Seven weeks after the Public Schools of Brookline announced a new policy for pre-screening student art before exhibitions, the district still has not explained how the process will actually work. The silence has not slowed community pushback.

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Carol MacBain, writing in a letter published Tuesday, July 21, on Brookline.News, argued that reviewing student artwork before shows amounts to censorship.

"It's not the role of a teacher or principal to censor those thoughts or interfere with the conversation between artists and consumers of art, no matter the age of the artist," MacBain wrote.

She also challenged the district's framing of the original incident, in which a first grader was described as "a little bit distressed" by the artwork. "I wonder how the child who was 'investigated' felt," MacBain wrote.

Her letter is the latest in a stream of numerous letters published on Brookline.News between Thursday, July 9, and Tuesday, July 21, most of them critical of the review policy. Neither Principal Sara Yuen nor Superintendent Bella Wong has publicly detailed what criteria staff will use to evaluate student work, what happens if a piece is flagged, or when the policy takes effect.

How the controversy started

At a Wednesday, May 20, art show at Florida Ruffin Ridley School, a student displayed a piece that Brookline.News reporting described as depicting a figure holding a sharpened stake piercing an Israeli flag. The display also included flags of the EU, UN, U.S., NATO, and several other nations arranged inside a cardboard box. A note from the student read: "I hope this brings knowledge to the horrible things going on in this [sic] places."

Ridley has 857 students. Hebrew-speaking families can enroll their children there through the district's Native Language Support Program, drawing a concentration of Israeli families to the school.

The day after the show, Yuen emailed parents saying the incident "should not have happened" and took responsibility for a "failure of our process." On Saturday, May 23, the social media account StopAntisemitism posted an image of the artwork to its more than 350,000 followers, calling it "a vile display."

Investigation found no discriminatory intent

In a Tuesday, June 9, follow-up email to parents, Yuen wrote that the investigation "did not find discriminatory intent." She acknowledged the artwork constitutes protected student speech but said the imagery "was reasonably perceived by Jewish and Israeli community members as invoking antisemitic tropes, and caused significant distress."

In the same email, she announced the district would implement "a formal content-review and approval process for all student work displayed at school-sponsored exhibitions and events." No further details have been made public.

Amitai Handler, an Israeli parent who attended the May 20 show with his first grader, told Brookline.News in the outlet's July 7 report that his daughter was excited to see an Israeli flag but confused when she saw it had been pierced. "It is art, and as an art piece, the student is totally entitled to make one," Handler said. "But in the context of an exhibition that's supposed to celebrate the art of the children created in an elementary school, it should have been a little bit better thought out."

Critics call policy a form of censorship

Zinaida Miller and Margaret Litvin, founding members of a group called Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff, wrote in a Friday, July 10, letter that the policy "would censor protected student speech, invite problematic viewpoint discrimination, and brand all Jewish people as ethnonationalists."

Justin White, a Jewish Brookline parent of two district students, wrote in a Tuesday, July 14, letter that the review process "risks turning discomfort into a veto and education into censorship."

Another July 10 letter argued that "removing art that is controversial or upsetting is what authoritarian societies do."

What's still unknown

The district has not announced any School Committee meeting, public comment period, or timeline for explaining how the review process will function. Neither Yuen nor Wong has commented publicly since the June 9 email. No criteria for evaluating student work, no staff guidance documents, and no implementation date have been shared.