To the editor:
I recently requested that both the Berkshire Hills Regional School District and the Town of Great Barrington release records of the legal costs paid to date for their respective defenses in the federal civil lawsuit filed in May 2024, against both the District and the town, by former Du Bois Middle School teacher Arantzazu Galdos-Shapiro in response to the “Gender Queer” incident at the Du Bois Middle School on December 8, 2023.
Dr. Dillon replied promptly that the costs of the district’s defense in that ongoing lawsuit are being paid by its liability insurance carrier. He also confirmed that the District paid $39,000 to the law firm Kinne-Cohen for its meticulously researched 2024 independent report on the incident.
A direct question from the floor at the May 6, 2024, Great Barrington Annual Town Meeting about this cost met, bafflingly, with no response, even though a later follow-up inquiry revealed that the bill for the report had been paid in full by March 15, 2024, seven weeks before the Town Meeting.
I thought that this year it would be helpful to Great Barrington voters to learn the amount of such legal expenditures before the May 3, 2025, Great Barrington Annual Town Meeting, rather than after it.
Perhaps the town’s answer will be the same as that of the school district: that the actual costs of the town’s defense in the “Gender Queer” lawsuit are folded into its insurance premiums.
The poorly conceived and executed police visit to the middle school on December 8, 2023, caused great distress to a reportedly gifted teacher who was subjected without notice to a warrantless search of her classroom, to interrogation without counsel, to fears for her safety prompted by the Great Barrington Police Department’s illegal grant of anonymity to her accuser, and to the damage done to her reputation by the accuser’s published defamatory lies about her speech and behavior.
I regret that the line items for the school and town budgets to be voted on at the May 3 Annual Town Meeting will not give voters any account of the substantial extra financial costs to society due to the mistakes made by public employees who should have known better on December 8, 2023.
John Breasted
Great Barrington
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