“I feel abandoned by the city and completely forgotten.” Added Rachael Evans, the mother of two Somerville High School students: “Somerville has been reacting to the demands of the teacher’s union, and I ask you to make in-person learning a priority.”Įxcept for one unidentified official caught on an open mike during a committee roll call, the struggles of local families weren’t the takeaway. “I am feeling empty and lonely,” said a ninth-grade girl named Anna during public comment. With both Toof and Lantagne listening in, the meeting made poignantly clear residents’ dismay over the city’s reluctance to fully bring students back to classrooms. The situation came to a head in March 2021, when the Somerville School Committee convened via Zoom to discuss the long-awaited reopening plans. To her shock, she says, “I was told that I just wanted to go to brunch,” as if she was only interested in having the schools reopen for babysitting. Julia Toof, the mother of a young son with autism spectrum disorder who struggled with remote learning, also pressed the case for reopening to Somerville officials. “I didn’t understand how averse many people here would be to using international data.”Īverse and often openly hostile toward parents pleading for relief from their families’ pandemic nightmare. Presenting administrators with her research on reopening tactics used in countries where the pandemic broke out before it hit the United States, she again was met with “a very adverse reaction,” she says. When Lantagne formed a group with other alarmed parents and approached officials with their concerns, they were told “we were advocating for our children, not the children of Somerville,” Lantagne says. Then-Mayor Joe Curtatone, well known as a progressive’s progressive, along with the local teacher’s union leadership, were vocal hardliners for keeping the schools closed. She believed it offered a blueprint for at least a partial reopening the following September.Ĭity officials had other ideas. So she decided to use her experience as a former public health engineer for the CDC, researching the data on school safety coming out of Europe. When the pandemic shut down Somerville public schools in spring 2020, Lantagne, a mother of two young children, was especially worried about how families with fewer resources would cope. Until, that is, progressive Democrats in her progressive city government dropped an f-bomb of contempt on her. “I have always considered myself a progressive Democrat.” The “arc of the universe bends towards justice,” she says, paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr. A Tufts University professor of community health, Lantagne’s impeccable credentials include years spent battling infectious diseases and evaluating water treatment programs in developing countries a postdoctoral fellowship in sustainability science at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and hobbies including yoga, vegan cooking, and hosting the occasional asylum seeker. In many ways, Daniele Lantagne of Somerville just might be the platonic ideal of a Massachusetts progressive.
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