Boston schools appoint gay headteachers
Two schools in Boston have appointed openly gay principals amid mixed feeling from parents.
Brian Salzer, 38, who will be the principal at Newton South High School, comes from Sauk Prairie, a small Wisconsin school district near the state capital of Madison, and was the first openly gay principal in Wisconsin.
Jennifer Price, 34, is a doctoral student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who lives in Newton with her spouse and their two young children. She takes over at Newton North High School in July.
One parent, Brian Camenker, of a Waltham- based organisation that is fighting same-sex marriage told the Boston Globe, “This is such a blatant, in-your-face move, nobody else in Massachusetts would do this. Nobody else in the country would do this.”
Meanwhile many parents said that the sexual orientation of the principals is not important.
“I don’t want to comment on their orientation because it doesn’t matter at all,” said Mark Wadness, co-president of the Parent Teacher Student Organisation at Newton North. “I think it has no bearing or problem within the Newton community.”
Ms Price said: “In the end it’s about our leadership and what we do in the schools.”
Superintendent Jeffrey M. Young said that Mr Salzer and Ms Price were hired because they were “the two best principals.”
“People should judge them on the way they do their job,” he said. “I am thrilled that they’ll be joining our staff.”
