’t been vaccinated against COVID before.
Is Mass. trying to close the last two facilities for developmentally disabled adults?
For months after their mother died in 2023, Kim Meehan of Norfolk tried to get her sister, Kristen Robinson, into a state-run facility that cares for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Robinson, now 52, had been living with their mother. Meehan said her sister is quadriplegic, legally blind, has a seizure disorder and dysphasia, a language disorder.
“Our family asked over 26 to 30 times to high-up people [in the state], ‘Why can’t she be admitted to the Wrentham Development Center or the Hogan Center?’ And we were always told by the state that she was not eligible,” Meehan told GBH’s Marilyn Schairer.
Robinson did eventually get admitted into the Hogan Regional Center in Danvers after a long hospital stay, and her sister said she’s doing well. Meehan said she would have preferred to have her sister at the facility in Wrentham, which is much closer to her home.
It’s unclear if anyone else has been admitted to the two facilities: in a response to a public records request from Schairer, the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services said it has had no new admissions at the Wrentham Developmental Center since the end of 2023 and none at the Hogan Regional Center since 2020. A spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services said that’s because no one has met the eligibility criteria, and declined to comment on why Robinson’s admission did not appear in the records request.
Massachusetts, like other states, has closed almost all of its institutions for disabled people in the last 50 years, often because the people living in them were being abused, neglected or kept in horrific conditions. There’s also been a push in more recent years to move people into smaller residential group homes, which tend to be less expensive to run.
“There’s a certain segment of the population that is very low-functioning and cannot handle community-based care,” said David Kassel of the Massachusetts Coalition of Families and Advocates.
And family members like Meehan worry that the state is trying to shut down the institutions, as they have with many other institutions for people with disabilities since the 1970s.
“The problem is now the pendulum has swung so far towards the group homes that it’s not a one-size-fits-all. Every disability is not the same,” Meehan said.
And she’s not alone. If you want to dig deeper, you can read Marilyn Schairer’s full investigation here.
Dig deeper:
-For blind and low-vision nature lovers, birding is 'by ear’
-Kids with autism are at greater risk of drowning. Swim classes can help.
-‘Shocking’ report spotlights Mass. history of mistreating disabled people
-Their disabled loved ones languished in state institutions. Now, they want the records.
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