nothing has changed in south hadley

they're calling it "the mean girls of south hadley" and 2 girls are being "disciplined" for bullying a girl who came there from ireland, and killed herself. like everything else involving groups of ppl that don't want to look at themselves it's being treated as an isolated incident. but if you read the comments after the article, it's SO clear that it's not.

i don't like to admit that i ever lived there. it was a terrible place. no one has ever believed me when i've tried to tell my story. south hadley is a place of physical beauty. it's full of nature. there are horses, there are trees. there's a lake. sort of. there's a prestigious women's college, so one would assume that it's like any other "college town", full of intellectuals, rich with culture. right? wrong... if any intellectuals live there, they send their kids to private schools. the south hadley public schools are... well until i read this article i would have said "were" and i might have gone along w/the belief that it's all in my head... but no, it's real and it's still happening. they're bigoted and racist and closed-minded and basically horrible. the kids are encouraged to root out anyone who's not to their liking and torment them. the adults look the other way if they don't outright egg it on.

i was off to a bad start when i started public school for the first time in south hadley in 4th grade, having skipped 3rd after just returning from a year in holland, where i'd attended a very small village school with only 8 kids in my 2nd-grade class, so we were combined with the 3rd grade. we wore those pointy wooden shoes for practical reasons - stuffed with a bit of straw they were warm and they kept the mud out. before holland, i'd gone to private school in northampton. but then we returned to the states and a decision was made that i should start public school. i was having trouble remembering how to speak english and even before school started, kids on my street were laughing at me when i accidentally would start speaking dutch.

my mom didn't know better, i'm sure... but she told me to wear those wooden shoes to school on my first day. i remember her saying to me "the kids will be so fascinated!" but it wasn't just the kids who were fascinated. my homeroom teacher enjoyed my shoes so much that she made a mockery of me, sending me on errands up & down the stairs all day, so that the sound of my shoes echoed loudly throughout the school for everyone's entertainment. they didn't have to try very hard to figure out i was weird. i can't blame them for that.

i posted this after the other comments i read about this girl's death, tonight. it has grieved me. just knowing a) that south hadley hasn't changed, and b) that all the ppl who told me it was all my imagination were totally WRONG, and c) that still it's not being looked at as a town-wide problem w/a long, long history... it's made everything kind of come pouring back, all this stuff i've tried to forget. things could have been worse. no one raped me in the woods. i didn't get murdered or kidnapped. but how to explain to anybody in my adult life who i am and why i act weird sometimes? i can't. it's impossible w/out context. so i read this article and context is all it is. i wish i could be there to do something to comfort this girl's parents. i just wish i could hug them. i wish i could make south hadley STOP being south hadley. i can't do that. i don't even know if what i'm about to do is totally stupid or not.. but i'm doing it... i'm copying here the comment i left after the other comments. there were stories not so unlike my own. i have been ashamed my whole life of the way i was treated, because it feels like it was my fault. looking at the picture of this beautiful girl makes me feel a bit less ashamed for me and more ashamed of that horrible town. it's not *me* who's disgusting. that's what i've spent my whole life trying to convince myself, anyway...

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i attempted suicide when i was 18 and having spent a number of years being tormented in south hadley public schools was ABSOLUTELY one of the main causes. i was tormented by my entire class from 4th grade through 8th, at which point i finally got my parents to send me to private school. 8th grade was so traumatic that i deliberately started in 8th grade again at my new school and pretended that the first 8th grade, in south hadley, had never happened. for many years i actually blocked it out of my mind, completely forgot about it. when it came back, it was almost too much to handle.

i know why i was tormented. i was the new kid, and i was different. i did not come from a catholic working-class family but rather from a non-religious, academic family. i did go to church to try to fake catholicism, but it's hard to hide a jewish nose. i could not go out in public w/out fear of being bullied. i did make some friends: if you look at my 5th grade birthday party picture you'll see the vietnamese girl (i remember the day the class bully took her glasses off her face and smashed them...), the bow-legged girl, the one black girl in town, her little brother, one "normal" girl who lived down the street, and me.

i had a crush on a boy named colin who lived on my street. he killed himself when he was 16. i don't remember anyone asking why, and no one bothered to tell me b/c no one knew or cared that i knew him. but colin was the ONE person in my neighborhood i was not afraid of. he was schizophrenic, they said. but we would make eye contact and a communication would pass between us, when we saw each other on the wood-path. colin was nice to me. but then he was dead.

i lived my life in fear. my parents, unfortunately, were no help at all. i couldn't decide if it was worse being at home or being out, so for the most part i stayed in my room, hid in bed under the covers and read books to escape.

