Ann Arbor School Board approves call for cease-fire in Gaza
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) - The Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Education approved a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war on Wednesday night.
The meeting lasted more than five hours and was marked by heated commentary from trustees and community members as the Board mulled whether to take an official stance on the conflict.
"To me, it is a moral imperative to call for a cease-fire," said trustee Jeff Gaynor. "But the resolution contains additional clauses that are particularly important to the AAPS community. Students need to feel heard and supported and to be informed."
Trustee Ernesto Querijero echoed Gaynor's comments, saying he felt the ongoing war in the Middle East is a "local community issue."
The Board was divided on the resolution; some trustees said the war has nothing to do with AAPS.
"Passing a resolution on this situation in the Middle East is not in our purview," said trustee Susan Schmidt.
"The folks overseas are not going to care what the Ann Arbor Board of Education says," said trustee Susan Baskett. "They're not going to listen to us, and as others have pointed out, we are not subject matter experts in this area."
The resolution passed 4 –1, with two abstentions.
The move makes Ann Arbor the first school district in Michigan to take a stance on the conflict, and possibly the first in the country to do so.
Former Board of Education president Rima Mohammad is a Palestinian American. She voted in favor of the resolution, which encourages dialogue in classrooms about the conflict.
"I think it's important," she said. "As we know, kids are exposed to social media -- they're exposed to this conflict and what's going on. And so, it's very important for us to provide a safe space for us to have these conversations but also support our teachers to have these discussions."
However, some community members are concerned about what the resolution means for the experience of both students and teachers moving forward.
Joan Lowenstein is a former Ann Arbor City Council member and a former president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor. She also raised two children in Ann Arbor Public Schools and said she feels bringing the conversation into classrooms could cause more harm than good.
"They don't have enough expertise to have dialogue in classrooms," said Lowenstein. "The teachers are already overburdened with trying to teach the students what they need to learn to actually graduate. And so, calling for dialogue without expertise, without teaching, it's just amazing that a school board would do something like that."
While some community members called the resolution divisive, Mohammad said she sees it as the opposite.
"I do believe that that call for ceasefire does ease the pain of everyone," she said. "A call for ceasefire is to promote peace and humanity and a way to move forward. And I do believe it also promotes coexistence."
"To give the benefit of the doubt to some of these school board members and councilmembers and Washtenaw County Commission members who have passed these resolutions, I think some of them have thought that they were doing something that would lead towards peace and end divisiveness in the community," said Lowenstein. "But because they've acted irrationally, they've actually increased the divisiveness."
Mohammad says that it is now up to the AAPS administration to decide how to implement age-appropriate conversations about the conflict in schools.