Hello, friends,
I’ve been bemused by some of the things I’ve been hearing coming out of Freeport for a while now, I’ve kept my thoughts to myself for the most part for reasons I’ll explain in a sentence or two, but I think it’s finally time I give them some written form.
So let’s get the obvious disclaimers out of the way:
Disclaimer Time.
1: I no longer live or work in Freeport. I’ve said this in at least half of the latest articles, but, yeah. Consider my opinion to be that of a former resident’s, as someone who isn’t impacted personally by what happens.
2: I am a former Freeport High School Teaching Assistant from 2010-2015. That means I actually know some of the people involved in this drama. I was also the assistant coach for the boys’ swim team for two years.
3: Other than a couple very brief dialogues, I am working off of what I have read from many Freeport Residents and other people concerned with the situation, as well as other publications from other media outlets (particularly the Long Island Herald). That means I have NOT, as a matter of principle on this one, reached out to talk to those deeply involved. That, in turn, means that I am almost exclusively referring only to things which are public, wide-spread information, with the caveat that such information is sometimes incorrect and imprecise.
4: I’ll try not to curse too much, but given how insane this all is, I might. (I did)
So What The Heck Is Going On With Freeport Public Schools?
The long and short is that there seems to be no one thing going wrong, but rather a constellation of weird stuff that sounds like it shouldn’t be happening.
The overarching theme is that there is a conflict between the school board and, so it would seem, everyone-the-hell-else. School board is fighting its own Superintendent, school board is fighting concerned residents, school board is fighting teachers, and all of this is most definitely having an impact on student wellbeing.
Let’s take these things on mostly in that order, because why not?
Freeport School Board Versus Superintendents And Structures
As reported on by the Long Island Herald wayyy back in April of 2025, Freeport placed its rather new Superintendent, Fia Davis, on administrative reassignment. Basically, that means she’s on paid suspension - she collects a paycheck, but she isn’t doing any work. What the Herald notes, and what I want to stress here, is that this was a 3-0 School Board vote with 2 of the members not even fucking present.
There goes my swearing promise.
For now, we can postulate as to why the school board felt such an important vote had to happen without the whole board present until the cows come home. The bottom line is that two members didn’t even get to voice their opinions about it on the record, and that’s an enormously bad sign because either the situation was so immediate that the Board couldn’t wait, or the Board’s majority chose not to wait and deliberately shut the other two members out from even getting to speak about it.
The Herald further reported on May 1st that the administrative reassignment was apparently not meant to suggest wrongdoing had taken place, just that it was “neutral.” It simultaneously reported that Assistant Superintendent for personnel and projects, Benjamin Roberts, was leaving the district.
Dr. Alice Kane (Who I’m kind of sure I’ve worked with in the past, but at a very far distance; no hostility, she was pretty cool, we just did very different things at the school - but I miiiight be mixing her up with someone else?) was appointed interim Superintendent.
Since this all went down, it’s my understanding that the school board has been radically reshaping its superintendent structure.
On November 21st, the Herald reported that the school board is re-organizing its administrative structure entirely. Five assistant superintendent roles were replaced with four executive director ones. What does that mean?
I have no idea. When it comes to education, I’ve always believed that it isn’t so much, “what does the administrative organization chart look like” as it is, “how does this organization work to benefit its students.”
I’m hearing - again, from a distance - that it’s not.
Special Needs Services In Question?
For example, I’ve read numerous crowdsourced reports that students who are entitled, through their Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), to speech therapy services have not been getting them. For months, apparently. I’ve read that other students with disabilities have similarly not gotten their educational needs met.
I don’t know the exact details as to what is and isn’t being provided, but it’s my understanding that with all of these changes to the Superintendent structure (and other issues I’ll get to later), the necessary resource acquisition, management, and distribution for a school system to function appropriately is simply not happening.
As always, students with special needs are getting left in the dust.
Now, three brisk paragraphs about me and my background with education, specifically with students with disabilities, so you get where I’m coming from and why this is so frustrating. First and foremost, I was one: Among other things, I have a fine motor skill impairment. I had a 504 Plan (similar to an IEP) that included my right to have access to a computer when taking tests. I couldn’t hand-write, but as you might imagine from reading this, I can type quite a bit.
My job as a Teaching Assistant at Freeport was - primarily - to work as a one-to-one assistant to students with special needs. Does a student have a disability that requires a little outside help? That’s me! I’m the outside help! That could take the form of academic support such as reading for someone with dyslexia, or it could take the form of providing external regulation to a student with emotional balance issues. That’s what I did.
I eventually moved on to teach Social Studies and ELA for New York City, where I had more than one Inclusion class that I’d work with a co-teacher on. That means I have first-hand experience as both the teacher in the front of a room full of students with special needs, and the teaching assistant in the back with a kid who needs extra help.
In other words, I know my shit.
And those services are required by law.
Let’s move on to the way the board has handled community concern about this.
How The Freeport School Board Has Handled Public Meetings
Let’s go back to one of our Herald articles. In it, Board Member Shuron Jackson claims he was given notice of an unusually-timed 5:00 meeting at…2:44 PM. 2 hours and 16 minutes is not, to my understanding, a fair amount of notice of a meeting. In fact, I dare say Google’s “AI Overview” (which, I mean, it’s AI so it could very well be wrong) suggests that you need 72 hours notice for a meeting by law.
I’ll leave it to lawyers to settle that question.