on the school bus, i'd be yelled at by the driver for not sitting down, but all the kids would scream "UGLY!" at me as i came by trying to find a place to sit. no one would let me sit w/them. i got in daily fistfights (even to this day i marvel at the very thought that it is such a luxury, not getting punched in the stomach every morning, not getting the wind knocked out of me every day.) i got spat on, and entire classes of kids, and often the entire cafeteria, would chant at me. when i walked down the halls of the middle school, all the kids would make monkey noises and scratch their armpits.

kids would yell "ugly!" "disgusting" "eeew!" at me... i didn't know what i could do. i couldn't get a great haircut or perfect clothes and even if i did, i knew that wouldn't fix it. i was just cursed. i went to the teachers for help but of course i was told to ignore the kids & they'd stop it (they didn't) and so i withdrew into myself, learned to stare at the ground as i walked, developed bad posture, learned to trust no one. the best i could do was to hide in a bathroom stall during lunch, to avoid the cafeteria, but i was rarely able to pull that off. the most luxurious week i ever had was when i managed to get in enough trouble that i "had" to eat in the principal's office for a week. i remember how angry he was when i thanked him, because i was supposed to be unhappy with the "punishment" and not "enjoy" it... but for me it was one week of relative safety.

back then they had "tracking" and i was in the highest-level classes, where kids were a bit more decent, and i remember one girl trying to talk to me in a friendly way... but i couldn't talk to her... i couldn't trust that she hadn't been put up to it and there wasn't a group of kids somewhere waiting for her to report back so they could mock me more.

i did my best to escape south hadley but somehow little traces of it managed to follow me. there was one particular kid who started the bullying and led the hoards in their chants... i remember going on a trip to mt. tom when i was in boarding school, and he was on the lift & he spotted me, and yelled out the usual insults. i couldn't get away.

it is so many years later now... but three times in the last three years, car-fuls of young adults have passed me by and shouted out the window in unison, "UGLY!" as they drove past. i know it's not possible that these were the same people, or that they knew who i was. i have learned, after many many years, that i am not ugly. i know it's not ME those kids are yelling at now... but they're doing it... it has to be a coincidence that i've been shouted at 3 times, but just the fact that it's still happening i think is pretty sick.

there is no doubt in my mind that i would be long dead if i had not been saved by books... and by having the good fortune to get the hell out of that place and go to where nobody knew me. i did learn, even at a young age, that only in south hadley did they know i was to be mocked, and so long as i could go elsewhere and hide my identity, i would be safe, so long as none of them could find me and tell everyone in my community that i was to be tormented.

i have lived in many places and i have never been treated as horribly as i was in the south hadley schools, or seen other kids treated that way. i hoped that with the 70's being over with teachers would have better sense now. in other countries, teachers will intervene if kids start mobbing one another. not here. it is extremely disturbing to learn that this still goes on. it's disgusting, it's sickening, and i know that it's based on bigotry and ignorance. the things i heard kids say about other people - puerto ricans mostly (and anyone non-catholic... i heard kids explaining to each other that jews, for example, did not believe in "god") were horrible. i know they learned it from their parents and grandparents.

there is nothing wrong with being different, but in south hadley at least, difference is treated as a valid reason to be singled out and treated absolutely horribly. not even the teachers were innocent. even my favorite teacher did things to me that people can't believe when i try to tell them about it. i got in trouble in 4th grade because we got to put our classroom seating choices in a ballot box, and my mom got a call because not one kid wanted to sit near me. my mother yelled at me for that - for some reason she was furious, it was if i'd done something to get "in trouble". and the next day i went to school and found that my desk had been put behind a barrier, next to the one other girl who was also entirely rejected. she was poor & got free lunch. her teeth were green. the two of us sat at our desks hidden from the rest of the class by a row of bookshelves. that's how the teacher dealt with the situation.

and she was the best teacher i had. in 5th grade my homeroom teacher was such a drunk that he gave me 13 detentions at once for talking back (i.e. speaking w/reason) and at recess i erased the detention marks off the board. he was too drunk to notice.

i have recovered inasmuch as i have entirely changed my identity and i rarely admit to anyone that i ever lived in that horrible place. thinking about it brings back more trauma than i can handle. the fact that a girl committed suicide after landing in south hadley from another place is sadly no surprise at all to me. i know that every "new kid" in any school has some trouble adjusting, but south hadley takes the prize for racism, hatred, bullying and general.... well, what i would call "evil" if i believed in evil. but i don't. i just think that kids there are encouraged to root out anyone who dares to be different, even if it's not their fault, and smash them to bits. my heart goes out to this girl's family and her friends... she had at least one. to everyone else: i hope they will understand that they helped push her over the edge and i hope they will learn something from this and teach themselves to become better people, as it is clear that there is no culture of acceptance there to guide them in a better direction.