The Concord community has reason to be significantly concerned about the recent behavior of Concord School District Superintendent Kathleen Murphy.

First, prior to the start of the school year, the district adopted and published to the community their comprehensive safety plan. The plan included a decision matrix that clearly states that the district would go fully remote if community transmission in Merrimack County reached the substantial level, a level we reached on Oct. 19.

On Oct. 22, the superintendent sent an email to students and parents stating the district was staying in hybrid mode without any reference to the matrix or explanation why she wasn’t following it. This week members of the community and the school board raised concerns about this inconsistency. Murphy stated to the Monitor that “the matrix was used as a guideline for us. It was one of the many points of data that we used in determining what was the right model to use as we provided education for our students.”

Murphy’s characterization of the matrix and how the district promised to use it is blatantly false. The introduction to the matrix states very clearly that “the District will use the decision matrix below to determine the model of instruction we will use in Concord.” There really isn’t any wiggle room in that statement “will use . . . to determine” is pretty clear and declarative. The document contains similarly worded statements such as, “Before coming to work, staff members will complete a health self-assessment”; “Students and staff will be screened by a trained staff member”; and “students will be grouped in classes that are smaller than normal to allow for social distancing.”

If the superintendent believes she can ignore the matrix because it is merely “guidance,” does that mean she can ignore the requirement to create smaller classes to allow for social distancing? Can she tell schools to stop screening students and staff for symptoms? Is that just guidance? It is deeply concerning that the superintendent’s idea of what is required varies significantly from the community and the board and is not supported by the language of the document itself.

Second, both the district’s safety plan and the state have made it very clear how to evaluate community transmission. There are three data points used, one of which is the number of new infections per 100,000 over the previous 14 days. There is zero debate about this. Yet on Oct. 22, the superintendent sent an email to parents and students stating that one of the reasons she was keeping the district in hybrid mode was because “the number of positive cases has been impacted by an outbreak in a long-term care facility in the county.”

Nowhere in the state’s guidance or in the district’s safety plan does it state that long-term care facility cases should be discounted or not counted when evaluating community transmission. I asked the superintendent how this fact was impacting her decisions and if the state or a medical expert had advised her to take this approach. She declined to answer my question.

Third, at the same time that the superintendent was showing a disregard for the safety plan, she eliminated the ability of parents to choose to move their students from the hybrid model to the remote model. The only reason that parents sent their students to school at all this year is because we thought we had received a clear statement of safety protocols from the district and a promise to follow through on those protocols. We thought we had been told clearly how the district would make decisions about the instructional model employed by the district and what data the district would use to make those decisions.

As I sit here today writing this, I now have no idea what elements of the safety plan the superintendent sees as required as opposed to “guidance.” I have no idea what data the district will actually use to make instructional model decisions. Is it the six data points suggested by the state and in the district’s safety plan? What about long-term care facility cases? Or is it just “all the data” as the superintendent loves to say? I also have no idea how the data will be analyzed by the district. The original decision matrix was never followed and the new one doesn’t yet exist.

I appreciate that the board on Thursday night asked the superintendent to develop a revised matrix and determine a plan to give families their choices back, but all of this is happening way too late to restore my trust.

Is there a reason why I should trust that the superintendent will follow the new matrix when she so casually ignored the last one? It appears that the superintendent wants the freedom to treat the safety plan as a menu of options, to decide each day what data she happens to think is important, and to analyze that data however she wants without providing timely explanations to the community about what she is doing, how she is doing it, and why – and that under those circumstances, she believes that the community can and should feel comfortable sending their students to school.

I’m not sure what district she thinks she works in, but community trust of district administration in Concord is a fragile thing right now. She is destroying whatever is left.

(Christopher Herr lives in Concord.)