More than 800 people — roughly 4 percent of Sharon, Massachusetts, a suburb of 19,000 south of Boston long known for its schools — turned out on Oct. 22 for a Special Town Meeting with one item on the warrant: a no-confidence vote in five of the seven School Committee members. Attendance forced overflow seating into a cafeteria and a lounge, and the vote passed overwhelmingly. In the weeks since, the Boston Globe reported, residents have filed complaints describing comments they perceived as racist, demeaning to people with disabilities, or xenophobic, including mocking speakers with accents.
A week after the meeting, the town’s Select Board issued a formal statement. “This behavior is abhorrent and unacceptable,” it said. “Strong feelings and passionate disagreement do not excuse it. No disagreement justifies attacking someone based on their race, ethnicity, religion, disability, or any other aspect of who they are.”
A superintendent picked in one night
The dispute underneath the meeting is procedural, and the timeline is short. At a School Committee meeting in July, Superintendent Peter Botelho — who has led the district since 2021 — announced he would not seek a two-year extension of his contract, which expires next June, writing in a letter to the community that he looked forward to bringing his expertise to another district. That same night, the committee voted 5-2 to appoint Joel Jocelyn, the district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, as the next superintendent. No posting, no search, no public process.
The mid-summer appointment caught many residents by surprise, and it appears to violate the committee’s own written hiring policy: “In no case should a candidate be hired as superintendent without sufficient public involvement.” Parents and other community members asked the committee to reconsider; it refused. The majority’s stated reasoning was economical: its members believed Jocelyn was well qualified, so spending the time and money on a search made little sense.
What happened at the meeting, and after it
Town Moderator Andrew Nebenzahl, who ran the Oct. 22 proceedings, told the Globe he heard no offensive comments during them and had “carefully set the boundaries for discussions to exclude any kind of personal attack” at the outset. “My protocol would have been to admonish those comments from the podium and, if it continued, I would have asked a police officer to talk with that person,” he said. The public records and complaints nonetheless describe heated words, some with racial undertones — and the confrontation described in the most detailed complaint appears to have happened outside the formal proceedings, as people left.
Sharon has a sizable Asian community — about 30 percent of students in Sharon Public Schools are of Asian descent, according to state data — and a group of Asian American residents reported being accosted on their way out of the meeting. “Why don’t you Chinese run for School Committee?” they reported a woman asking. One of them answered, “What makes you think I’m Chinese? I’m not Chinese.” The woman followed up: “Sorry, whatever, Asians, Asians. You know what I mean. I bet you think I’m white, huh?” Another woman in the group tried to end it — “This is not a racial thing” — but the woman raised her voice and began cursing at them, according to the complaint.
Members of the same group later described the incident during public comment at a meeting of the town’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, which issued a formal statement condemning the discriminatory comments during the Special Town Meeting. One woman in the group said it was the first time she had personally experienced racism in Sharon in nearly two decades of living there, and that it was disheartening to see other residents describe similar incidents from the meeting on social media. “One of the things that disturbed me is that no one stepped in … to say, ‘Hey let’s not do that here,’” she told the committee. “There is a sentiment of anti-Asian hate that’s running through some portion of this community.”
The second time in six years
Sharon has been through a version of this before, with a price attached. In 2020, the School Committee ousted Victoria Greer, the district’s first Black superintendent. She filed a racial discrimination complaint, the town eventually paid $750,000 to settle it, and many residents vowed then to improve the town’s racial climate.
What the record so far does not contain is any move to revisit the underlying decision. The five-member majority has refused to reconsider Jocelyn’s appointment, Botelho’s contract runs through June, and the complaints now sit with a town whose last school racial controversy ended with a settlement number.