Following the first reading of its new naming policy for facilities, including athletic fields, the West Windsor-Plainsboro district has amended the language of the policy and removed a reference to suicide. The board will read the amended policy on Tuesday, October 2, and vote on its adoption.
WW-P School Board President Hemant Marathe said the new version attempts to set guidelines for recognizing individuals.
“The policy is meant to recognize people who have made a contribution to the district. The discussion that happened at the last meeting [on September 11] was tangential to specific causes of death and how that should be recognized. At least in my mind, that was not the intent of the policy. In the new version, all references to causes of death or whether somebody has died have been removed, and it focuses on how a person should be recognized,” Marathe said.
At the Tuesday, September 11, meeting, the school board heard concerns from Tricia Baker, the mother of former North student Kenny Baker, who died in 2009. After hearing the news this week about a student in Oklahoma who killed himself, Baker again called WW-P to action.
“Our district needs to take suicide seriously and create a traumatic loss policy. They don’t want to wait until there is a dead student bleeding in the hallways to figure out what they need to do. Our district is not above this happening. Three suicides in three years is nothing to ignore,” she wrote in an E-mail to the WW-P News.
Marathe said the naming policy was not intended to be a referendum on suicide. “People can have different opinions on suicide, but that has nothing to do with whether or not a person should be recognized,” he says.
Marathe also explained the five-year waiting period to take formal actions towards naming a field after someone. Five years after the time a person either retires, graduates, leaves the district, or dies, their name can come up for recognition with the potential of naming a facility after them. Marathe said this is similar to some sports, music, or professional organizations’s hall of fame standards. Initially the five-year time frame was unnerving to some who have lobbied for the baseball field at High School North to be renamed after former star pitcher David Bachner, who died in 2009.
Baker’s comments to the school board on September 11 initiated the changes to the new policy. On Wednesday, September 26, WW-P school board vice president Robert Johnson informed Baker that not only was the section on suicide removed, but as she had requested, the board added a non-discrimination clause written by Alan Berman, executive director of American Association of Suicidology. The clause removes any stigma associated with the “manner of death” for a person who could potentially be honored through naming a facility.
“We are happy that we have been able to make a change in the policy that was proposed last week. All of the discriminatory language has been removed,” Baker said.
Donna McCarthy, Baker’s friend and a 21-year resident of Plainsboro, said removing the paragraph about suicides was one good step. “They can’t be perpetuating a stigma. A blue-ribbon school district has to have more forward thinking than that, and they kind of proved that by taking the paragraph out,” McCarthy said.
“You would never blame someone from dying of cancer. You shouldn’t blame someone from dying because they completed suicide. I truly believe that suicide is a result of mental illness,” she said.
But McCarthy attended the September 11 meeting to voice another concern. Although McCarthy says that naming the baseball field at North after David Bachner would be a “fitting place.” But right now her conclusion is that WW-P’s facilities should not be named after anybody. “My heart truly goes out to his family, but I just don’t think anything should be named after people because there are so many examples of extraordinary people that came through the district, and there are also other kids who have passed away,” she said.
McCarthy says the new policy needs to be “fleshed out, discussed, and then voted on.” She says the district has not been clear about the guidelines being only for naming the facilities or for the selection process to nominate names. What makes a person worthy may be subjective, says McCarthy, as she brought up one Olympic Gold Medal winner hailing from WW-P.
“Does that mean we are now going to name a building after Rebecca Soni?” McCarthy asked, referring to the Olympic swimming star who attended High School North.
McCarthy said if she would be okay with being the only person to speak up and say WW-P’s facilities should not be named after anyone until the criteria for submitting a person’s name for consideration can be “spelled out very clearly.”
“We are opening up a big door here and if you open that door, you need to be fair to everybody. Special interest groups will be coming out of the woodwork with kids that they feel are special to them for buildings to be named after- – and the same with faculty. If somebody retires after 30 plus years, you will have people wanting to name things after each person,” McCarthy said.
She brought up the example of High School North gym teacher Trevor Warner, who in 2010 saved the life of a 15-year-old student who was having a heart attack. “[Warner] was very humble about the experience but it was on the TV news and in the papers, so should we name the gym after him?” she said.
McCarthy also brought up Jack Rutledge, a boy in WW-P with physical disabilities who died at an early age. “Everyone loved dealing with him and he had a very positive outlook on life despite his disabilities. Should something be named after him? Everybody has someone special who touched their life, but we don’t have enough buildings or venues to accommodate all that,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy has two daughters, including Nicole, a junior at North. Her older daughter, Christine, graduated from North in 2011 and just started her sophomore year at Penn State. Her own children have relayed fond memories of North’s long-time music teacher, Mary Jacobsen, who retired this year after 22 years with the district (WW-P News, June 8).
“Her students loved her, and she would be someone they consider too,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy is a marketing consultant who works at a financial services firm in West Windsor. Her husband, Chuck, also works in financial services. McCarthy came to Plainsboro from Valley Stream, New York, after the company she worked for relocated. She says her family did not seek out the WW-P school district, but they are lucky to have landed into it.
