Sexism, racism and secret surveillance—those are among the allegations Superintendent Priya Tahiliani is making in a lawsuit she has filed against the mayor of a Boston suburb and the school board that declined to renew her contract earlier this month.
Tahiliani, who was hired in 2019 and is now widely recognized as a K12 star-on-the-rise, lost out in a narrow vote by the Everett School Committee on March 6 despite, according to local reports, her popularity among Everett Public Schools staff and students. She had also received “broadly positive feedback” on her performance evaluations over the past two years.
Tahiliani’s controversial ouster also comes a little more than a year after an ongoing federal probe was sparked by the discrimination complaint she filed against long-time Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria, who is a member of the school board and was among those to vote against her this month.
A few days after the committee’s decision, students at Everett High School walked out of class and marched to city hall to protest the pending dismissal of the district’s first superintendent of color. Tahiliani’s contract ends in March 2024, according to The Boston Globe.
Priya Tahiliani’s allegations against Everett
The lawsuit, filed by Tahiliani and Deputy Superintendent Kim Tsai, claims DeMaria and the school board have “championed” institutional racism. “Tahiliani and Tsai were subjected to demeaning and racist comments, abusive and disparate treatment, and unjustified and highly subjective discriminatory and retaliatory attacks,” the suit says. “Their main offense? Being women of color who refused to maintain a ‘whites only’ hiring policy for district-level jobs.”
The lawsuit alleges that the mayor had little to do with Everett Public Schools until Tahiliani, who identifies as Indian American, was appointed. She says DeMaria subsequently blocked Medicaid reimbursements and reduced school funding to the required state minimum, whereas in the past he had given the district $550,000 to $5.5 million extra.
Tahiliani further claims that after she filed the discrimination complaint, DeMaria installed secret cameras in Tahiliani’s office to track her participation in the federal probe. “The FBI removed those and is currently investigating that unlawful wiretapping activity,” the lawsuit claims.
The conflict appears to have its origins in Tahiliani’s opposition to the expansion of the school from nine to 10 seats to make room for the mayor, DeMaria, who has been in office since 2007 but “never endeavored to become a voting member of the School Committee” during the tenures of previous superintendents—including one who was convicted of sexual assault.
This effort took place not long after she was hired and during the early turmoil of the COVID pandemic, says the discrimination complaint, filed with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination in January 2022 and which echoes many of the allegations now made in the lawsuit.
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Tahiliani described the following incident as one example of the harassment she has been subjected to. Because Everett Public Schools has large populations of students of color and English learners, she hired staff members of color to serve as family liaisons to provide outreach beginning in June 2020. She also implemented real-time interpretation services to help with the outreach and worked to diversify her staff based on guidance from the state’s Department of Education and Secondary Education, public school districts.
“To achieve this goal, I began to hire staff that were culturally diverse, including establishing important new positions such as the family engagement manager and the chief equity officer, both of which were filled with minority candidates,” the complaint says. “As a result of this, Mayor DeMaria began to openly accuse me of being a racist to members of the school committee and the school community, stating that I only hire people of color and hate white people.”
When another administrator of color complained
This is not the first time that Everett Public Schools has been accused of discrimination. But that complaint, lodged by a former executive vice principal of academics, was dismissed by the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination in 2020, according to MetroWest Daily News.
The complaint was lodged by Omar Easy, who is now the superintendent of nearby Wayland Public Schools and more recently accused his current district of discrimination for placing him on leave in February.
Easy’s complaint against Everett schools claimed he was passed over for promotion to superintendent based on his race but the commission rejected it, saying that Everett “had a history of hiring minority administrators—six in the five years preceding the complaint,” MetroWest Daily News reported.
The commission also found no evidence race played a factor in Everett’s failure to consider Easy for its top post.
