Danvers School Committee Delays Action Amid Hockey Abuse Probe

DANVERS, MA — The Danvers School Committee met for about 90 minutes in an executive session on the district's response to accusations of racist behavior and hazing within the high school hockey program but took no action on the status of Superintendent Lisa Dana Monday night.

School Committee member Robin Doherty had made a motion — which was seconded — at last week's School Committee meeting that Dana be placed on administrative leave "while the School Committee can ascertain the best path moving forward." But School Committee Chair Eric Crane told reporters no motion of that nature was made Monday night and that the School Committee would release a statement about the meeting on Tuesday.

The executive session came one week after some parents called for School Committee members to resign following a Boston Globe investigation into 2019-2020 season Danvers hockey incidents that included accusations players engaged in locker room rituals using racial slurs and used a sex toy to embarrass players who did not go along with their demands.

The Danvers Teacher Association this weekend was sharply critical of officials' handling of the accusations and the investigations that followed.

"The lack of communication from school district leadership around this issue allowed these hostile behaviors to fester in our schools," the Teachers Association said in a statement. "The school leadership's secrecy prevented educators from playing an active role in addressing the racism, homophobia, antisemitism and bullying taking place."

Dana released a statement through the district last Monday saying that the accusations were investigated and the district "addressed appropriate personnel and student discipline."

Longer-tenured members of the School Committee members claimed during last week's School Committee meeting that privacy obligations prevented them from discussing the details of the charges publicly and any personnel decisions made in relation to the coaching staff.

"It bothers me more than anything that people are thinking that we covered up something because the Boston Globe said so," Crane said at last week's meeting, which was open to the public. "I know I spoke about the particulars to the extent that I could.

"We used words like abhorrent. We made clear during our discussions that there were things that could have had racist overtones, homophobic overtones. What we didn't do was give explicit details."

The additional hockey accusations came in the same week town and school officials said racist and antisemitic graffiti — including two swastikas — were found in the bathroom of the Holten Richmond Middle School.

"We are acutely aware that this most recent incident fits into a broader pattern," officials said in a joint statement last Tuesday after detailing the middle school graffiti, "both within our schools and within our broader community that includes allegations of racial profiling at a local business, an apparent noose left outside a local church, an investigation into racist and homophobic behavior last year by student-athletes, a Confederate flag flown in our downtown as part of a political rally and a swastika discovered in the woods behind the middle school.

"We want to be clear in our condemnation of these acts, actions and allegations. Individually, they are ugly, unacceptable and have no place in Danvers or any other community. Collectively, they are proof that there is much work to be done."

Town Administrator Steve Bartha, Crane, Dana and Human Rights and Inclusion Committee Chair Dutrochet Djoko issued the joint statement.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)

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