That said: This is where I largely break with almost serving as a curational journalist towards the Long Island Herald and just…Go with what I’ve been reading on Facebook. See, I might not live there anymore, but I still have a lot of friends and semi-friends who live in the Village.
And they are pissed.
For starters: Apparently the Board hasn’t been letting people ask questions about the numerous problems that they have with what’s going on. Or, if they are, they’re hiding behind things being under investigation. Which, I mean, I get it - if you can’t talk about an ongoing personnel matter, you can’t, right? But then you also can’t get mad that people are hearing rumors and getting angry about it. Because you aren’t telling them what’s really going on.
We will circle back to this when we get to our final section (Remember, this is only our second of three major topics) about teachers.
So, people are mad that their questions aren’t being answered, sure - but they’re also mad that they apparently, so they claim, aren’t being allowed to ask them in the first place. Some of that has been deflected on to issues like, “This meeting never had public comment to begin with.” Which…Okay, I mean, I remember back in 2010 when The Weekly Freeporter first launched and how people didn’t grasp that not every Village Board meeting would have Public Comment.
But, again, if you never allow for comments and, on the rare occasion you do, never answer questions, people are gonna be pissed. That’s just the nature of the beast called governance.
Let me pull from yet another Herald article by Mohammed Rafiq:
“They are not actually meetings of the public” is a hell of a quote when you’re an elected representative of the public.
Well, at least they acknowledge that they’re not acting like “most school boards.”
Freeport School Board Versus Freeport Teachers
One of the earliest complaints I heard about the way the school board was behaving was how it treated Football coach Jimmy Jones. I know Jones as a solid man who has my respect. Hell, I’ll extend that to the whole Jones family - I’ve sat with students in Meredith Jones’ Health class. He took over after Russ Cellan’s departure.
Jones was removed as head coach this year.
Allegedly, someone threw something at Jones (Which by the way is assault). Jones had a reaction to this, and the nature of that reaction seems to be the source of the conflict, here.
Like…Here’s Eddie “Truck” Gordon, someone I’ve known distantly for a long time, speaking on the topic. Gordon is a few years older than me, so we didn’t spend much time at FHS together, but we’ve brushed shoulders here and there over the years. And, yeah, he’s a resident who helped lead a lot of people into going to board meetings.
Where their questions weren’t answered.
Hmmmmmm.
I wanna move on to another, somehow-even-worse situation: Pat Langan is the president of the Freeport Teachers Association. I knew Pat as both a student and as a TA. She was always kind, always chill, knew her students and her material down cold. She’s great. She is heavily quoted in this Herald article here talking about the conditions she’d been working in, lately.
It’s my understanding that Pat was just recently reassigned from her decades-long position at Freeport High School to Dodd Middle School. This certainly looks like on-the-job retaliation for her speaking out. I can’t put it any more plainly. She is the union president and she’s singled out for a transfer? What? Freeport can’t hire new teachers, they have to transfer people around mid-fucking-school-year?
See, confession time: I’ve had the displeasure of taking up a new schedule in the middle of the school year. In fact, I’ve had that displeasure twice - And I was only successful the first time. The first time I had a lot of administrative and colleague support, and was able to pull off a good school year. The second time, I didn’t have nearly the same support, and I couldn’t pull it off. It led to me eventually having to resign mid-year because I just didn’t have the strength to do it. That’s how demanding it is.
If any of the kids I disappointed in 2017 read this: I’m sorry. I truly failed you.
Simply put: Taking up a class in the middle of the year is extremely difficult. Doing it because you are re-assigned mid-year is insane. And having to do so because you are targeted by the school board?
When the simplest and least painful solution for everyone involved is “Find a teacher, even a permanent substitute (as I was) to fill the gap and leave everything else alone?”
Speaking as a teacher with first-hand experience, let me be extremely plain: There is no good educational reason for doing this.
This can only be punishment.
I’ve heard other horror stories, too. I’ve heard that the schools have started using per-diem, placement-service-provided Teaching Assistants and even forced an old friend of mine through that path for some unclear reason. I can’t speak to that because I don’t know all the details and that old friend has since passed on.
Her name was Judi Kupi, and she ran a computer lab at the high school for decades. I went to her lab when I had tests to take as a kid. She was my union boss when I was a TA. She dedicated her life to Freeport and its students in ways most people simply can’t imagine.
And, if I have my facts right, at the very end of her career they took her computer lab from her.
Yeah. I think we’re almost done here.
So What Can Be Done About It?
It’s my understanding that within the last week, efforts were being made to organize a protest. It’s fitting: One of The Weekly Freeporter’s first articles back in 2010 was about a protest against the school budget.
How the world turns, eh?
I would encourage parents and residents alike to check out mostly-Facebook for information about when and where any actions might be, and to take part if they are at all capable. It may take a bit to figure out who is leading what and which group will best fit you, but spend a few minutes researching. It might be a good idea to keep an ear to the ground for any Freeport Teachers Association actions that might or might not take place, and to support them.
I would also encourage attendance at school board meetings. Even if you don’t ask questions yourself, your presence demands respect, and you can bear witness to what takes place.
Lastly, and this should go without saying, but please be active in voting for the school board. This isn’t to say, “Don’t vote for the budget.” The budget is the resources that are supposed to go to the students. Don’t take those away!
Instead, think of who you’re voting for on the school board.
Or, hell - If you’re curious, if you have some free time in the structure of your life, and especially if you have kids in the district you are afraid aren’t being properly taken care of, run for school board yourself.
Thank you for reading.
